KOCHI: Kerala is emerging as a hub for startups, and many of them have made it big in the market. Over the years, the number of startups bringing out innovative and out-of-the-box products is on the rise in the state.
Recently, Headstart Kerala, an NGO that supports early-stage entrepreneurs and startups in the state, released its annual list of 23 companies to watch out for in Kerala in 2023. The list has been published in association with the Kerala Startup Mission, IDFC Bank and Bigin CRM from Zoho. In a series, TNIE introduces a few startups from the list of 23.
Infusory Future Tech Labs - Educators’ friend
Infusory, founded by Thomson Tom, Shyam Pradeep Alil and Suvith S, started as a campus startup that gives training and conducts workshops for school and college students across Kerala. In 2016, the company launched the first-ever VR app development workshop in Kerala. Starting from there, the company initiated many innovative workshops and training programmes across India.
After legally forming Infusory Future Tech Labs Pvt. Ltd. in 2018, it entered the AR and VR service industry by providing a VR-based training simulation system for Singapore Airlines. In a short span, the company grew as a pioneer in creating AR, VR, and 3D content for various industries and events.
Infusory released the TutAR platform in August 2020. TutAR is a 3D model deployment and sharing platform with easy-to-integrate APIs for every ed-tech platform. It offers more than 5,000 3D models to create interactive presentations for educators, which students can experience as videos, AR/VR, or metaverse.
Additionally, TutAR has pre-set templates of 3D models mapped to 30+ curricula worldwide. Since its launch in 2020 as an app for teachers to record lessons in AR with 3D models, TutAR has gained over 1,00,000 users across 5 countries. Today, Infusory is not just an AR/VR company. It is a metaverse startup with expertise in 3D animation and extended reality. Its mission is to make every online engagement interactive.
Humblx: A digital housekeeping assistant
Just one visit to a public urinal is enough to put off a person from using such facilities for life. This very experience, however, led to the founding of a startup that makes the upkeep of such public facilities an easy task. Samir Dayal Singh, an alumnus of Cusat, started Humblx to solve this problem in India through technology.
He took this up as a course project at Cusat with the help of funding from the university’s Center for Innovation, Technology Transfer and Industry Collaboration (CITTIC). He received further grants from Kerala Startup Mission and BIRAC, Department of Biotechnology to develop the prototype.
According to the founder, while researching the possible reasons for this lack of maintenance of the public facilities, he realised that housekeeping is extremely tough to manage.
“It’s manpower intensive as well as a complex process and needs a quick response. If a toilet is dirty it needs to be fixed now, if a tap is leaking, it needs to be fixed now. Supervision of housekeeping processes is even tougher, with limited visibility of ground-level operations and a complex hierarchy, but still, there is a clear lack of real-time tools to manage and supervise the day-to-day operations,” he said.
Commercial spaces such as public facilities, hospitals, corporate buildings and hotels are currently using age-old paper checklists along with WhatsApp groups to manage the housekeeping processes, which is a very tedious process and provides unreliable data with no traceability.
Everything is happening manually and that is the problem, said Samir for whom the trigger to start the company was an incident that saw his mother fainting in a public toilet. At Humblx, enterprise software has been developed to digitise the paper checklist and all the housekeeping processes around it. It’s a QR-based system to report housekeeping-related issues supported by pictures, text and audio.
This brings real-time operational visibility of the day-to-day process, accountability and overall transparency in the system, empowering the housekeeping teams with remote monitoring, real-time actions, constant improvements, effective execution of SoPs, lower cost, better trust with customers, efficient scale and getting more customers.
However, while setting up the company, Samir and his team had to know if there was a market for it. Upon doing some research, they found that the facility management market in India is a $70 billion industry in 2018 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20-25%.
Only 10% of it is organised which presents a huge opportunity for them to empower the unorganised sector with technology and allow them to compete with the big players in the market. Humblx is poised as a great solution to solve the long-lasting traditional problems that have plagued this industry for the past many years, said Samir.
Having done pilots with hospitals and signed deals with several housekeeping and facility management companies through their partnership programme, Humblx has proved that there is a need for this product and as a result, a new change in which the industry operates. The market potential now is $21 billion. Will be $70 billion by 2032.
They started with AIIMS Patna and went on to trials in the private setting with KiMS Trivandrum. “Then we made the software more configurable so that now we are onboarding multiple hospitals in Kochi and Delhi, as well as multiple other large commercial facilities like hotels, malls, factories and corporate offices,” said Samir.