Nobody on a factory floor wakes up wanting AI, Internet of Things (IoT) systems or a smarter dashboard. Their job is simply to keep machines running, production moving, and compliance headaches at bay. For factories, this also means keeping track of groundwater extraction, air quality and other metrics, which regulators now expect enterprises to monitor and report.
For decades, this grunt work rested on manual readings. A flow meter installed on a borewell would tell a factory how much water was being pumped out. Someone would note the reading, compile it and submit it to the relevant authority. The system worked, but it was slow, fragmented and vulnerable to inaccurate reporting.
Now, as regulatory expectations shift towards IoT-based monitoring of industrial assets, this challenge of compliance has become more urgent. Enterprises may not necessarily care about deploying another layer of technology, but they care about avoiding the fines and disruption that follow non-compliance.
Another major issue facing enterprise compliance is that most manufacturers, which supply industrial monitoring equipment, are not built to offer software, AI and connected-device capabilities.
“Industries had long relied on flow meters for manual readings. When IoT monitoring became mandatory, they turned to their existing flow meter vendors for compliance support. However, most OEMs lacked expertise in IoT, AI, and software,” says Ubiqedge cofounder Visat Patel.
This is where Mumbai-based Ubiqedge appears to have found its niche. Founded in 2024 by Patel, Archit Khandelwal, Akhilesh Thorat and Hetvi Shah, the startup is building a full-stack artificial internet of things (AIoT) platform for monitoring and managing industrial infrastructure.
Its hardware platform, KLEON, and AI-powered software layer, SAMASTH, are designed to help industrial equipment makers and system integrators convert conventional machines into automated systems. Earlier this year, the Mumbai-based startup raised ₹10 Cr in a seed round led by Piper Serica.
A Second Shot At Industrial IoT
For Patel, Ubiqedge is his second attempt at building an industrial IoT company. An alumnus of IIT Bombay, Patel began his entrepreneurial journey in his final year of college. He holds two patents – one in biomedical devices and another in agritech.
Before Ubiqedge, he founded Ushwa, an IoT startup that operated for nearly eight years before it was shut down.
By his own admission, Patel said that the technology was sound, but the go-to-market (GTM) approach was wrong, and the business couldn’t scale past a certain point. This experience left the founders with a clearer understanding of why industrial IoT deployments often fail to move beyond pilots.
“We identified that while AI and IoT tools are good individually, industries aren’t very comfortable engaging with this technology. A lot of large companies have deployed this tech at a cost of ₹50 Lakh or a couple of crores, gotten a good overview, but then nothing concrete has come out of the solution. This has weakened industry confidence in the technology’s scalability,” Patel said.
Determined not to repeat the past mistakes, Patel regrouped his founding team, including Khandelwal, Thorat and Shah, to rethink industrial IoT deployment from the ground up. The four cofounders quickly zeroed in on three persistent bottlenecks.
- Technology creators lacked the bandwidth to support varied industrial use cases
- OEMs also lacked the expertise to develop IoT and AI layers around their machines
- Technicians on the ground were often intimidated by complex connected systems.
Ubiqedge was built around solving this three-way problem. Rather than asking factories to adopt a new tech stack from scratch, the startup was envisaged with the idea of making industrial AI and IoT simple enough to deploy at scale.
Turning Machines Into Connected Assets
To overcome traditional enterprise sales resistance, the startup deploys a novel distribution strategy. Ubiqedge doesn’t sell directly to factories. It sells to OEMs and system integrators, who then bundle Ubiqedge’s hardware and software with their own equipment.
Powering this bundled model is a plug-and-play tech architecture designed to upgrade legacy machinery without disrupting existing operations.
At the heart of Ubiqedge’s tech stack is KLEON, a hardware device that is integrated with industrial equipment. It reads the data generated by the equipment, stores it and sends it to the cloud. The device can communicate with nearly any sensor protocol and can operate through SIM connectivity, Wi-Fi or LAN.
Take a factory borewell as an example. The flow meter attached to the borewell measures the volume of groundwater being extracted. Ubiqedge’s device connects to this meter, captures the reading and transmits the data to the cloud.
The software layer, SAMASTH, then converts that raw information into a usable operating and compliance system. It can show the factory owner live groundwater consumption, retain a year of historical data, automatically forward required data to government servers and send alerts when usage approaches a limit set by the owner.
The system can go a step further. Using the same hardware-software combination, a factory can automatically shut off the borewell pump once the licensed extraction limit is reached. In this sense, the startup is not merely digitising a flow meter, but turning it into an automated compliance tool.
“A common failure mode with tech adoption is offering technology that just notifies you of a problem without doing anything about it. We always deliver a baseline ROI (return on investment) automatically, without requiring further action,” Patel said.
The startup currently caters to four use cases: smart water management, solar photovoltaic remote monitoring and control, smart concrete management and air-quality monitoring.
Separately, Ubiqedge is also working on an AI-driven configuration layer to make its platform more adaptable for OEMs and system integrators. The idea is to let a client describe a new use case in a prompt: which sensors need to be connected, which data points need tracking and what kind of dashboard needs to be created.
The system would then generate the relevant firmware (the software layer that runs on the hardware) as well as the analytics dashboard, without requiring programming. This could make it easier for factories to deploy solutions across specialised industrial needs without waiting for custom engineering work for each new application.
Smart Hardware, Steady Margins
On the business front, Ubiqedge operates on a dual-revenue model. Besides one-time hardware sales, the startup also earns revenue from its software via an annual subscription model.
Piggybacking on the distribution networks and customer relationships, the Mumbai-based venture claims to have already onboarded more than 100 direct customers, over 8,000 end users and roughly 30,000 devices deployed through its OEM and system-integrator network.
On the back of this, the startup claims to have closed FY26 with a revenue of around ₹7 Cr, with double-digit profit margins. It also claims to have been cash-positive since its first year of operations.
Going ahead, Ubiqedge plans to expand its footprint globally, with an eye on the Middle East first.
But the road ahead may not be easy as the AIoT startup eyes its next stage of growth.
While its servers are currently hosted in India to comply with domestic data localisation norms, moving overseas will require the startup to set up dedicated regional data infrastructure in each of these geographies.
Hardware adds another set of constraints. While manufacturing is outsourced to Indian contract manufacturers, Ubiqedge still relies on Chinese connectivity chipsets. Any supply disruption, price volatility or component shortage could affect delivery timelines and margins.
The startup’s dependence on OEMs and system integrators, rather than factories, also limits its control over sales cycles, installation quality and the end customer relationship. Ubiqedge must ensure that its partners can explain, deploy and support its products without turning the implementation into a complex project.
But Ubiqedge’s biggest challenge will likely be overcoming the scepticism that industrial clients have developed after years of expensive but underwhelming IoT deployments.
For now, with a cash-positive business and a fresh seed round, Ubiqedge is looking to deepen its presence in India while preparing for overseas expansion. The bigger test will be whether its partner-led model can scale across industries and geographies without losing the simplicity that forms the core of its pitch.
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