At 25, IIT Mumbai engineering grad Gagan Goyal had already founded Rhizo, a startup clean tech venture that aimed to harness heat generated from air-conditioners. This venture however had to be shut down, and like most Indians, young Goyal fell back on the ‘secure’ environs of a public sector oil firm. “But I was not enjoying myself. I had a fetish for robots. I thought why not launch a business around robotics,” he says.
Through his engineering, Goyal had displayed a keen interest in robotics with him also being selected to represent India in the ASME Student Design Contest in New Orleans, USA. The workshop at the contest was to create a robot which could test a Baseball ball and see if it was ready for play. He reminisces: “What I realised was that the effort was more focussed on integrating parts rather than creating them.
Ready-made parts gave participants enough time to focus on programming the robot to make it do intelligent things.” With this in mind, he pooled in Rs 2 lakhs from his personal savings and set up ThinkLabs, which created individual robotic parts and conducted robotic workshops primarily targeting engineering students with an interest in robotics.
The big change in the model came when he approached SINE, (Society of Innovation and Entrepreneurship) the incubator at IIT Mumbai. As Goyal remembers, “the meeting with SINE enabled us to completely change our business model. They helped us realise that robots could be used to help students appreciate and understand science and technology. We subsequently changed our path to become completely education focussed with customised workshops for college and school students.”
What followed was the launch of robo.in, a series of workshops designed to make students interact with robots and programme them to carry out different functions. The basic program is one named ‘SCORE’ (Starter Course on Robotics Education) which is a 24-hour workshop which costs Rs 10,000 and is designed for students in the 11-17 year age group.
At the workshops, students work with a software interface and an associated hardware to programme the robots to move in a certain direction or create a video game. This interactive format enables students to not only learn software but also learn physics, electronics and mathematics. Today, apart from teaching children, Thinklabs also sells its robotic kits to educational institutions and students.
In 2007, his IIT-Mumbai classmate Abhishek Biswal joined Goyal as a partner and now looks after the marketing function. “Initially, educational institutions were quite sceptical of the value of our courses. But we soon re-structured our courses in a way that it meshed well with the understanding of the school and college syllabi,” says Goyal. Thinklabs has trained over 30,000 students across 200 educational institutions in 35 cities.
“The key for us is to look at training others who can carry out our method of training. We are looking at a franchising model wherein we train other training institutes to conduct our workshops.” The future growth plans include raising another round of funding over the next three months and a long-term plan an IPO over the next three years.
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