The rise of Thinklabs , a robotics start-up

At 25, IIT Mumbai engineering grad Gagan Goyal had already founded Rhizo, a startup clean tech venture that aimed to harness heat generated from air conditioners. This venture however had to be shut down, and like most Indians, young Goyal fell back on the ‘secure’ environs of a public sector oil firm. “But I was not enjoying myself. I had a fetish for robots. I thought why not launch a business around robotics,” he says.

Through his engineering, Goyal had displayed a keen interest in robotics with him also being selected to represent India in the ASME Student Design Contest in New Orleans, USA. The workshop at the contest was to create a robot which could test a Baseball ball and see if it was ready for play. He reminisces: “What I realised was that the effort was more focussed on integrating parts rather than creating them. 

Ready-made parts gave participants enough time to focus on programming  the robot to make it do intelligent things.” With this in mind, he pooled in Rs 2 lakhs from his personal savings and set up ThinkLabs, which created individual robotic parts and conducted robotic workshops primarily targeting engineering students with an interest in robotics. 

The big change in the model came when he approached SINE, (Society of Innovation and Entrepreneurship) the incubator at IIT Mumbai. As Goyal remembers, “the meeting with SINE enabled us to completely change our business model. They helped us realise that robots could be used to helpstudents appreciate and understand science and technology. We subsequently changed our path to become completely education focussed with customised workshops for college and school students.”In 2007, his IIT-Mumbai classmate Abhishek Biswal joined Goyal as a partner and now looks after the marketing function. “Initially, educational institutions were quite sceptical of the value of our courses. But we soon re-structured our courses in a way that it meshed well with the understanding of theschool and college syllabi,” says Goyal. Thinklabs has trained over 30,000 students across 200 educational institutions in 35 cities. 

In Jan 2008, Thinklabs raised its first round of funding of $1 million from Seed Fund. Most of the money has been used to fund expansion into more cities and increasing its workforce to its current strength of 75 employees. The startup has revenues close to Rs 2 crore, most of it coming from educational services. 

“The key for us is to look at training others who can carry out our method oftraining. We are looking at a franchising model wherein we train other training institutes to conduct our workshops.” The future growth plans include raising another round of funding over the next three months and a long-term plan an IPO over the next three years. 

In an industry which is still unstructured, Thinklabs faces very little competition in the educational robotics space. Its biggest inspiration comes from Denmark-based Lego, which has similar educational services which are sold in over 20 countries and four continents across the globe. 

What keeps Goyal and his team going is the feedback from parents and students. “We regularly hear that students are giving up video games and spending more time with their robotic kits,” he exclaims.