CTOTalk: In conversation with Ultraviolette Automotive’s CTO Niraj Rajmohan
Niraj Rajmohan hailing from a diversified background is the CTO of the revolutionary mobility company Ultraviolette Automotive. Ultraviolette has been developing futuristic electric vehicle technology to outperform petrol powered motorcycles and recently showcased the final product — the F77 Electric Motorcycle.. Today, the company comprises professionals from Automotive, Aerospace and Consumer Electronics Domains working on a vertically integrated approach and developing products starting from User Experience and Design, Mechanical & Electronics Engineering, Simulation and Software Development and extending all the way to Testing and Validation… What we witnessed in this intriguing session hosted by CTOTalk was Niraj’s background, the inception of the idea behind Ultraviolette, and the tech stack behind India’s fastest electric superbike.
With a calm on his face, Niraj thanked Dinesh for the succinct introduction he gave away. He started the session by hinting how he wants more people to take up the hardware revolution sensibly.
“Today I will share some learnings and insights so that more individuals or companies can make a mark in the electric vehicle industry especially in India. Build skills for hardware revolution”. ~Niraj
Niraj’s Background
Niraj’s tryst with tech started early with programming at the age of 10! Yes. It was then when the desktop computers had just kicked in and Niraj had an early hands-on experience with the C programming language. He started by creating command-line applications, exploring networking components like TCP/IP protocols and file systems, learning UNIX, Linux, and Bulletin Board System (BBS).
In his words, “I exploited networking in many ways. It was when I upgraded to a 486 processor and went from a 14.4 KBPS to a 56KBPS modem”. He realized that even with the advent of so many languages and networking skills like analog and transistors, it never really came up with any practical applications. It was later or we may say now that he truly understands their practical worth.
In the year 2008, he graduated as a Computer Science engineer from BMS College, Bangalore. During his college tenure, he participated in various inter-college competitions. One of them was IIT’s Shastra event where he and his friend and now co-founder, Narayan participated. As a team, they won the Robotics challenge along with 35–40 more competitions.
Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj have known each other since school days. Narayan is a mechanical engineer who has previously worked with Mahindra, Volkswagen, and Ferrari.
Yahoo
Post-graduation, Niraj went on to work with Yahoo as a Software engineer in their Media team. His role was to keep a check on the system’s performance especially during critical events like updating the match scores without any delays. During his stint in Yahoo, he learned architectural problems like how to make cloud applications work, how databases are created and maintained, and much more which later proved useful.
Startup#1: UAV
In the year 2010, he launched his first startup to build autonomous drones for terrain mapping much before the now accurate Google maps had launched.
Problem statement: Why can’t drones have a longer flight time which normally ranges from 3–40 mins only?
His proposed solution: If the drones could charge themselves on the go using the power lines using modular batteries.
Although Niraj innocuously tried for a year, the implementation didn’t go through due to his lack of skills in the hardware area.
MBA, Asian Institute of Management, Manila
So, he thought of excelling in management skills and did his MBA from Manila. During this, he participated in a major hackathon conducted by Yahoo where he won out of 800 participants and 170 teams.
Hackathon Problem Statement: While reading docs (PDF or any form) on the move, you end up getting nausea because of eye strain.
Solution: Launched Accelerometer on iPads identifying low-frequency data from moving trains, buses, or any vehicle. Using graph traversal and geospatial lookups, he tried representing the images in a 3-D format to reduce eye strain and therefore, easier for readers on the go. This required his extensive knowledge in the IoT and real-time analytics system.
NetApp
Worked as a Product Manager in the Advanced Tech Group (ATG) in NetApp. Worked on future products with the research team, commercialized their research to understand market requirements, and how to use streaming data to create viable solutions.
Ultraviolette Automotive
Surprisingly, this was not Niraj’s first startup. He had fixated his eyes earlier on a few other startup ideas as well time and again. But it was Ultraviolette that stayed.
Electric vehicles are our future. But building them is no easy brick. People are often familiar with the software capabilities that go behind a product like creating web applications, embedded applications, or any software functionality. What is not prevalent is having enough hardware knowledge.
Overcoming challenges, they are all set to launch their first motorbike F-77 by this year-end (in 2021). This has already garnered interest from over 180 countries. Features?
- 27kW power peak
- 150km+range
- Meant to outcompete all petrol-powered vehicles in the same segment
0–60 acceleration: 2.7 secs
0–100 acceleration: 7.7 secs
[This is Part 1 of a two-part series of Niraj’s session for CTOTalk. Check this space for Part 2 releasing soon.]
