Most people never find out what is in the water they drink, the food they buy or the air around the factory down the road. The reason is not that nobody cares. Finding out is slow, expensive and done somewhere else, by someone else, weeks later.
That gap is what VidyuthLabs Technologies exists to close. This week we took a real step towards it: VidyuthLabs has been selected for incubation at the STPI Centre of Excellence for Efficiency Augmentation (CoE-EA) in Bengaluru.
I am proud to be building this company alongside my co-founder, Varshini CB.
What we are building
Our ambition fits in one sentence: technologies and systems that help people understand, reduce and ultimately prevent contamination, across water, food, the environment and industry.
The order of those three verbs matters.
- Understand. You cannot reduce what you cannot measure. Detection has to leave the central laboratory and go to where the contamination actually is.
- Reduce. A measurement is only worth something if it changes a decision: a batch held back, a source treated, a process corrected.
- Prevent. The end state is not better testing. It is fewer things to test for.
We intend to get there through research, education, technology development and action in the real world, not through any one of them alone.
Why an incubator, and why this one
Deep tech has a particular way of failing. The science works in the lab, and then the company runs out of runway somewhere between a working prototype and a product somebody can buy. I wrote about that gap after our visit to a research lab at BITS Pilani: the technology is often already here; what is missing is the bridge to a product.
An incubator, at its best, is part of that bridge. Through STPI's CoE-EA, VidyuthLabs gets access to:
- mentorship from people who have taken technology to market before;
- technical infrastructure and connections to laboratories;
- industry networks and exposure to markets;
- connections to investors and funding agencies.
For a company working on contamination, the laboratory and industry connections matter most. A sensor proves itself in the field, against real samples, alongside the people who will use it, and not only in the lab where it was built.
The people who made this possible
None of this happens alone, and I want to name the people responsible.
At STPI, my thanks to Shri Mahadesha V, Jurisdictional Director, STPI Bengaluru, and Dr. Nishant Peddagopu, Chief Operating Officer, STPI CoE - Efficiency Augmentation, and to the wider STPI team for the confidence they have shown in us.
Within VidyuthLabs, our thanks to Dr. Manjunatha Channegowda, our Chief Scientific Advisor, whose guidance shapes the science we build on, and to Dhyan M, our Chief Business Officer.
What comes next
Selection is a start, not a result. Over the incubation period, our job is to turn access into evidence: tested devices, real deployments and data that shows contamination being caught earlier than it is today.
If you work on water quality, food safety, environmental monitoring or industrial process control and contamination is a problem you live with, I would like to hear from you. The best way to build a measurement tool is with the people who need the measurement.
The original announcement is below.