Probus Smart Things raises $500,000 led by Unicorn India Ventures

Delhi-based IoT communications & data analytics startup Probus Smart Things, focused on smart grid applications, has raised $500,000 in a bridge round led by Unicorn India Ventures. The round also saw participation from prominent angels like Anuj Khanna of Trimaster, Kiran Alla, Theia Ventures, Devdutt Shah, Kuntesh Chandaria, Urmin Group and Anmol Rastogi. The company plans to use the funds to scale up its team and operations within India and abroad.

Probus develops integrated hardware and software solutions for utility providers and helps digitise their distribution grid and have a clear visibility of their network through Probus integrated end-to-end IoT platform.

"In early 2021, we introduced India’s first DLMS compliant RF product offering for smart meter integration. We are strongly positioned to meet the upcoming requirement of smart metering in both India and abroad by providing our RF mesh products. With the current funding round, we will be expanding our team and product offerings while looking to fulfill our order pipeline,” said Anand Singh, co-founder and CEO, Probus Smart Things.

For the next 12 months, Probus plans to build strong partnerships with various utilities, system integrators and meter manufacturers for catering to various automatic metering infrastructure (AMI) and loss reduction opportunities.

“We invested in Probus last year and have seen first-hand the impact it is making on the ground. Leveraging IoT to improve electricity distribution and bringing down grid failure rate by giving discoms insights right at the distribution level is cutting edge work. The bridge round being led by Unicorn India is a testimony to our belief in Probus and the change it is pioneering in the utility segment,” said Anil Joshi, managing partner, Unicorn India Ventures.

The Indian distribution sector is plagued with minimal real-time information of distribution asset performance, and outage information and man-power utilisation are yet to be implemented. Digitisation of the distribution grid through IoT-enabled technology is the only way forward to drive change.