Making Miko: Sneh Vaswani's journey to co-create a robotic revolution

The co-founder of Emotix, a leading B2C robotics company, highlights the need for a systematic strategy to work towards building a great start-up

How does a young entrepreneur manage product innovation, go-to market strategies and production, investor expectations and emotional stability all at the same time while running one of India's leading robotics start-ups?

Sneh Vaswani, co-founder of Emotix, a leading B2C robotics firm, and an avid karate enthusiast, has been regularly training since 1994 (when he was barely in school) and turns to the activity as an stress buster. He also credits his karate instructor as much as his family for his emotional health. 

"I think the entrepreneurial ecosystem doesn't give enough credit to supportive family and spouses as one of the key drivers of success. We couldn't have managed so much work without the emotional support from our families," says Vaswani, who never mentions his work without crediting his co-founders.

Vaswani, together with Prashant V Iyengar and Chintan S Raikar, built the Emotix global team consisting of leading mathematicians, designers, engineers and neuropsychologists for Miko, their flagship product in

2015. Miko and its updated version Miko 2 are smart robotic companions targeted towards children. 

Emotix raised $7.5 million Series A funding from the likes of Chiratae Ventures, YourNest Ventures

and a group of technology evangelists among others in August. Last year, the company had raised a pre-series of $2 million. 

Speaking to Vaswani also makes one realise that the company did not just come into existence simply because three young IITians wanted to launch a start-up after graduation. Rather, they put years of careful planning right from their first year of graduation. 

"We knew each other since the first year of college and we knew that we had to start a company together. We worked towards it right from selecting the best internships to jobs in order to have the best learning in product design and delivery," says Vaswani. For him it was his job as a Research Engineer at Siemens

Technology India. 

Vaswani completed his post-graduation in Metallurgical Process Engineering from IIT Bombay. The institute's  director recommended his name to the government to sketch the Technical Vision of India for 2035. He was also awarded with Institute Technical Color (5 of 7,000) for outstanding performance in Robotics, Institute Special Mention for contribution in technical activities and Institute Technical Roll of Honor where he was the 2nd awardee in the history of IIT Bombay.

With such deep engineering experience, why wouldn't these young engineers continue working with leading

robotic manufacturers?

"Working in a B2B set-up puts your destiny in the client's control whereas in a B2C, you are completely in control of innovation. The day we felt we were ready to work on our own company, we called each other up and quit our jobs," says Vaswani. He adds that that working on large-scale project delivery in a B2B model helped the team create a culture in which they can now roll out prototypes within a matter of days instead of spending months on a new product.

Another thing the founders have been focused about is to reach out to investors who understand the hardware product lifecycle. In fact Keshav Murugesh, Chairman of Nasscom and group CEO of WNS, was one of the early investors in the company.

Their first product line, the Miko series of robots targets a seldom-addressed need of millenial parents who seek a positive and trusted gateway of technology that caters to the learning and development needs of children.

"The idea hit us when we saw a friend's sister struggling to wean her child off a smartphone because there were no better options for kids to play with," said Vaswani. With an extremely positive response from the

India market, Miko aspires to bring their platform solutions to every household globally with a 2023 vision of reaching 20 million homes across verticals like childcare, elderly care and more.

"No, we will not always build robots," says Vaswani. "We will, however, continue to focus on products and solutions that are emotionally intelligent."