Smart Homes
Outlook Business|March 31, 2017

By Offering Products at Affordable Prices, Cubical Labs Is Hoping to Ride the Boom in the Home Automation Space.

Shilpa Elizabeth Abraham
Smart Homes

Shilpa Elizabeth Abraham

Three enthusiastic college students and their college project on wireless devices — that’s how the story of Cubical Labs began. Year — 2013. Place — IIT Guwahati. Swati Vyas, Dhruv Ratra and Rahul Bhatnagar were exploring how devices can interact with each other through a wireless connection. During the course of the project, the students realised that despite almost everything under the sun that could be done with a click of a button — from opening your car door to doing your daily shopping — there wasn’t an affordable technology that had been introduced in middle class Indian homes to control electrical devices remotely. The trio immediately saw the possibility of their project becoming commercially viable. Encouraged by the faculty, the idea was incubated at IIT-Guwahati’s technology incubation centre.

Four years down the line, the team has since shifted base from Guwahati to Delhi. The company has developed a wireless home automation system, named Cubical Automation, which is currently active in over 1,500 homes across the country. What’s more, Cubical has bookings for around 10,000 more units. After introducing devices that can control electrical equipment in homes using a smart phone app, the start-up is about to launch its next product — Cubical Aura. It is an intelligence system which learns about your daily usage patterns (of ACs and fans) through real-time data, senses the outside temperature and accordingly provides suggestions to control the temperature in the rooms, besides letting you control the lighting and switching off devices using hand gestures. As increasing number of people choose to live in smarter homes, Cubical Labs is well poised to make a niche for itself in the home automation space with its suite of products.

This story is from the March 31, 2017 edition of Outlook Business.

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This story is from the March 31, 2017 edition of Outlook Business.

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