Today we bring you the first episode in EcoPreneurs, a new series of conversations with entrepreneurs who are trying to make a difference in combating climate change.

In this episode, Bhagyashree Bhansali Jain, founder of The Disposal Company, gives us a brief overview of her work, trying to get businesses to reduce and recycle their plastics. In the process, Bhagyashree is also attempting to improve working conditions and earnings for rag pickers.

In July last year, The Disposal Company, a three-year-old venture, was among the 10 tech startups selected to the first Accenture Sustainability Value Accelerator Programme, in partnership with the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

We caught up with her at the centre last month, at a startup conclave. Bhagyashree says her solutions are geography agnostic, and she aims to expand into overseas markets as well.

 (00:47) Intro to Tech Conversations and today’s guest – Bhagyashree Bhansali Jain, founder, The Disposal Company

(02:11) Background on The Disposal Company and how Bhagyashree started it 

(04:30) Low-value plastics – the need to tackle this problem

(06:46) Early work that Bhagyashree did

(09:05) Developing local solutions

(11:26) More on what The Disposal Company does – plastic footprinting, working with rag pickers and waste aggregators, making recycling attractive

(13:42) Going from one customer to multiple celebrity backers and 85 customers today

(15:54) Convincing businesses and other areas of work – carbon neutrality via GHG assessment, decarbonization plans and then carbon offsets

(18:07) Making it viable to switch to sustainable alternatives

(20:17) Trying to improve working conditions for rag pickers

(21:42) Going overseas – now in Singapore and Qatar

(24:04) A made-in-India global solution

(26:26) Thoughts on more funding

(28:43) Last quick thoughts – need to design sustainably from the start

This is the last in a series of conversations, this year, on deep tech in India. In this episode, In this episode, Rohan Ganapathy and Yashas Karanam talk about how their company Bellatrix Aerospace, in Bengaluru, is transitioning from a propulsion systems maker to an in-orbit space mobility business – like an Uber pool for satellites, they say. In this conversation, the two founders give us an update on how far they’ve come in their commercialization journey, and plans for the year ahead.

In this penultimate episode of this year’s collection of conversations on deep tech in India, Rohit Grover and Pradeep Thangappan give us an update on the small gas turbine they’re developing at their IIT Madras incubated venture Aerostrovilos Energy.

Their first product will be a 100kW unit that will be compact enough to sit below the cabin of a truck, to generate enough electricity that will easily run the vehicle. The turbine, designed to burn any fuel – from diesel to hydrogen – will also see applications in the industrial genset market, which alone is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity, the two founders say.

In this conversation, they talk about how close they are to their first commercial product, interest from potential customers, and the challenges of building a deep science and engineering-based hardware product from India.

Today we bring you another conversation in our series on deep tech in India. Shashwath T Ramkumar and Sharan S Jagathrakshakan started Mindgrove, incubated at IIT-Madras, to build semiconductor systems-on-chip for applications in IoT (Internet of Things), computer vision and automotive sectors.

Built on the Shakti microprocessor, developed at IIT Madras, Shashwath and Sharan are hoping that the tape-out of their first prototype SoC, meaning making the physical chip from their design, will be a first small step contributing designed-in-India semiconductor processors.

We recorded this episode in second half of September, so I asked the founders for a quick update this morning. And “yes, the prototype production run started on November 15 as scheduled,” Shashwath wrote back. “It was a marathon run at the end but all looks good,” he says.

And pending a few updates from the foundry and on the packaging side they expect to have samples available early in the new year.

In this next episode of our series on deep tech in India Arindrajit Chowdhury and Tausif Shaikh, co-founders of Inspecity Space Laboratories, talk about how they dream of cities in space.

Their contribution is their two-year old venture, which is preparing to soon launch a small CubeSat propulsion system the size of a small tiffin box. It will take them one small step forward in developing an ecosystem of in-space life extension of satellites, involving repairs, navigations and eventually controlled de-orbiting manoeuvres.

SuperOps is a Silicon Valley and Chennai SaaS startup that helps small and medium sized managed services providers automate many of their processes. Co-founders Arvind Parthiban and Jayakumar Karumbasalam, both serial entrepreneurs and former Freshworks employees, recently raised $12.4 million in series B funding from March Capital, Addition and existing investor Matrix Partners India. In this episode, Arvind talks about taking time to find product-market fit and the lessons therein and plans for expansion with the fresh funding.

In this episode, Frank Diana, principal futurist at Tata Consultancy Services, talks about how a lot of his work in figuring out where we’re headed is about learning from history. I spoke with Frank last week, a few days ahead of the company’s New York marathon, during which TCS and Dassault Systemes would showcase their digital twin technologies by modelling the heart of a noted elite athlete, Des Lindon. Diana spoke about why interest in such technologies has surged, and how current advances, including AI, will bring unprecedented productivity gains in the near future.

As India readies its own deep tech startup policy, this is episode 10 in a short series of conversations with some of the entrepreneurs and VC investors who are building this ecosystem in the country.

In this episode Pramod Ghadge and Shahid Memon recount the story of their robotics startup, Unbox Robotics Labs which they founded in 2019. Today their plug-and-play robotics tech for intra-logistics automation – which they’ve branded as the UnboxSort system – has customers including some of the largest third-party logistics providers in India, a large e-commerce company, and one of the biggest retailers from Europe.

They are raising more money, and expect to go from about 60 robots currently deployed with customers, to about 400 this fiscal year. And they’re beginning to expand into the US and Europe, with their tech certified for those markets.

In this episode, Jaspreet Bindra, founder of Tech Whisperer, a UK based consultancy, and Sudhir Tiwari, global head of the digital engineering centre at Thoughtworks India, talk about their idea for a “jan AI” as a digital public good for India. They talk about the need for such an AI stack, how we might build it, and what our challenges are in bringing the benefits of AI to the masses without compromising on how their data is used.

In this episode, Bernard Charlès, CEO of Dassault Systemes, talks about how companies are taking software services back in-house, and on the other hand, how the no-code and low-code model is rising. He also talks about plans for Dassault’s operations in India, which include the country’s biggest conglomerates as customers, India’s largest IT companies as partners, and the French company’s own large global capability centres in cities including Pune and Bengaluru, with thousands of professionals.