Hero Electronix buys enterprise IoT firm Zenatix

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Hero Electronix, a Hero Group company, has acquired Gurgaon-based Zenatix, an enterprise-focused Internet-of-things company.

Founded in 2013 by IIT-Delhi engineers, Zenatix has built its own proprietary IoT stack, which includes hardware, cloud-based software and big-data analytics.

“It’s our first entry into the IoT space. We’re also building our own IoT platform which is consumer facing. We’ll be announcing the product towards the end of this year,” said Ujjwal Munjal, Founder Director, Hero Electronix.

While Hero Electronix works in some areas in auto technology but that is entirely independent of the rest of the group, said Munjal. The company was set up by the Hero Group over two years ago to tap into emerging digital opportunities

The company did not disclose the value of the transaction. “The original plan for Hero Electronix was to invest Rs 1,000-1,200 crore. Of that, we have already invested Rs 350 crore so far,” said Nikhil Rajpal, CEO, Hero Electronix.

India is projected to have an installed IoT device base of about 2 billion units by 2020 according to National Association of Software and Services Companies.

Hero Electronix has in the past invested in Tessolve, a Bengaluru-based semiconductor company, Malaysia-based Spectrum Integrated Technologies SdnBhd and the test lab business of Singapore’s Lynxemi Pte. In 2015, Hero Electronix also acquired MyBox Technologies, one of India’s largest multi-operator manufacturer of digital set-top boxes in the country.

“For IT businesses to succeed, they should have an end to end technology, and we have built that in-house, so it is easier to scale.  Another thing for a business to succeed is the ability to drive a lot more intelligence controls through artificial intelligence and ML. Though AI, we can predict when an equipment is likely to fail,” said Rahul Bhalla, CEO, Zenatix.

Zenatix’s current customers include companies like Vodafone, Mother Dairy, and Aviva Insurance. They also count some banks, ATM management companies, retail chains and QSR outlets as customers.

According to Rajpal, the sweet spot for Zenatix is solving “unique Indian problems”. For instance, a big freezer at one of their clients wasn’t performing up to the mark because the operator would open the door to cool himself in the heat. Some customers even asked if the company could detect a dog inside the ATM.

According to Hero Electronix, using its machine learning-based model, Zenatix analyses over 10 million data points every hour and helps provide customers help in areas such as predictive maintenance and consumer experience analytics.

Hero is looking at 100,000 deployments for Zenatix in the next three years.

Post the acquisition, Hero Electronix plans to widen the reach of Zenatix by foraying into global markets in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and so on, as they have similar challenges as the India market.