Sramana Mitra: How did you find your co-founder?

Ritukar Vijay: One of the co-founders was in my college in the Robotics club. That goes back more than 15 years. The other two guys, we met through our careers during 2010 to 2012.

Sramana Mitra: In the robotics company?

Ritukar Vijay: Yes. Then we moved in different directions. Then in 2020, we came together. It was strange times. It was strange times for everyone. There was the entire lockdown.

Sramana Mitra: The four of you were in Delhi?

Ritukar Vijay: At that time, I was living in Germany. Because of the lockdown, I was in India and couldn’t travel. That’s when everything started. We built the MVPs in our guest rooms.

Sramana Mitra: What was the MVP? What were you building?

Ritukar Vijay: While brainstorming, we scratched multiple use cases for autonomous technologies. The major one was warehousing. Then we realized that one of the most critical legs of supply chain is the last-mile delivery. It was an underserved area in the entire supply chain. There are tons of companies focusing on warehousing or manufacturing. This was an underserved area.

These robots should be fully autonomous. They should be delivering items from point A to point B. With that thought, we started building an MVP. We realized a lot of things during the course of development. What are the target markets and customers? What are the pain points?

One of the core pain points was labor shortages and not getting exposed to delivery personnel during COVID. It started with that. We did some market research. We did the market sizing. On one side, the product was getting developed. One the other side, the strategy was being built up. What are the feature sets that these robots should have?

Sramana Mitra: Were customers part of this process?

Ritukar Vijay: It was only the co-founders during the MVP. Once the MVP was made, we were testing the MVP in our parking lots. We thought of reaching out to one of the e-commerce companies called Snapdeal. Fortunately, they were generous enough to do a pilot with us. It was not a commercial engagement. It was more of an innovation arrangement. We delivered goods.

Sramana Mitra: Elaborate on the exact use case. How would this work?

Ritukar Vijay: When we started with Snapdeal, the large vehicles would come out to group housing societies. The delivery person gets out, takes all the deliveries, and delivers to each of them. We break the whole problem into multiple processes where each van delivers to each of the group housing societies. Then the robots will do the deliveries and the van can move to the next one.

Then there was a critical learning. We were trying to solve a problem which was not a problem in India. The labor shortage was not there. Labor is available at low price points. Our core realization is to offer the service where the problem exists. That’s how the whole journey of Ottonomy started in the US. Based on these pilots, we were able to crack one of the airports in the US which was Cincinnati International Airport.