Innovation Follows Passion — Story of Tech @ Carnot
“Walt Disney once sat on a dirty, broken bench, near a merry-go-round, with his family and realized that he wanted to create a better family experience, perhaps, a family theme park. So he came up with the beginnings of Disneyland, yay, a clean theme park with plenty of bathrooms, children and parent-friendly rides, everything designed to make it easier for families to enjoy a day together.”
While we are no close to the great Walt Disney, for us, the engineers working here, Carnot is certainly our small dreamy Disneyland, with loads of roller coasters. Buckle Up !:)
Part 1 : The Broken Bench
While I started up Carnot in Mid 2015, the “broken bench moment” for me happened in the 2013 Formula Student season in Silverstone, UK. (A big shout out to team IIT Bombay Racing :D) .
After putting our blood, sweat, and tears — we built a beauty (which btw, was also a beast) and became the first Indian team to pass all technical hurdles to the main competition. But as Murphy’s law says — “Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong “, our Battery Management System gave away, halfway into the endurance race.
While it was a heartbreaking moment, it also turned out to be the reason Carnot exists. Personally, it was a defining moment of my life. For the first time in my life, I heard an inner voice — challenging me to build world-class technologies at par with best, which people should simply love using!
“The dream of developing technology excellence, at par if not better than global benchmarks, was seeded right there, in Silverstone racetrack amidst the sound of screeching tires and smell of burning rubber”
Phase 2 : From Me to We
When I started Carnot, I wanted to create a team of fun-to-work people and build great technologies. Keeping the “K.I.S.S” principle in mind, we started with a simple target of selling 1000 OBD (On-Board-Diagnostics) based GPS tracking devices with a beautiful user interface. We in fact sold 10,000 of our first product. While we eventually decided to let go of OBD space, setting up team and culture was the biggest lesson learned. It helped us define the “WHY” of our organization.
Establishing Carnot’s DNA and culture has been a life enriching lesson.
Ever read “Man in the Arena”? We all swear by it.
To answer the golden question, perhaps the reason for our identity —
What Defines Us? We:
• Believe in generating revenue and not just valuation
• Deeply care about the impact we have on our customers’ lives
• Are hands-on. Something needs to be done, we do it. Position is immaterial
• Make mistakes but we accept, learn and move on
• Have fun along the way. After all, what’s the point if it isn’t fun?!
Although OBD product was a crucial phase of our Engineering DNA, we learned the hard things about hard things in the hardest possible ways
In the last 5 years, we have painted and lived this beautiful picture. There have been times when even interns at Carnot have led projects that affect top/bottom line in a meaningful way. There have been instances where 75% of the office, have stayed back in the office, to finish up time-critical project delivery, and these moments have bonded us strong from within. I must confess, burning midnight oil was never so much fun!
Phase 3 : Connecting the Dots… :
Qualcomm...Farmers...Mahindra…Agri Tech
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
I only experienced the true meaning of Steve Jobs’ quote, when Qualcomm Design in India Challenge (QDIC) happened. We won a design grant of 100,000$ for our innovation for Voltsig™️, which combines DSP and Machine Learning to detect RPM, Engine Load, and Vehicle gears with 93% accuracy, using just battery voltage ripples.
Though, the honest truth is — We always thought two wheeler segment will jump on our innovation and it will create massive data driven impact. Turned out, we were wrong all the way.
Although as Karma goes, our innovation caught the attention of Mahindra, the world’s biggest tractor player by volume. We caught the train, and with a bigger picture in mind, created a REALLY advanced digital demonstration experience for tractor owners in the process. In the process of building it, we got exposure to the “Real India” — The Farmers, and learned their problems up and close. We also ended up raising crucial Series A round from Mahindra to accelerate our product development cycle.
We learned that problems of farmers and tractor owners are regional and unique, and need technology and product innovations to solve them. This opened up a new dimension and made us focused on one of the most important problems our country faces: How do we improve farmer incomes with technology?
The pursuit for this question led us to develop our flagship product —
The Simha Kit.
Phase 4: SIMHA Kit -Artificial Intelligence for tractor billing
Imagine building Uber or Ola without google maps! That’s the exact case with tractor rentals. Currently, the level of Farm Mechanization stands at about 40–45% of total agriculture land in India, and it is growing at ever-increasing pace. Yet, there is absolutely no technology when it comes to the billing part! Imagine running your taxi without a meter!
India has 70L tractors of which over 35L are used for rentals. Typically, fields are under-reported in size during tractor rentals and customers lose 15–20% revenue, every single day.
Enter Simha — The agri-telematics platform
Simha kit is a telematics HW + Mobile app combination. The hardware is easy to install and can work with literally any agricultural machine. The software platform hosts the IoT data and runs our AI engines.
As for the end-user, there is a (REALLY!) beautiful mobile app which provides the user with the following features :
- Tracking and alerts (Peace of mind, first !)
- Acreage and Trolley Rental (This is our magic sauce :D)
- Accounting (Digitizing the conventional ledger book)
Every time Simha owner trusts technology for his accounting, and area measurement — it brings a smile to our face. And as things stand, our world is full of rainbows and sunshine :). 70% of our customers open the app daily to check location and acreage, and the number stands almost at 90% on days in which the tractor is very active. Our digital diary — the Accounting tool is gaining trust and replacing the conventional Khata-Bahi. With this, our users are adding transactions worth millions in our app every single day!
Providing data-driven insights to tractor owners, is the tip of the iceberg. Imagine having 10,000 of tractors in a certain state/region connected with Simha Technology. We are looking at millions of acres of farm mechanization data!
Check out more about The Simha kit here :
Phase 5 : Finding AI in AgrI
Variable Rate Controller, RTK GPS, Krishi Diary and much more..
The Simha experience and 1000s of conversations we have had with our customers have been insightful and eye-opening towards ground reality.
When we talk about innovations in agriculture and farm tech, there are tons of innovations in developed economies. Unfortunately for a developing economies like ours, there aren’t many
We want to bridge that gap through tech, and we want to take a look at the agriculture efficiency problem from an Engineering Problem lens. So far we have merely scratched the surface, but we hold this ambition dearly in our heart. To list down a few of the innovations we have developed so far :
- Variable-rate fertilizer bringing 60% reduction in potato fertilizers
- Variable-rate sprayer, working in sync with image-based detection and spraying, to bring nearly 10x reduction in sprayer volume
- Simple accounting tool (Krishi Diary)for farmers, which has around 30K active users as we speak
- RTK GPS which works with a 1cm accuracy level. Talk about precision! :)
- Satellite image-based yield prediction
I once visited a farm in future-land. I saw giant automated machines harvesting the farms at mind-boggling speed. The technology was enabling the operators to plan out their daily tasks. The farm owner was relaxed and checking satellite data to gauge his vineyard health.
There, at that moment — I asked , can there be Indian version of this dreamland? A broken bench to be fixed perhaps? ;)
Join me in fixing this broken bench — Check out the open opportunities here
We’re eager to hear your thoughts. If you have any suggestions or queries, or even better — if you are game to join us — drop me a line at pushkar@carnot.co.in.
