From glorious past to bright future: Parag Kulkarni

A Brief Glance at Background

I finished my M.Tech from IIT Bombay in 2008 and immediately started my career with Juniper networks. During the course of 14 years, I had worked with many MNCs in various domains ranging from Networking, Semiconductors, Wireless communications etc. It gave me the opportunity to be part of software and hardware product development. In the year 2022 I was working with NXP and was handling a team of 10-15 engineers. I was looking after product development and its delivery to the customers. Very exciting times in terms of career progress and work satisfaction.

The Bug and Its Fix

During these years I got opportunities to work with many great minds across industry. I could see almost everywhere behind every great product, one of the great minds is from India. Which made me think we have such an amazing talent pool on one hand but then on other hand we hardly see any Indian products which are leading the international markets. This appeared quite odd and disturbing to me. This idea started to bug me more and more as I was making progress in my career.

As a friend from IIT days, I was in close touch with Aniruddha. I have seen the journey of Atreya Innovations since its inception to POC to productization. I was always amazed with the approach that Aniruddha took in the field of Ayurveda. The research publications made by him were not only insightful but also revolutionary. This was amazing for PhD and Postdoctoral topics. What made me glad is, this PhD work got converted into a product idea.

During one of our casual meetings at café, me and Aniruddha were discussing future plans of Atreya Innovations. The current state of the product and future potential appeared wonderful to me. It naturally came to my mind, why not join the mission and be the part of change that I want to see. Ofcourse, it was so easy to decide to break the comfort of a good paying MNC job and jump to a startup. More than that I was working at NXP for the last 10 years and the team was like family to me. This made it a bit harder at emotional level also.
After lots of rounds of discussion and brainstorming with Aniruddha I became more and more motivated and excited to make this decision and finally in April 2022 I left NXP to join Atreya Innovations and its mission 😊.

The First year

I joined Atreya Innovations as CTO in April 2022. The flagship product, Nadi Tarangini was already developed. The B2C offerings using Turyaa were in the process of development. TCS was already a COIN partner, and an exciting work was under discussion.
The engineering team was of just 2-3 people. The main challenge was to bring in focus in product development considering limited time and resources.

When I left NXP, I was already managing a team thus have not done solid code development in the last few years. Considering limited resources, it was time to go to basics. I considered myself as one of the resources and started to do product development for the TCS project myself while guiding the rest team for our B2C product development. It was quite a learning curve to steer the wheel under these limitations and still be on time with respect to time to market.
I must say we did a great job, in 2-3 months of time, our MVP product for TCS was ready and we were in good shape to go ahead with the pilot project. It was a great success with the emergence of lots of opportunities. The Turyaa based offerings did also get launched in the market, and we stepped our first step in the market with that Product.
Nadi Tarangini was put on hold during pandemic years due to certain business and finance reasons. We took a cautious decision to revive the Product. It was a nightmare to revive it. The global supply chain was disturbed due to Pandemic. It was very hard to get required components in the desired time frame. To make matters worse we started to get affected by attrition. It was a struggle to find workarounds for issues that are beyond our control while making people not feel over stressed. Finally, against all odds we did it. The Nadi Tarangini was re-launched, and it became a huge success. It is so successful that Nadi Tarangini is currently our major source of revenue.

Future plans

I like to call ourselves a Technology company working in Ayurveda space. Ayurveda has always lacked touch of digitalization. As a domain of course Ayurveda is proven and self-sufficient, but I feel the touch of technology will revolutionize the last mile delivery of Ayurveda.

Today every person has convenient access to the internet via PC or mobile phone. Thus, re-shaping the Ayurveda knowledge base in the form of digital and modern technology, will immediately enable us to deliver Ayurveda to the last person in the remotest part of the world. Keeping this in mind we have a great product road map for the coming year.

Ashoka Platform

A scalable and modular state of the art platform that will enable B2B integrations. It is offered as Platform as Service. This B2B integration capability enables third parties to come up with their own Ayurveda based solutions without having to acquire any domain expert skills. The potential of this can be just imagined.

Wearable

This is close to my heart. The conventional wearable gadgets such as smart watches are very well accepted, however they are hardly ‘Smart’. Ayurveda has the core strength of predictive analysis. With the help of Wearable smart watches and our patented Nadi sensor, this power of Ayurveda can be easily brought to the benefit of the masses to give them insights into their health and wellbeing.

Ayurveda based Wellness ecosystem.

The Ayurveda platform and various diagnostic and wellness devices can create a very strong ecosystem where end users once associated with Atreya Innovations, irrespective of whether he/she is at home or workplace or public place, will always feel part of a larger mission that’s trying to keep them fit.