BENGALURU: METI M2M India Private Limited, a Mysuru-based startup in the field of industrial internet of things (Industrial IoT or IioT), has received investment of `1crore from an Angel Investor.
METI Machine to Machine company, incorporated in December 30, 2014, is one of the early entrants in this field, and has gained lots of expertise after nearly six years of working in this area.
The industry manufactured IoT-enabled electronic hardware, helps collect data from seniors and industrial controllers, and sends the data to the cloud-based servers using GPRS. The team provides web services, managing cloud services, front-end analytical tools and provides end-to-end solutions, and more.
NS Geethesh, COO of METI, says, “We have invested nearly to `1.15 crore till now. Our USP is having the entire end-to-end design, development and deployment capabilities for industry 4.0 solutions. Similar services are coming up fast.”
Replying to a query about challenges faced, he says, “We are still in the process of establishing our services. We have to prove to our customers that new technology works, and it takes us nearly three months to do a demo of our product and find solutions. Earlier, our sales conversion ran from nine months to one year, now it has come down to 60 days.”
“Earlier, when we approached big companies, the common question was will we survive the next year? How secure is the cloud? With time, we were able to prove our competence and acquired close to 100 customers across nine Indian states,” he adds.
MK Narayana Swamy, CEO of METI, says that the investment came after lot of work, and this has helped them to scale their growth. “The funds will be used for revenue growth, and invest in research and development. We have three revenue steams from five segments (energy, process, production, solar and composite). Right now, industries like automotive, engineering, food and beverages, pharma and renewable energy are the target audience,” he adds.
“We certainly have challenges in finding efficient staff. So at METI, we hire based on values, and train based on skills. There are currently about 25 people working with us, and with the investment now, we plan to increase the headcount,” he adds.“Entrepreneurship does not end in creating jobs, rather, it has higher responsibility of creating an ecosystem by itself,” say the founders.
Kiran Chinya, the angel investor from US, says, “There is a lot of traction in the industrial IoT and smart manufacturing space globally, and this will pick-up pace in India.If the industries do not invest in
technologies, they will not remain competitive.”