MANGALURU: A New Frontier for Startups in Coastal Karnataka
Coastal Karnataka, often celebrated as India’s Silicon Beach, has captured the interest of a promising startup from northern India.
Sophrosyne Technologies, a burgeoning semiconductor enterprise with a keen focus on healthcare innovations, has established its research and development and product design hub in Udupi.
This initiative comes under the auspices of its Founder and CEO, Manish Srivastava, originally from Lucknow.
Co-founder and Chief Business Officer Jatin Gupta, who hails from Faridabad, noted that the startup has successfully secured $2 million in seed funding through Bluehill VC.
Operations commenced about a year ago from a modest office in Udupi, which saw its larger facility officially inaugurated on Saturday. Moreover, Sophrosyne has been awarded a $1.2 million grant via the Union government’s Design Linked Incentive (DLI) programme.
The Udupi office began its journey with a compact team of six full-time professionals and four external consultants. However, the workforce has burgeoned to 30 members over the last year, encompassing both in-house experts and specialized professionals.
We plan to cultivate a robust entry-level talent pipeline and mentor engineers into mid-level positions, alongside strategic lateral hiring for key roles.
Our objective is to elevate the team to over 50 members dedicated to product development and commercialization within the next 18 months, affirmed Manish.
Sophrosyne is delving into several pivotal domains, which include:
- Real-time health monitoring
- Smart surgical navigation systems
- Brain health chipsets
- RF-based energy-harvesting technologies aimed at prolonging the lifespan of implantable and wearable devices
Ambitiously, the company intends to enhance its workforce and capabilities over the coming four to five years.
Sophrosyne stands as one of the few Indian startups pioneering a single low-power system-on-chip (SoC) that can assess multiple vital parameters—including ECG, PPG, temperature, and respiration—tailored for healthcare wearables and artificial intelligence-driven models that deliver immediate health insights.
Although its headquarters are situated in northern India, both founders possess extensive experience in Karnataka’s vibrant ecosystem of innovation.
Coastal Karnataka, especially the Manipal-Udupi sector, presents an ideal backdrop for our pursuits in medical technology and semiconductors.
The region offers clinical accessibility, academic depth, and a strong talent pool, facilitating expedited product development and real-world validation, remarked Manish.
The founders emphasized that the local landscape fosters a synergistic environment where healthcare and engineering closely converge.
Proximity to Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, allows for direct interaction with clinicians to pinpoint real-world hurdles and validate use cases early in the development cycle.
Institutions like NITK Surathkal and MIT Manipal further enrich the region, providing access to skilled talent and a robust research culture.
They concluded that the area is exceptionally suited for sustained research and development efforts, capitalizing on the tight clinical-engineering feedback loop; this landscape also holds considerable promise for phased manufacturing scalability, ranging from prototyping to quality assurance and medical device production.
Source link: Timesofindia.indiatimes.com.
