There is no denying that the industrial sector is rapidly evolving and adapting technology on all fronts. Covid-19 has further accelerated the digital aspirations of manufacturing industries, particularly in advanced technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), data science and blockchain. At the heart of it lies the small businesses in the country, for which embracing Industry 5.0 is not far away.
Many have projected this vision. Sudheesh Narayanan, 45, a former Infosys and Larsen & Toubro employee, also believes in it, leading him to start Knowledge Lens in 2013.
Bengaluru-based Knowledge Lens is a B2B product company that provides solutions in new-age technologies such as data science, big data analytics, AI, augmented reality, IoT and blockchain. Its customer base involves companies in manufacturing, automation, pharmaceutical, retail and others. Its solutions include plant digitisation, asset management and traceability, and fault detection, among others.
Handy experiences
After graduating as an electronics engineer, Narayanan started his career with L&T in 1998. His job involved visiting manufacturing plants. However, he was always interested in software. “So, after two years of doing all the heavy lifting in the electronics industry, I moved to software and joined Infosys, which has been with me for a large part of my career,” he said.
Narayanan left Infosys in 2013 as the Chief Architect and went to the US for a brief period. After returning from the US, he worked for a production company to understand what was missing in India’s industrial market. He wanted to know what was hindering its growth. “Since India’s strong point was always software, I realised that we have to build something on the software side to create a competitive revolution in the industrial sector,” he said.
During that time, cloud and AI were the emerging technologies and Narayanan wanted to tap that segment. “I always believed that data has all the hidden gems in it,” he said, adding that the need to hunt insights from data led to the birth of Knowledge Lens.
The first thing the company focused on was climate change. As environment monitoring had become imperative in India and issues around air quality were mounting, Knowledge Lens created a product called GreenLens or GLens to provide real-time data on industrial emissions. It can connect with any analysers and sensors on the field, create analytics, identify the root of pollution and allow remote configuration and calibration.
The company’s other solutions are iLens and MLens. iLens enables plant digitisation, AI-powered visual inspection, labour management and optimisation, and inventory optimisation, among others. MLens is for enterprises’ big data requirements and helps in big data workload migration, cloud data management and automated disaster recovery capabilities. The company also recently launched UnifyTwin, its first Industry 5.0 solution, as a software company that joins human intelligence and machine intelligence to remove digital blind spots for smarter manufacturing processes. It is headquartered in California, US.
Today, Knowledge Lens has over 3,000 customers in automation, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, retail and other segments across India, the US and the Middle East. Some of its clients are Dalmia Group, Jubilant FoodWorks and Welspun Group.
Welspun Flooring Limited has been working with Knowledge Lens for the past two years to automate its manufacturing process. GV Subramanyam Gupta, Vice-President of IT & Chief Information Officer of the company, called it an amazing experience. The companies have co-created solutions on how to make things more efficient. “We are able to leverage Knowledge Lens’ technology to generate unified contextualised insights from our connected workers and machines in real time for our coating manufacturing plant.
Some of the key success areas have been predictable productivity, improving quality of our products and setting up operational dashboards for various levels, thus enabling us to take quick decisions. We are planning to replicate the same in other Welspun Flooring Plants soon,” he said.
SME focus
Narayanan stressed that the company has been aggressively working with the SME market as well, including very small textile plants and tanneries. “The advent of digital transformation for them is very important, especially on the Industry 5.0 journey, because most of their systems are pen and paper today. Further, the challenges on efficiency have not been focused on, and they are not very financially equipped to make large investments in the space of industrial IOT and so on,” he said.
While there are still some challenges pertaining to finance and access to infrastructure for small businesses, he said, SMEs are keen to invest in technology to reap its benefit.
What Knowledge Lens brings to the table for small businesses is reasonable cost. Since the solutions are completely made in India — hardware, software and last-mile implementation — it gives Knowledge Lens an advantage over the solutions of foreign companies. “This is why we have been able to gain the trust of SMEs as well. We also make some initial investment for them to show them the benefits so that they can take things forward,” he said.
Knowledge Lens reported a revenue of Rs 90 crore last year, from Rs 65 crore in the year-ago period. Knowledge Lens India’s revenue last year was Rs 75 crore, from Rs 55 crore previously.
Narayanan said they were expecting to clock around $30 million by the end of this financial year. The company has a valuation of $120 million. It was bootstrapped, and the promoter is not seeking investments. “I have always believed that for any business model to be sustainable, it has to be profitable. You cannot run a business that is not profitable, by relying on VC funds,” he said.
Knowledge Lens is looking for strategic partnerships and international certifications for some of its products.The company is now working on its expansion plans. This year, it inaugurated an office in the US. Narayanan said he wants to widen the reach in Europe and the Middle East.
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