Mumbai: Ankit Mehta knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur by the time he finished college. After he graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), with a dual degree in mechanical engineering in 2005, he took up a sales and marketing consultancy job he hated, “for the paisa” to support the venture he wanted to start with two of his fellow IITians.
Rahul Singh, a mechanical engineering student, and Ashish Bhat in electrical engineering, were his juniors and still in college. Despite coming from different departments and batches, the trio had worked together during various techno-fests and competitions that allowed inter-departmental collaborations, and shared apassion for building products combining their differentdisciplines.
Productive interaction: Attendees at BarCamp, a start-up related networking event held on the IIT Bombay campus. (Photo: Ashesh Shah / Mint)
Exactly six months later, Mehta quit his job, and the team came up with an idea of building a mechanical, instead of electrical, mobile phone charger aimed at rural areas that faced constant power outage. They turned the idea into a company called IdeaForge Technology Pvt. Ltd and were soon inducted into IIT-B’s incubation centre, the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), which supports start-ups during the initial phase when they are most vulnerable, as they transform into real companies.
“We got a lot of help and mentoring from our professor, C. Amarnath, and getting into SINE was a smooth process,” says Mehta.
IdeaForge is one among 16 companies incubated on the sprawling Powai campus. In the last two years that it has been there, the company has built and sold a few thousand units of its chargers.
It also received Rs15 lakh government funding from the Technology Development Board and, more recently, an undisclosed funding from a clean-tech focused angel investor. It has also branched out into building small, remote-controlled air vehicles. What began as a hobby project, given the team’s penchant for mixing electronics and mechanics, won them first place at an international microair vehicle competition held at Agra’s airbase earlier this year, defeating competition from Australia, Germany and the US.