At the Global Entrepreneurship Summit being held in Hyderabad, the Indian Prime Minister and the US President's daughter will come face-to-face with Mitra - a humanoid.
Practice, not preach
Invento Robotics came into existence last year in October 2016 after the founders pivoted from their educational startup named Invento Makerspaces. "We wanted to change education with a maker-centric approach, but it turned out to be harder than we had anticipated," shares Balaji Vishwanathan.
It was in 2015 when a robot made by a team of Invento garnered much appreciation during a maker fair that made the founders realise that a proof of concept may work better to inspire.
The proof of concept can now be found walking in the corridors of Canara BankBSE -1.58 % and PVR Cinemas in Bengaluru, greeting consumers and telling them what they like best. Capable of face detection, face recognition, speech recognition, contextual support, and autonomous navigation; Mitra is a 5 ft tall humanoid.
"What Google does for the online world, we do for the offline world. The robot speaks to the customers, gets to know them and their preferences, and on subsequent visits makes contextual suggestions. Mitra can help businesses do better customer targeting. For instance, in supermarkets, Mitra is capable of collecting relevant data on your first visit and not only make suggestions on your corresponding visits, but also take you to that particular aisle," explains Vishwanathan.
"Hardware ecosystem in India is very nascent and thus will take time in supporting high-end tech-savvy hardware products. Naturally, the guidance we were seeking in running a hardware startup was not easily available. The investor ecosystem also was not primarily looking for hardware products - hence funding was hard," shares Vishwanathan.
Work hard, party harder
The founders are currently monetising via two streams - rental and sales. Priced at Rs 8 lakh, the company makes a majority of the revenue from renting out Mitra for corporate (Rs 25000) as well as social events (Rs 15-18000).
"People rent out Mitra for weddings and birthday parties. It moves around like a loud jukebox playing songs, takes pictures, also tweets those out if you want it to," explains Vishwanathan.
Rentals form a majority of the company's revenues at present, but the company is in the midst of overhauling their manufacturing process which is expected to increase the share of sales. The company manufactures its robots from Bengaluru after issues cropped up with transporting their first prototypes from the global manufacturing hub, China.
Invento Robotics turned profitable two months back and will soon be launching a "female" version of Mitra, to be known by the name of 'Mitri'.
While Mitra comes equipped with a tablet, Mitri has been handed a tray.
If you think this is sexist, Vishwanathan puts your worries to rest with a simple explanation, "Most of the servers in India are men; there is no such thought behind the design." Rest assured; Mitri would be available to do your bidding in a few months.
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