Interview with Discovery IOT CEO Selvam VMS
Hey everyone, today we have another great interview to share with you with Discovery IoT CEO Selvam VMS. Enjoy!
Thank you for joining us today. How are you?
Great! Thanks for reaching out, appreciate it.
Tell our viewers about yourself and your background?
We are DiscoveryIoT, and we solve supply chain tracking problems by bringing together IoT, AI and Blockchain.
We are a running business with 3+ years of pedigree and experience.
I am Selvam VMS, the CEO of Discovery IoT. I am an MBA in Supply Chain Management from Purdue University (USA), considered to be among the top-10 universities in the world for Operations/SCM. I have worked with Dell Computers for a brief while in the Nashville plant before returning to India to join my family business — a kitchen appliances major.
In early 2015, I branched out to start my own supply chain solutions business (H&S), which I have been running profitably (we broke even in a record 6 months!). We help consumer product brands optimize their supply chain, with respect to warehouse optimization, inventory track and trace, IT solutions, as well as the hard part of the supply chain (logistics, warehousing and transportation). We operate at a pretty decent scale, having handled and tracked more than 150 million lbs of products through our supply chain in 2017. Our clientele includes some of India’s largest multi-billion-dollar consumer product brands.
How did the idea of Discovery IOT come to fruition?
Discovery IoT is essentially an extension to the solution that we already provide to our clients. In H&S, we provide inventory tracking solutions up to the point of my clients’ factories and warehouses, giving them visibility of their products at their locations.
Over the past 1.5–2 years, many of our clients have been pushing us to build a visibility solution that can help them track their products beyond their span of control, and all the way to the retail shelves/consumer locations. We have been researching for the past 2 years on the ideal solution to handle this client requirement, and have zeroed in on blockchain and IoT as the ideal solution for the same. In other words, DiscoveryIoT was born out of an existing market problem that my clients have pushed me to build a solution for. Unlike most projects, we are not a solution in search of a problem, but rather working on addressing a validated multi-billion-dollar problem that my clients (and all other consumer product brands) face.
There is a number of supply chain problems on a global scale. How is Discovery IOT fixing some of these issues?
True, there are a large number of problems faced by the supply chain industry today. In fact, it is pretty amazing (and appalling!) that an industry of this size (8% of global GDP!) runs at such inefficient levels, through a whole host of middlemen adding to the inefficiencies.
However, the root cause of all the supply chain problems faced today can be boiled down to two major issues: lack of trust in the ecosystem (consequentially the huge paperwork, contracts etc.) and the lack of traceability of products in the system. Both of these problems lend themselves very well for disruption through blockchain technology.
DiscoveryIoT is solving the traceability problem, by giving companies/enterprises real-time visibility of where their products lie in their supply chain. Through this visibility on real-time basis, brands can very clearly optimize their business processes — by ensuring that the right product is present at the right time at the right location; as well as by optimizing their marketing spends by channeling their resources to the right markets.
However, given the “physical” nature of the industry, a pure-play software solution would not be able to solve these problems. It calls for a blend of a hardware & software solution.
The DiscoveryIoT solution has 3 layers:
(1) Hardware / IoT Layer, where we are building a super-cheap battery-less IoT tag (“Cliot”) at a cost of $0.05-$0.10 per unit, lending itself suitable for use in the mass market (bottles of shampoo, for instance). This Cliot would be affixed on every unit of the product that the company/brand manufactures.
(2) The User Community (Blockchain layer) wherein we are building a community of users who will have our app (or third party apps of our partners) installed on their smartphones. These users become nodes of our blockchain, and act as “scanners/readers” of information from the Cliots which are near them (30 meter range). The users get rewarded for lending their smartphone’s data connectivity for this purpose.
(3) The AI/analytics layer which converts all these millions of data points into meaningful insights for the brands. This could include insights like which retail shops are expected to run out of stock of the company’s products in the next 2 days; which outlets have too much stock and have the risk of product expiry, etc.
This real-time information and insights would help brands proactively prevent any stock-outs, product obsolescence etc., and also plan and optimize their marketing spends.
Staying along these same lines, what is the plan to take Discovery IOT global?
Yes, we are currently operational in India, with plans to expand into China and South East Asia in 2019. By 2020, we expect to be in markets covering 60% of the global population.
You have a very strong and diverse team in place. Explain the thinking behind assembling these members of your team?
Our team comprises of experts from four domains — Supply Chain Management, IoT, AI and blockchain.
I am a Supply Chain veteran, and my background has been explained earlier.
My co-founder Kumar is a tech-genius, with over 15 years of experience in the spaces of AI and IoT. He has built several solutions for Fortune 500 companies in the past and runs a successful company that builds such solutions.
Our COO Prabhakar has more than 25 years of experience in SCM and has independently handled multi-billion-dollar supply chain verticals in the past.
The team is 72 member strong, with a mix of technical and business domain expertise. The thinking behind assembling such a varied team is that a blend of business domain and technology experience is necessary for disrupting any industry, and neither one experience would be able to do so in isolation.
How does the Blockchain fit into Discovery IOT’s plan?
Our solution runs on the foundation of blockchain, AI and IoT. We use blockchain for 3 major purposes:
(1) Smart contract pairing of the user’s smartphone with the Cliot. This happens in an automated manner in the background, with the Cliot’s private key information (required for pairing) pushed into the user’s smartphone in the form of a block, based on their location
(2) Device and Data security: Enterprise data is very sensitive and valuable. Any attempt to hack this data from any node (smartphone) would be thwarted by the AI engine, and this hacking signature is shared across the entire mesh of smartphones in the network to prevent any further attempt elsewhere.
(3) Edge Computing: The data collected by the node (smartphone) is processed on the edge, and only hashed information is shared in the blockchain. This controls the size of the data thus stored on the node.
What are the future plans for the project?
Our MVP is already launched with 2 clients using the same. By October 1st, we will be launching the first version of the product in a limited roll out. Our full scale product will be launched by April 2019, with the 1st geography launch by July 2019.
There are many supply chain Blockchain projects, what separates Discovery IOT from competitors?
There are 2 major differences that make DiscoveryIoT unique:
(1) Infrastructure-less system: Most supply chain projects on the blockchain work on the RFID protocol, which means there is a requirement of a RFID-reader to be placed at every tracking location. We are working on an IoT solution where no scanners/readers are required anywhere in the system. Our data collection mechanism is decentralized (user community), thereby making it super scalable and affordable. There is no capital investment required by our clients to adopt our solution
(2) Bottom of the Pyramid: We are the first supply chain solution on the blockchain, targeting daily products. Our application is not restricted to high end and expensive products, but rather, focusing on the mass market by democratizing IoT and Blockchain. This makes the scope of our application much wider.
Do you think Bitcoin will someday cost 100k USD? If so, when would you see that happening?
Certainly. I view BTC price is an indication of the overall market. This means that for BTC price to hit $100k levels, blockchain as a technology needs to become mainstream. While I would refrain from giving specific timelines, according to me, there are three hurdles that hinder mainstream adoption of blockchain: enterprise acceptance and user understanding, government regulation, and ICO scams.
As more enterprises adopt blockchain solutions, the whole crypto space will become far more vibrant and lucrative for innovative startups to thrive. The taboo around crypto space needs to go for enterprises to freely adopt blockchain solutions.
Governments around the world need to take a far more proactive view on blockchain as a technology, and cryptocurrencies as a facilitator of this technology. While it is heartening to see some governments bring regulations to monitor the space, a majority of the world’s economies still take a very negative view on cryptocurrencies. This has to change.
Thirdly, we see a lot of scams happening in the ICO space. As long as entrepreneurs see ICOs as a way of making a quick buck, this perception will be hard to change. The whole ecosystem needs to go through a thorough cleansing to weed out such scammers, so that genuine projects are rewarded in their efforts to make the world a better and decentralized place.
Do you have a phrase or quote that you work by?
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” — Mahatma Gandhi.
This quote is especially pertinent for entrepreneurs who want to make a change in the world.
Thanks for taking the time today!
Thank you for having me!
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