ROTIMATIC THE BREADWINNER

Pune-born Pranoti Nagarkar, 37, read books about inventors and their innovations growing up, and the idea of creating something novel, useful and from scratch stuck with her.

- Aparajita Saxena

In college, Nagarkar made an automatic clothes ironing device, winning several accolades for it, and eventually went on to work at another start-up in Singapore. But her breakthrough idea came after she got married and realised - as some young Indians do when they become adults - that roti (Indian flatbread) is an incredibly difficult thing to make.

“I was a working professional in Singapore at the time. The commute to work and back used to kill me, but I was newly married back then and I wanted to cook healthy food for my family,” narrates Nagarkar. “One of the healthiest items in an Asian kitchen is the roti, but making it is hard work!,” she adds.

DREAM COME TRUE

In 2008, Nagarkar decided to put all the elbow grease that goes into making a roti, to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming an inventor, launching Rotimatic, an automatic roti maker that does everything from kneading the dough, and compacting it into a ball, to flattening it and cooking it consistently every time. The machine is designed to emulate human actions, such as adjusting the dough-to-water ratio, making sure the rotis are the same thickness and using different customisations for different kinds of flour, using artificial intelligence.

Till date, Rotimatic has churned out over 75 million rotis, as per the live counter on the company’s website. The company has sold over 60,000 devices across 20 countries, including Singapore, and the U.S., currently its biggest.

Zimplistic, the company behind Rotimatic, has raised a total of $48.5 million in funding over four rounds, from investors including Credence Partners, Bosch, and EDBI, as per data aggregator Crunchbase.

EXPANSION PLANS

The company is currently working on its plan to expand into India, Nagarkar tells us, which should be by at least the third quarter of 2020.