Meti M2M India | Monitoring manufacturing
'We are now looking at doing more research and development work as well as expand our reach', says Narayana Swamy
Enterprise name: Meti M2M India Pvt. Ltd
Entrepreneurs: Narayana Swamy, 40, Geetesh N.S. (42)
Founded: April 2012
Location: Mysore
Brand name: Meti
From a data entry operator in the central government’s excise and custom department for 13 years to being a technical consultant for a semiconductor company to becoming a co-founder and managing director of a company that deals with the Internet of things, Narayana Swamy has come a long way.
Swamy doesn’t hold any fancy degrees; he is not even an engineer. “I wasn’t qualified enough to do other things. I was always underestimated and mostly bossed around," says Swamy who is an Industrial Training Institute diploma holder in computer science.
Between working in the government’s administration department, and learning coding and creating software for the excise and custom departments, he set up an electronics lab in his house in 2004. With the help of two of his friends, Geetesh N.S. and Ganesh Raja, he started learning about basics of electrical engineering.
In three years, he became technically sound enough to start consulting for US-based Cypress Semiconductors Corp., solving problems online for its clients around the world. After quitting his government job in 2006, he joined Cypress full time. There, he learnt more about core electronics on the job over the next five years.
“I always wanted to start my own company, even when I was working for Cypress," says Swamy. “In 2011, I had a chance to work on a project for HPCL (Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd) for monitoring their underground pipelines."
He got an idea from the project and started designing a product that could monitor different parameters of an industrial process, collect all the data and send it on a centralized platform through SMSes for the client. Later he moved the product from SMS-based to GPRS-based platform.
He founded Meti M2M India with Geetesh N.S. in 2012 with an industrial product which monitors various parameters, including gas or liquid flow, temperature, pressure and humidity for different processes in manufacturing industry, put all the data on a cloud-based, centralized platform, provide the analysed data to monitor the processes to conserve energy and take the corrective measures if required.
“While looking to manufacture the product two years back, we started looking for funds. We went to four banks with our proposals but three of them rejected us outright," says Swamy. “At that time, Bank of India lent us ₹ 26 lakh without any collateral under a central government’s scheme CGTMSE (Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises)."
“We are now looking at doing more research and development work as well as expand our reach. We are talking to few investors to raise about ₹ 1 crore to get into the consumer space," he adds.
The 13-people company which, apart from working with manufacturers, works with municipal corporations and city administration departments for monitoring and controlling things such as streetlights and water levels in overhead tankers, is planning to launch affordable consumer products for monitoring and controlling water, gas and energy consumption in households through SMSes or an Android app.
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