Lab to market to communities is the key for impact tech startups: Manoj Kumar, Founder, Social Alpha

He is also a director at mach33.aero, a joint venture between CSIR-National Aeronautics Laboratory and Social Alpha to address challenges in building companies in the space tech, precision engineering and robotics sector and unlock opportunities to create positive impact in areas like climate change, human health and food security.

Manoj Kumar spoke to indianexpress.com on the challenges of identifying deep tech social impact startups, raising funds, finding markets for them, and finally putting them on the path to sustainability and profitability. Edited excerpts:

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you give an overview of Social Alpha’s journey, its philosophy, and its achievements?

Manoj Kumar: We began our journey in 2016 when we recognised that there was a lack of innovation on issues and themes which affected the marginalised sections of the society and also certain issues which affect the larger society; like say climate change. This could be because the market risks were too high for startups and investors, or the challenges were too many.

The challenges for entrepreneurs and startups in these sectors range from curating the problem statement to establishing product-market fit, to finding markets, capital and scaling it up. Without a mentoring and investment partner with deep expertise in the innovation ecosystem this is difficult to execute. That is why we have built a full tech stack for the impact sector with three pillars: laboratories, ventures, and communities.

Why Manoj Kumar

We have our own labs for product development, and also have partner labs at various research institutions like IITs for our incubatee startups to work on. After the product development reaches a certain stage in our labs, we then take the startups to the Venture segment, where we invest and showcase the same startup to a larger set of investors and finally we take the startup to our communities segment. Communities are where we work with nonprofits and social sector organisations on the ground to test these products and evaluate their efficacy. We get detailed feedback on the products from users, and based on it, we finetune the products. It might look easy, but this is something that only an ecosystem player with deep connections with partner nonprofits in rural areas can provide. Our community partners bring a wealth of experience of the problem statements which is not easy to replicate. Then we do pilots in various places for these products to see if there is offtake and if people are seeing value in the same. Using our network, the startups can also find out the comfortable price points for their products.

It is during this process we work on Go To Market readiness, ways to overcome regulatory hurdles, and help the startup gain accelerated market entry and scale it up further. We are among the few organisations in India that have the mentoring and hand-holding playbook all across the journey of a social impact startup.

There are some difficult challenges these startups face and these could be in terms of market failure, mission drift and suboptimal scale, and we work with them to resolve the same.

We have mentored and incubated around 300 startups, and invested in around 90 of them. Our investments are in the range of Rs 50 lakh to Rs 2 crore. We bring in a larger pool of investors for startups to raise additional funds.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Social Alpha, SustainPlus, Mach 33, how do these converge?

Manoj Kumar: We have built many collaborative platforms with various stakeholders across the spectrum.

Sustain Plus is a multi-stakeholder collaborative platform focussed on clean energy access and seeks to aggregate global philanthropic capital and allocates it to impactful projects that use clean energy solutions.

mach33.aero is a joint venture between CSIR-NAL and Social Alpha, and works with organisations like CSIR, to create a platform for deep science founders, leveraging advanced tech across various sectors. We want to unlock the opportunities that the technologies provide and find relevant uses in climate change, human health, and food security.

We also work with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for the SpaceTech Innovation Network (SpIN). India’s first dedicated platform for innovation curation and venture development for the space entrepreneurial ecosystem, SpIN works on facilitating space tech entrepreneurs in three distinct innovation categories: geospatial tech and downstream applications, enabling tech for space and mobility, and aerospace materials, sensors, and avionics.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us about some of your startups and innovations with social impact that have emerged from your incubation/ mentoring programmes?

Manoj Kumar: Many of our incubatee startups have produced products which have had a substantial amount of impact and have also raised a good amount of money in their journey of being sustainable enterprises. One such instance is Voxelgrids Innovations, which is a pioneer in manufacturing affordable lightweight MRI machines in India. The machine can be used in both stationary and mobile modes. It can be deployed and operated under challenging installation conditions and generates high quality images for clinical diagnosis. This prototype was deployed in 2017 at the Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences, Bengaluru, and in 2021, it went on to raise funds from Zoho.

Hasiru Dala is a pioneering Bengaluru-based venture in the waste management sector that focuses on creating dignified livelihoods for waste pickers while delivering substantial environmental impact.

Manoj Kumar, founder of Social Alpha. (Express photo by Jithendra M)

Phool.co has developed a unique technology to recycle used flowers into artisanal organic products. Founded by engineering graduates Ankit Agarwal and Prateek Kumar, it is a flower recycling tech startup and is a pioneering biomaterial startup from India. It is a natural incense stick and cone manufacturing company that employs women from marginalised sections of the community and offers them a fair wage. Phool.co has invented Fleather — ‘leather made from flowers’. This could prove to be an alternative to animal leather and could disrupt the global leather goods industry. It has gone on to raise substantial funds from venture capital.

Satyukt analytics is an agritech company, which uses satellite remote sensing technology in the field of agriculture and agribusiness to provide services world wide. It is a decision analytics platform that works on satellite remote sensing, machine learning, and big data analytics to answer large issues in agriculture. Their tech assists crop insurance companies in assessing, preventing sowing, estimating crop damage, and paying payments as quickly as possible.

Tan90’s portable cold storage simplifies the transportation of temperature-controlled products from farm to fork. The specially designed thermal panels, containing proprietary chemicals, are placed inside an insulation box to keep food at desired temperatures. The product was designed to address the concerns of the very people left out of the big, centralised cold storage infrastructure.

Khethworks creates new tech and products for smallholder farmers. They have built a submersible centrifugal solar-powered irrigation pump to reduce farmers’ dependence on monsoon rains and costly fuel pumping.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What do you think has been your impact on the innovation ecosystem in India?

Manoj Kumar: We have evaluated more than 20,000 innovations, supported more than 300 startups, have funded around 90 of them, provided opportunities for catalytic funding for 100 of them, apart from arranging for grants and market access for them. With more than 20 grand challenges, our startups have generated more than 65 patents, apart from winning 350 awards from various national and international organisations.

Social Alpha has built an extensive partner network across the innovation and investment ecosystems, with deep engagement with the central and state governments, private sector, academic institutions, R&D labs, philanthropic foundations, investors, nonprofits, and community organisations.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about your labs; how they are structured and what do they work on?

Manoj Kumar: Impact-focused tech start-ups addressing problems in areas like climate change and healthcare (with a focus on access and affordability) often work on breakthrough technologies like energy storage, medical devices, advanced materials, etc and require extensive research and development before reaching a stage where they can be deployed. This is the challenge and this is where our labs come in.

Our labs have transitioned more than 20 technologies, making quality healthcare accessible and affordable. More than 130 innovations from our labs have been deployed by our startups in more than 300 districts across the country. With specific reference to medical tech, more than 1,000 institutions have adopted the technologies that have come out of our labs.

Social Alpha architecture integrates backwards with the R&D ecosystem, co-creating laboratories for research, product development, and venture incubation.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: How does your innovation scouting/grand challenges work? What does it focus on?

Manoj Kumar: We have run more than 20 grand challenges, from the clean energy sector to assistive technologies to agritech, healthtech and waste management and processing solutions.

We also held challenges on Urban Livability, a nationwide scouting programme for innovators and entrepreneurs who are working to solve complex problems of urbanisation through deep-science and tech innovation. Many of our challenge winners continue to work with us.