Meet the two entrepreneurs from India in MIT Innovators Under 35

Photo by Jurgen Appelo

Each year, MIT comes out with a list of its pick of the most promising innovators and disruptors shaping the future with tech. The latest crop has two entrepreneurs from India – one of whom has brought robotics to Indian ecommerce, while the other has pioneered the development of low-cost medical devices for those who cannot afford expensive healthcare.

Here are the two Indian entrepreneurs in the latest MIT Innovators Under 35:

Samay Kohli, GreyOrange

Co-founders of Grey Orange: Akash Gupta and Samay Kohli

Hardware success stories are rare in India. GreyOrange is an exception. It makes robots to improve efficiency and reduce costs of warehousing and delivery in India’s fast-growing ecommerce.

The Gurgaon-based startup began in the field of robotics education before pivoting to the more lucrative field of industrial robots. Backed by Blume Ventures and Tiger Global Management, it scaled up fast to dominate the warehouse automation space in India before expanding to Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Indonesia, and Europe. It plans to expand to the Middle East and China next with its two main products, which are a robotic sorter and a “butler” that moves the sorted packages to their designated areas.

Samay Kohli, the 30-year-old CEO and co-founder of GreyOrange, is a mechanical engineer from one of India’s premier tech colleges, BITS Pilani, where he developed a humanoid that got 6th position in Robogames 2008. GreyOrange invests heavily in R&D, developing both its hardware and software inhouse. “Our customers love the fact that we provide end-to-end solutions, and that is possible because we can control every piece of code and every micro-controller that runs the same,” Samay told Tech in Asia when we profiled GreyOrange.

See: Grey Orange adds wings to its international expansion plans with $30M funding round

Jagdish Chaturvedi, InnAccel

Jagdish Chaturvedi and his team with with Dr. Rodney Perkins at Stanford.

As an ENT (ear, nose, and throat) surgeon, Jagdish Chaturvedi observed how doctors in rural India relied on a makeshift combo of mirrors and headlamps to detect serious conditions like throat cancer. (Farmers who chew tobacco-based products are prone to throat and mouth cancer in India.)

Imaging devices were just too expensive, so Jagdish decided to create low-cost ones by attaching small off-the-shelf cameras to endoscopes. He joined the Stanford-India Biodesign program to learn to commercialize these devices, in partnership with medtech firms. He has gone on to co-invent 18 devices to date, and is also the clinical lead at InnAccel, a medtech accelerator in Bangalore.

India imports three quarters of its medical devices, most of which are too expensive to use in rural areas. InnAccel and its 32-year-old co-founder Jagdish are out to fill this gap in healthcare in partnership with tech startups. “Something I’ve realized after inventing so many devices is that it’s not as hard or time-consuming as doctors seem to think it is,” Jagdish told Kylee McIntyre of Tech in Asia in a recent interview. He hopes to inspire other doctors to make modern healthcare more accessible in India.