This week we feature the Benguluru based startup Invento, maker of Humanoid Robot. It is a hardware company based out of Bengaluru that makes humanoid robots used in banks and event management.

Invento started operations in October 2016 with a goal to build a “great hardware company” in India that can shape the future of computing. The company has a stated mission

“To enable the culture of creation moving from the culture of consumerism.”

Invento first product is Mitra, a humanoid robot that can converse with people, take pictures and navigate around. Mitra is a 4.5 feet tall humanoid that is designed to interact with humans through natural ways – voice and vision. It recognizes speech and then converts that to actionable information. The robot runs algorithms to respond queries through past learning that is conveyed through speech output.



Balaji Viswanathan, CEO of Invento describes applications of humanoid robots like Mitra

In events [both corporate events as well as weddings/birthday parties], the professional photographers can hire these to go around taking candid pictures as it entertains the people. It can also answer repetitive questions like where is the restroom, what’s in the menu or what is next in the event. It also collects analytics that can be useful to the organizers to finetune the management. In banks and other offices, the security persons can use this to do the patrolling and alert them when it finds an issue. They can also send these to danger. Let’s say there are gunshots going around, you want a robot to poke around to see what is happening and stream the video to you than a human getting there. Answering repetitive questions in the reception desk. Businesses often want someone to greet the customers [a boring task] and then answer repetitive questions. The bot can sit alongside a smarter human who can then do a more complex job.

Startup Bytes Co-Founders: Balaji Viswanathan, CEO , Bharath Kumar, CTO. Mahalakshmi, COO

Startup Focus: Robotics company · Education

Future Plans: a “Come create robots and intelligent devices at our makerspace in Bangalore.” Startup stage and funding: currently bootstrapped.

Challenges

In a detailed post in knowledge sharing site, Quora, Balaji also describes the challenges unique to hardware startups in India.

“It is pretty hard to run a hardware company especially without government support. Getting basic things like tax registration, incorporation to financing is hard. While we expected the Indian government to be more assistive with the “Make in India” initiative especially when we are 100% making in India of a whole new industry, truth is neither the state nor the central government have provided us any kind of help. That said, we got some assistance from Nasscom and EFY by providing us visibility in events. The media has also been a bit helpful in taking the message across.

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