March 22, 2019

In 2015, when India was still trying to warm itself up to the concept of drones, two young men from Guwahati, Biswajit Dey and Ritesh Kanu, started conducting aeromodelling workshops in different educational institutions in their work town Kolkata, under a brand called EduRade. That was the beginning of their startup story.

Soon, Biswajit and Ritesh, along with their childhood friend and Co-Founder, Debajit Deka, expanded to a Pan India reach, holding workshops at esteemed educational institutions like the IITs, the NITs, and various regional colleges across the country. Within a span of a year, EduRade had trained over 1000 students. However, these training programs were a part of the company’s bootstrapping mechanism to fuel the greater picture.

“Our main mission was to design solutions in the surveillance industry which had drones in it. But in order to start, we needed funds. So, we started with our educational brand, EduRade in December 2014. The fund accrued from the brand was channelized towards our survival as well as for the R&D,” says Biswajit.

The strategy bore fruit in 2016 when they bagged a tender from the DRDO for their newly developed product under the brand, Drones Tech Lab. And that’s when they founded RCHobbyTech Solutions Private Limited. It was also during this period that Biswajit and Ritesh succeeded in getting incubated at the IIM Calcutta Innovation Park.

Drones Tech Lab offers expertise in designing and integrating Drones for Surveillance, Industrial Inspection, Aerial Survey, and Smart City Mapping. The brand develops and deploys customized drones to meet the multifarious needs of the concerned clients. Apart from the DRDO, it has offered services to the Indian Army, the Indian Airforce, the NDA, the National Disaster Management Authority, the National Informatics Centre, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the West Bengal Police, to name a few. Drone Tech Lab’s corporate clienteles include Larsen & Turbo, JSW, and GENSTRU among others. And the services have garnered a lot of praises.

 “Our efforts to control the dengue menace in Kolkata, in collaboration with the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, by deploying our systems to check accumulation of waters in rooftops received a lot of appreciation. And our commitment to help the defense forces detect the insurgents in extreme weather conditions through our sensors-equipped micro drones was also accepted well,” Debajit says.

Drones Tech Lab was also in news recently for developing specialised drones to help pluck the best Darjeeling tea by accurately identifying the optimal areas for pruning and plucking.

Under the guidance of Dr. Subhrangshu Sanyal, the CEO, IIM Calcutta Innovation Park, the brand has been able to bag a soft loan of Rs. 20 lakh from the IIMCIP and a loan of Rs. 80 lakh from the UBI. But the lion’s sum has come from Balmer Lawrie & Co. Ltd under Startup India, garnering a fund of Rs. 1.5 crore from them.

Although Biswajit and Ritesh are steadily scaling heights, the process of scaling up has been more difficult than starting. Apart from the struggle to ensure a constant flow of funds for meeting client demands, team expansion has been an issue. Working in a startup environment comes with its own set of challenges, which demands the team to be up on its toes every day for maximum hours. However, not everyone is ready to work under such a taxing setup.

“When you are in the process of scaling up, you need a good team that shares your vision. Startup demands a brainstorming environment where things must develop every day. We aren’t finding the right set of people to work in this challenging startup setting,” Biswajit reveals.

In 2017, the company, after consulting with their IIMCIP mentor, Mr. Devasis Gupta, took a tough decision to suspend the commercial operations of EduRade except for meeting the prior commitments. As Ritesh says, “Though both the brands (EduRade and Drones Tech Lab) were running nicely, it was no more feasible to run both the brands simultaneously.” The good news is that they are contemplating on reshaping EduRade into a franchise model in the coming time.

Interestingly, neither Biswajit nor Ritesh aspired to become entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship happened by a stroke of fate when Biswajit, an aeronautical engineer, had to give up his job in the Indian Army following an accident during the training days at OTA Chennai. The startup idea rose from the ashes of his career setback. Ritesh, who was comfortably placed in the corporate world with his smart marketing niche, decided to give up his job to join his friend on an uncertain entrepreneurial journey. And it’s their courage to come out of the comfort zone and take a risk, and their hard to kill attitude that makes Biswajit and Ritesh’s story so much more awe-inspiring.