Oakter plug-play smart devices enter India’s home automation market
Oakter’s device can be used to smarten 34 different types of home appliances which include AC, water heater, water motor, mosquito repellant, fish tank, lamps... among others.
Picture this! On a lazy Sunday morning, when you are reluctant to get out of that cozy bed, your hot cuppa coffee is already brewed; your air conditioner automatically turns off and your geyser turns on with the appropriate temperature for a nice hot bath!!! And you could do all this just by moving your finger over a smartphone application that automatically follows your preset command in switching on/off all the desired appliances in your house?
Noida-based startup Oakter Private Limited is one such enabler that has conceptualized and created an IoT-based smart home kit, which can manage all household appliances’ operation through a centrally controlled hub and a smartphone application. With no additional alteration in the house, Oakter’s smart plug-and-play smart home products just adapts itself to most electrical fittings turning your simple abode into a smart home. The company’s products smarten existing home appliances that can be controlled better and that can be managed remotely just by using a mobile app.
On a smart mission
Oakter is on a mission to use technology to elevate life by better home management. Founders Shishir K Gupta, Nithin K David and Varun Gupta are the smart brains behind Oakter. “In the US, IoT products like Google Nest, Belkin Wemo, Samsung SmartThings and Amazon Echo have been very successful with penetration in more than a million homes. Oakter was founded to solve the same problem for Indian homes and lifestyles,” says Founder Shishir Gupta while introducing Oakter.
Gupta, an IIT-Delhi alumnus, and his other friends from IIT, Nithin David and Varun Gupta were successful entrepreneurs in the engineering services sector. In 2014, they came together with the idea of starting something impactful to elevate Indian lifestyle. They first developed the design of a ‘Solar Air Conditioner’. However, that was not a commercially feasible product, as they realized that 1.5-Tonne AC costed Rs 2 Lacs. But, while developing the air conditioner, they discovered and developed an IoT-based controller to reduce energy consumption of the AC at night time operation. They deduced that the controller was able to substantially reduce energy consumption by about 30%. So they took that controller and expanded on the idea of IoT-based controller for home appliances. As they went deeper in to it, they were completely convinced that there was a workable IoT-based smart home product in the offing.
Oakter stands for Oak Technology Enabled Residences. Since Oak is the wisdom tree, the idea is to grow smartness inside residences, says Gupta, when he asked about what made him name the company Oakter. Explaining in-detail about the blueprint and the working of the product, Gupta outlines, “Currently all home appliances are controlled through on-device buttons, knobs and other controls. Step 1 of IoT technology is to get those controls transferred to a user’s smart phone. This is done by using a server over internet as the gateway. Step 2 is to write the software on the server which learns from the user behavior and gets smarter. The home appliance becomes smarter over time via software upgrades. It becomes convenient to use the appliance and they become energy efficient. Step 3 of technology is that these appliances talk to each other and collectively and become even smarter.”
Oakter’s device can be used to smarten 34 different type of home appliances which include AC, water heater, water motor, mosquito repellant, fish tank, lamps among others. Oakter’s first product was launched in November 2015. The founders took