Bridges, railway tracks, and pipelines often stretch across long distances, making them difficult to monitor. Most conventional sensors measure conditions at a single point and need a power supply at that location. Chennai-based Folium Sensing is developing a way to monitor entire stretches of infrastructure without installing powered sensors along the route.
Founded in 2024 and based at IIT Madras Research Park, the startup uses fibre-optic cables already laid for communication. According to CEO and Co-founder Sanidhya Chaturvedi, its technology can detect sound, temperature changes, and strain at points along a cable extending 100 km or more, using equipment connected at just one end.
Chaturvedi graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from IIT Madras in 2026 and leads the company with three co-founders. CTO Venkatesh Varadhan is a 2007 electrical engineering alumnus of the institute with 20 years of industry experience. Professor Balaji Srinivasan and Professor Krishnan Balasubramaniam, who has co-founded 14 startups, are the non-executive co-founders.
Chaturvedi says the technology is the result of more than 20 years of research at IIT Madras. The first year after incorporation was spent visiting potential customers in the field to understand their requirements.
Monitoring infrastructure through fibre-optic cables
Folium Sensing’s system sends a pulse of laser light through a fibre-optic cable. When the cable is disturbed, some of the light scatters back towards the source. The time taken for the light to return helps determine where the disturbance occurred.
The returning light carries three types of signals. Rayleigh scattering detects sound, Raman scattering measures temperature, and Brillouin scattering measures strain, or the stretching and compression of the cable.
These signals generate large amounts of data, which machine learning models process using edge hardware and cloud systems. Filters remove background noise, while a pattern-recognition model developed by the team identifies unusual changes. When it detects an event, the system generates an alert with the location marked on a map through a Google Maps link.
The models were trained on test beds at IIT Madras for pipelines, underwater assets, railway tracks, and bridges. The startup has also filed patents for its technology.
“Our AI can tell you whether it is a person walking, a bike engine, a JCB at work or a leak. We have trained it on all of these, and it gives the location and what is happening there, with about 96-97% accuracy,” Chaturvedi says.
From test beds to field projects
Folium Sensing has five products, including distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and distributed strain sensing (DSS). Its DATSS system combines all three.
The startup sells hardware and software to businesses and government agencies in oil and gas, defence, railways, and infrastructure for end-to-end monitoring of industrial asset health.
It has begun deploying its technology in the field. Folium Sensing supplied DTS units for a tunnel on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway in partnership with Forbes Marshall. It has also completed a project with TDK Ventures to monitor heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems in smart buildings.
Other projects are at the proof-of-concept stage. These include pipeline leak monitoring with GAIL, CPCL and IOCL, mine monitoring with Tata Steel, and bridge monitoring in Kolkata.
Funding and expansion plans
Folium Sensing has not raised external funding. It is incubated by the IIT Madras Incubation Cell and IIT Madras Pravartak Technologies.
Over the next year, the startup plans to focus on data centres, border intrusion detection, pipelines, railways and tunnels.
“Our first target is the Middle East, where we want to work with oil and gas pipeline companies,” Chaturvedi says.
The company then plans to expand into Southeast Asia and Africa, followed by the US, where it already works with some clients.
Folium Sensing is part of YourStory's Tech30 cohort—a showcase of India's most promising startups of 2026, unveiled at TechSparks Bengaluru.
Edited by Teja Lele