Kanpur: It is definitely an achievement that needs to be celebrated. Four students from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur have developed an open-source electronics prototyping platform: evive, which is for learning STEM skills, prototyping electronics circuits, creating robots and hacking together IoT solutions. It has been designed for the product developers, student and educator communities in mind. This EdTech startup already created a buzz among investor community as it has successfully already raised $35,000 (nearly Rs 22 Lakh) via global crowfunding campaign with over 300 contributions representing 30 countries.
Four students of IIT Kanpur are the brain child of evive: Dhrupal R Shah, Akshat Agarwal , Abhishek Sharma, and Pankaj K Verma. This electronics prototyping platform has also won the international Hackaday Prize automation challenge-2016. The Hackaday Prize is the greatest hardware competition on in the world, which aims to honour the next great Open Hardware project that benefits everyone.
These four students have set up the startup company under the name Agilo Technologies Pvt Ltd, which operates the brand evive. Dhrupal R Shah, CEO & Co-Founder, Agilo Technologies, said, “Lots of hardware startups are in the field of IoT, automation and embedded systems. However, evive is a cost effective all-in-one platform that fills the gap between the high end costly debugging tools and low end age old tools for product developers, students and educator communities.”
The revenue model for this hardware product will be based on production and manufacturing. The startup, which is at an early stage, is planning to complete the first round of manufacturing by November 2016. “Simultaneously, we are developing worldwide distribution network for evive and are beginning with EU and North America. Also evive will be available to purchase via global “drop-shippers” like Tindie or SeedStudio,” said Mr Shah. Further, the company is trying to tie up with educators in this field to strengthen the market reach of evive.
Commenting on the product features of evive, Mr Shah said that this prototyping is intuitive and user-friendly, which removes the need to reprogram the Arduino frequently and removes repetitiveness. evive offers highly accurate sensing capabilities using state-of-the-art ICs for IoT applications, all in a battery-powered portable unit. Agilo Technologies has already tied up with three distributors and is in talks with some EdTech companies worldwide for promoting STEM education in schools.
