gram power: Yashraj Khaitan, founder and CEO, Gram Power: To survive as species, we need environment and not the other way around – Times of India

Yashraj Khaitan is the founder and CEO of Gram Power, an energy technology company founded out of Berkeley, California. Gram Power develops and commercializes technology for smarter electricity grid and energy analytics to help utilities and businesses reduce their energy losses. Yashraj completed his undergraduate studies in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California. Founded in 2012, GramPower initially focused on building low-cost solar products and microgrids for rural electrification, today the company is one of the biggest players in smart metering solutions for the national grid in India and claims to be managing over 100,000 KW of power in over 30 cities across the country. On this World Environment Day 2022, Times of India Tech-Gadgets Now spoke to Yashraj about Gram Power, lessons from Pandemic and more…
Q. Tell us about the key offering of Gram Power?
Gram Power provides the industry’s most comprehensive smart metering and power distribution management platform. Electric utilities use our solutions to digitize and automate metering, billing and collection activities and to identify and eliminate power theft. Our technology is designed and deployed to address the $16 billion/year energy lost problem in India.
Q. What is the key difference, if any, in Gram Power’s solutions for businesses vs retail users?
There isn’t any particular difference in Gram Power’s solutions for businesses vis-a-vis retail users. We provide our smart meters across all our business verticals — State Electric Utilities; co-living and PG operators; and retail users. While the first two use our solutions to manage power distribution operations, retail users deploy our advanced analytics to track their budgets and reduce their electric bills.
Q. How has Gram Power offering changed/evolved over the last 10 years vis-a-vis the market?
Gram Power was into rural electrification 10 years back. We would set up smart microgrids in off-grid areas where we would generate power using solar energy and distribute it using our smart prepaid metering platform. In 2016, we pivoted the business and started focusing on providing smart prepaid metering solutions to electric utilities — both public and private as we identified that as a much larger problem to solve — annual energy losses in India are equal to almost 40% of our national healthcare budget. Since then, the technology and product stack have significantly expanded to take care of complex requirements
Today with our smart meters and software platform, we manage over 100,000 kW of power distribution daily, over 70 crore of annual electricity payments, and serve over 400,000 people with our technology. The country has recently also mandated that 100% of India’s 250M electric meters are to be converted to smart meters in the next three years. We are playing the leading role in this technology transition.
Q. What has been Gram Power’s biggest Pandemic learning?
Supply chains in our industry have been completely disrupted by the pandemic. One of the biggest takeaways from the pandemic has been diversifying the supply chain. The other has been to put an even stronger focus on SaaS revenue as opposed to hardware sales.
Q. Any message you would want to share on the occasion of World Environment Day?
To survive as a species, we need the environment and not the other way around. We’re devoted at Gram Power to do our bit in building radical energy efficiency on the grid and hope many more businesses will truly align their strategies towards a cleaner planet.
Q. How has Google for Startups Accelerator Programme helped you in your entrepreneurial journey?
Google for Startups Accelerator Programme has helped us substantially in our growth journey. It helped our work get a lot more visibility and get connected to some amazing mentors on the product, technology and strategy sides.
Q: Why don’t you have an app for iPhone users?
We currently have an application for Apple iOS in the works. Since less than 15% of our users are operating from an iPhone, we built our platform for Android first.