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‘Our water canopies can help switch off municipal supplies’
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A research project led to the
institution of clean-tech venture ThinkPhi in 2015. The business is now
creating sustainably engineered products that intelligently conserve water,
energy and waste. Backed by serial entrepreneur Nimmagadda Prasad, the
venture has already made early sales of its patented rainwater and solar harvesting
products to Godrej and Rustomjee, and is now looking to grab a larger pie in
the domestic market while also exploring a few international markets. Samit
Choksi and Priya Vakil Choksi, co-founders of ThinkPhi, talk about the
company’s business with Ashish K Tiwari.
What led to launching the venture?
What’s the background?
Samit Choksi: Being from a computer
science background, I have worked in software companies. I was interested in
creating things and it’s quite easy to do so in the software industry. My
first creation was a messaging technology application but I ran out of money
to finish the patent, something I’m still sour about. Today, more than 40
companies are using it. Priya, my co-founder, was working as a green building
consultant and three years ago, we looked at a small project about recycling
debris (construction waste). We put together an excel sheet, tried to build a
few blocks using the recycled debris. It wasn’t a scalable business but it
certainly triggered the thought of building something in the environment
space and integrating technology in it.
Priya Vakil Choksi: We were looking
at finding solutions for people living in an urban environment who are faced
with very typical issues. One of which was rain water and Mumbai gets so much
rain water that’s just running off. So we started an independent research and
narrowed in on the fact that once the rain water hits the ground, it gets so
dirty that it becomes extremely expensive to filter and almost unviable to
make it usable. The solution was to catch the rain water before it hits the
ground. This research project turned into a design project and today a
product.
How is the product being received in
the market?
Samit: When we started off people
wanted to see return on investment (RoI). Our product can actually help
switch-off the municipal supplies for that 4 months duration and use the
filtered rain water instead. So while in the short term you are saving on
cost of procuring water what you are also doing is conserving municipal water
which could be used later like in the summer season when there is actual
shortage. We have also met companies in the outskirts with cost of drinking
water around Rs 4.50 a litre because they don’t have the municipal water line
connection. So a system like ours is a solution that can give 4-5 lakh litres
of water a year depending on the number of canopies they put up.
But what
else could the canopies do once the four months of rain water harvesting was
over?
We did some studies and added some in-house software model to figure
out how much energy output we can generate. That’s how the idea of adding a
solar module came into being. At a full capacity, the area is enough to put a
1.5 kilo watt of solar capacity and we are now slowly moving it up. This
apart, the product also includes an intelligent lighting system which
provides various levels of programmable lighting options and a mobile charge
unit.
How many units are you planning to
sell this year? Is the business in the profitable zone yet?
Samit: We hope to sell 300 units this
year and we are hoping to reach 1,000 units in a couple of years from now.
Again, we don’t want to be very aggressive because that number will get us in
the profitable zone. It’s a good margin for us. Being a sustainable company
our economics are sustainable as well. We don’t invest in manufacturing but
we have high research and development (R&D) cost. Even today if we reduce
R&D spends, we are profitable. So we will turn profitable by March this
year.
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Ashish K Tiwari
DNA29JUN16
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