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Imagine switching your appliances on and off from a mobile app. Start your coffee maker from your bed right after you wake up, or your air conditioner in the TV room right as you leave office so your favourite room is chilled when you arrive. Sound good? It gets better.
Automate is a Karachi-based startup that uses the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) to make your home appliances — be it ACs, lights, water motors, etc — smart. But how smart? Think of it this way: every time you want to sleep but the light is on, you don’t have to nag your sibling to switch it off. Automate lets you control your devices from its app. How? They have built a number of products — smart switch, smart socket and smart dimmer — that you can replace your old electric system with, and given access to a WiFi network, all your electronic appliances are then on your fingertips. Yeah, science.
“Back in university, I used to make final year projects for friends and this one time, I designed an app that enabled farmers to control tube wells from their houses. That’s how the idea behind Automate was conceived,” CEO Haider Mirza tells Dawn.
After flitting around between the startup and a number of jobs for almost two years, he finally took a leap of faith and gave in to his entrepreneurial calling. “Sticking to a 9-5 job just wasn’t my temperament,” he says.
While the prototype was ready by 2015, the company failed to gather interest from the right investors. But that changed when Shayan Tahir, CEO Homeshopping.pk, became Automate’s first investor and they finally began commercial operations in August last year.
Still not sure what exactly is at offer here? Let me try. Their first product is a simple smart socket that you can basically order online and plug-and-play. As simple as that. The switchboard is the new addition, fancier in its design, and more complicated in its installation, but as simple to operate. Their pitch? “You don’t need to buy smart devices; we will make your old devices smart.”
What they offer is to automate your home for a price tag starting at Rs4,000. Or you can opt for a single switch, plug in anywhere and play all you like. Once you join their system, you can control all the connected devices in your home or office from your phone. From setting a timer on your water motor so that it runs automatically at a fixed time during odd hours to selecting specific times for the fridge to save some gold-priced electricity units, they let you do it all through their app.
Their role doesn’t end here though. At the end of the month, the company sends you a log of your activity to help you manage your electricity usage. In fact, for them, things start here. They record all user activity data which, after reaching certain data points, would be analysed to better understand consumer behaviour.
Given Pakistan’s construction boom, Haider is naturally optimistic about what the market holds for him. “Even if we get a fraction of the newly built homes in DHA, Bahria etc, we are set,” he confidently claims. Since their inception, the company has fully automated 300+ homes and sold many more standalone sockets.
But competition lurks in the shadows for Haider. Orient, the appliance maker with a large presence in the market, has already made an entry into the Internet of Things (IoT) , through its local subsidiary BlueEast. Being a large player, they enjoy access to financing that is not available to young entrepreneurs like Haider. Plus, there are the big-shot local software houses who have shown an interest to enter the hardware arena as well by getting outsourcing deals. Plus they have money to burn.
“Big sharks entering this scene can obviously push us out in the long run given their deep pockets, but I am not as pessimistic about race-to-the-bottom competition,” Haider says. He’s probably right about that.
A few big players venturing into this arena might in fact provide the industry the marketing Automate can’t afford, thus pushing up the demand for their product.
Eventually he sees his biggest challenge in the limited internet penetration in Pakistan, not the bigger players eyeing his market. In a country where even internet access is limited to less than 20 per cent of the population, the prospects of an IoT-based product seem rather limited. And Haider agrees. That is why the company is launching its product line in the United States as well, which would soon be available on Amazon.com.
“We are eyeing US and the United Arab Emirates as our primary markets in the near-term from where we hope to gain credibility and then expand in Pakistan,” Haider tells Dawn. While that might sound ambitious, he is confident about both his tech and the cost advantage. “The closest substitute to our smart switchboard in the US costs around $100,” he reveals. He can fulfill that at less than half the cost.
With those price points, he feels, there is little standing in his way. Now that’s a thought to calm the nerves, isn’t it? Pakistani technology, powered by local smarts, raging through large export markets!
The writer is member of staff:
Twitter: @MutaherKhan
Published in Dawn, June 24th, 2018
