Wi-Fi solutions for real-time microclimate intelligence: Yuktix

By Anusha Ashwin  With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technology, traditional method of weather monitoring and forecasting is passé. Sensor-based smart solutions for environment sensing and monitoring, and smart infrastructure are the new age system to be relied on. Yuktix Technologies, a Bengaluru-based IoT and M2M start-up working in remote monitoring and control, develops such indigenous sensing solutions that provide data across the agricultural value chain and weather.

Founded by IIT-Kanpur alumni Rajeev Jha, Yuktix pioneers in Automatic Weather Station that gives real time weather data on cloud and mobile. The company has developed sensor-based devices that have applications in crop monitoring, post harvest monitoring, crop disease prediction, and greenhouse monitoring. Yuktix devices play a significant role in the Bangalore Open Weather Network, which streams live data on Bengaluru weather and micro-climate. A small group called the Know your Climate Network (blog.knowyourclimate.org) along with Yuktix has installed 18 telemetric rain gauges. Information on such parameters as temperature, pressure, humidity, rainfall and even soil moisture is now available on its website in real time.

Kick starting Yuktix

Rajeev Jha, founder of Yuktix, did his graduation from IIT Kanpur and Post Graduate Program in Enterprise Management (PGPEM) degree in Business Management from Indian Institute of Management in Bengaluru. Before Yuktix, he founded Favsales, a tool to enable payment for businesses on social media. He has worked with Oracle, AOL America Online and Citrix. Inquiring on how he started the company, Jha says, “One of the earliest motivations for Yuktix came when a friend, a researcher, showed me a card with sensors and wanted me to write software that could collect data from different types of sensors and data coming at great velocity. I knew nothing about sensors but the idea of collecting the data from actual physical systems and environment to provide intelligence intrigued me. I think back then the term IoT was not in vogue. The Vodafone report still called it M2M and people used terms like wireless sensor networks, smart homes and connected factory… I felt that the promise of sensor networks and breaking up of data silos to make seamless systems could be another cloud-like opportunity. Yuktix Technologies was then founded in October 2013. Since then, I have been working to create indigenous remote monitoring solutions for emergent markets. The company now provides data capture and communication solutions for remote monitoring and environment sensing.”

Jha heads the four member-team company. Shailendra Singh, an embedded engineer from UPTU, Lucknow and a DIY enthusiast, joined Jha even before Yuktix was incorporated. Singh and Jha do most of the outside interfacing, travel and legwork for Yuktix. Ashok Kumar Verma, a 1980 IIT Kanpur graduate, came through the institution’s Alumni network when Jha was looking for a seasoned hardware designer, especially someone who could handle radios. Last November, another IIT Kanpur alumni, Arun Verma joined Yuktix after quitting Schneider. Verma is now the VP of operations at Yuktix.

Designing products for fragmented markets

Rolling the products into the market was no easy go for Jha. He was stubborn on creating a product with an end-to-end service oriented approach. “Hardware is essentially a fragmented market and no single device can fit all use-cases. This means that device manufacturers will have to stick to specific domains and use-cases. With Yuktix we are breaking the entry barrier to sensor-based data capture in any domain as we have developed IPs that can be used as ingredients to create multiple solution templates. Using our Sensor catalog, Yuktix’ IP and our hardware expertise, we can practically solve all data capture problems. This means that people who were earlier dependent on specialized hardware device manufacturers and wherein customization meant escalated costs, can now be easily accomplished using the Yuktix device IP. This also means that we shorten the development time for futuristic data-capture.”

Yuktix’ devices also have a solar powered option that can store data locally and transmit it via GSM/GPRS to the cloud from where the customer can access it from anywhere, anytime. The company’s solutions are off-grid and weather-proof and tested for extreme conditions like storm, sun and hail. The company offers solutions to customers who have no GSM network connectivity. Yuktix steps in here by drawing a wired line from a remote site to a place where there is GSM network connectivity or would lay down a Zigbee-based wireless sensor network to relay the data to a location where there is network connectivity.

Jha’s USP is to deliver a mashup of wired and wireless communication options with solar based off-grid weather proof data capture. “We are building the products from ground up to be off-grid or on-grid, with multiple communication options and software to go with the offerings for quick integration. So, for example, the same air quality unit can run inside a building on the ethernet or can be deployed totally off-grid running on solar. Then one can integrate our products into their portfolio using WiFi or ethernet or we can also talk about getting water quality data from lakes using low power long-range radios. Then we provide software that can feed all the data into your system. I believe integration would be the key, as people are not going to throw away their existing investments just like that. Our motto is to make that integration as painless as possible in terms of rollout, maintenance and software,” explains Jha.

Telit-enabled Bangalore Open Weather Project

One of Yuktix’ significant effort to collate weather data is the Bangalore Weather Open Project. The company, in 2014, set up India’s first citizen-run network of weather stations in Bengaluru for measuring and tracking the micro-climate in the city. “Pavan Srinath, the weather enthusiast behind Know Your Climate Blog, conceived the Bangalore Open Weather Project and we connected because he and his team were getting frustrated trying to figure out all the technical details. Now, we have about 18 stations on the grid. It feels good to have come to this stage from scratch and tide over the skeptics. We plan to go to 50 stations. There is a lot of work to be done on the visualization and software side. Hopefully, with a stable device template we can start working on the data intelligence part more,” says Jha.

The 18 weather stations collect critical information from various Bengaluru’s localities such as temperature, humidity, rain and in some cases other variables like wind speed. The Open Weather Network enables the citizens and climate researchers by giving them open access to weather and microclimate data. The weather data from all these stations can be accessed at www.yuktix.com/m/aws. Yuktix has also developed an android app to access the microclimate weather data across Bengaluru.

One of the core partners in Jha’s Weather Project is Telit. “We are using Telit’s GL868 V2 GPRS modules inside the stations. GL868 was chosen because it provides a good price-to-performance ratio and tests showed that it generated a better signal than its competitors. In addition, the Python engine provides a good way to process asynchronous events via SMS. Telit IoT modules are to deliver connected-device functionality for multi-purpose weather stations, data acquisition devices that operate on solar, battery or AC power. The new generation of Yuktix devices embeds the Telit GL868 GPRS module,” says Jha.

Time to speed up sales and projects

“The sales so far have been inbound and judging from a startup perspective, we had a good year. We have a product roadmap and we see lot of boxes that we need to work on. On the device side, the key is low power and long range- power is something that lots of people tend to miss in these discussions. Imagine having a device that can run on a phone battery for a year and beam data. That will open up so many areas that are not traditionally wired. Cold storage chains and greenhouses in India are one good example of this. On the cloud side, we would like more abilities to analyze and predict. No one is interested in data dumps. A good system shows what is important and needs attention first. Then, there is third area of easy provisioning. How do you ensure that your networks are self-updating and call point out mistakes easily? Imagine the reduction in support cost. So, yes there are many topics to be covered. I am not worried about that I will run out of problems to solve,” comments Jha.

Envisioning the future, Jha says, “We had raised angel funding from people we knew and we have invested our own money. Last year, sales revenues also came in. From here, we are looking ahead at raising a proper seed round for product development and more sales engagements. We need to speed up the activities because we see lot of opportunities and it would be a shame to let these slip. After five years, we want to see our systems deployed in large contexts and we should be doing good revenue. We need to complete the current product road map and engage more in sales. Personally, I would like our sensors’ initiatives to come out good. I believe that needs to happen in emergent markets like India for project costs to make any sense.”