This Bangalore-based company brought wireless technology to India to elevate customer experience. But they quickly realised there is a bigger play in India – the need to productise a high potential market. Read how Tech.Powersquare is bringing about this change
Anand Katragadda, Founder & CTO, Tech.powersquare
Tell us why you decided to start Tech.PowerSquare
At PowerSquare, our team is constantly working with niche technology such as wireless power to build products and solutions that elevate consumer experience. During our product development journey, we observed that a key aspect which was missing in our Indian ecosystem was the productization piece.
We realized that people are great at designing and engineering, but the skill set required to create a commercial product which is ready to hit the market is very limited. Most companies end up outsourcing this to other countries.
With the popularity of Make-in- India, many companies are now slowly planning to create home grown products that are suitable both in India and for the world. Hence, they need the right partners who can take their concepts to realty. Several such organizations began approaching us to advice and help them with their product development journey. This was a great opportunity for us to extend our experience and knowledge to help them in realizing their product dreams. Hence, Tech.powersquare was created as the B2B arm of PowerSquare that became a customer-focused, one-stop, shop for complete product development – from concept to mass production.
Today, Tech.powersquare is closely working with many Indian MNC’s and startups to help them in their product strategy. We have also garnered a lot of interest from global OEMs who are looking at alternative sources due to the political uncertainties between U.S.A & China.
We feel this is a great time for us to showcase our capabilities and scale; and the above mentioned factors are helping us in our growth story. With Tech.powersquare we want to empower Indian companies to make products in India for the world.
You and your cofounders bet on wireless technology way before the trend set in – why?
When we started, we wanted to pick a niche technology that not many were a part of and wireless power was fairly a new technology. But we knew wireless power would change the future as it would lead to the creation of many applications and implementations. As a team we had the knowledge, capability and the ecosystem relationships to scale with which we were able to develop some ground breaking innovations and stand as one of the premier technology providers not just in India but around the world.
So, Is Tech.powersquare only about wireless power? No.
Now Wireless charging technology is applied across many applications. So, using wireless charging as a tip of the spear we have gotten into all implementations and systems – industrial, automotive, consumer to name a few.
Over the last few years we have expanded our expertise in industrial and mechanical design, hardware engineering, firmware development, mass manufacturing and everything in between to build products from scratch.
Your company is a good example of native manufacturing and the Make In India campaign – how has this journey been for you? What would you say are the challenges & opportunities of native manufacturing?
The journey has been good so far, with Tech.powersquare being able to successfully establish an amazing ecosystem of partners that enable us to deliver world c lass products across the globe.
But this journey was far from a walk in the park. We’ve learnt that the Indian ecosystem does not value the cost, time and effort put into the process of productization. Companies don’t want to pay for engineering the solution but want an existing solution that they don’t have pay to create. That’s the real challenge we are facing today, what we call as NRE (Non Recurring Engineering Cost), the one-time cost to research, design, develop and test a new product or product enhancement. Since no company wants to pay to develop new solutions, this keeps us from innovating.
Recently we had the opportunity to work with an organization that really wanted to push boundaries using wireless power in a new space. And we were very excited to engineer something that no one had done before. But unfortunately they didn’t want to spend money on engineering innovative product but copy existing solutions. Companies just want to take run of the mill solutions and just add software.
The challenge is that the mindset is not yet there to take the step to innovate. Since most Indian companies are coming from the software background, they are always trying to innovate on the software front.
A good example would be in the smartphone market – Apple Inc. is able to sell because they have amazing design and software that makes it easier for consumers to use. Microsoft failed because they were never a hardware company, all their products were focused on holding great software on an acceptable hardware. Whereas Apple benefitted because they were always a design (hardware) focused company and their products always looked different and attractive. They also brought the right combination of software with their design and then they exploded in the market bringing innovation for an outstanding consumer experience.
Every company has to evolve overtime. For eg: Nokia was an amazing hardware company but they didn’t bring in the right software required at the right time to catch the pulse of the latest generation. Once known as great innovators for their time, but overtime they didn’t evolve.
At Tech.powersquare, we want companies to innovate and bring the real value of their product that makes them different from others. With our knowledge, experience and capabilities, we want to encourage the Indian ecosystem to develop real innovations that add convenience and elevates experience.
Take us through some of your offerings and their USPs
Our offering is productization – i.e. taking a concept and creating market ready commercial product. Our USP is we have gone through the entire journey of creating our own product and putting it out into the market. We understand every aspect of this journey all the way to the final shipment into the distribution channel. We know the problem one goes through in this entire chain and therefore with our experience we can work towards helping companies achieve their goals, not just from an engineering point of view but also the entire execution phase. We are one of the very few companies who have done this in markets especially focusing on consumer experience, automotive and industrial applications
Which sectors do you see the applicability of your offerings in India?
We create technology-agnostic products and solutions across markets that focus on consumer electronics, smart wearables, industrial and automotive sector. From a power-based technology perspective, wireless power is one key area that we focus on and we also work on delivering connected experiences through mobile and non-mobile platforms
Scaling product companies in India can be tricky – how would you say you have navigated this obstacle? What are your immediate future plans for the company’s next phase of growth?
Tech.powersquare is solution engineering company. Scaling such companies is tricky anywhere in the world. The only way to scale is to inorganically grow i.e find the right partners and multiply inorganically.
There is a huge market globally which Tech.powersquare can support and we believe that coming together with the right partners with complementary skill sets, will allow us to build one of the premier solution engineering companies from India to support companies globally. Therefore, we are looking to scale inorganically with the right partners.
Our focus for the year 2020 is to add real big global names to our customer list and you will soon be hearing some exciting news about our partnerships.
This article is part of our ongoing series TechVoice, where we bring to you the leaders of the industry talk about the latest in innovation, technology and trends in their industry sectors. If you want to contribute, write to sindhuja@nasscom.in
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