Advertisment

StartUp Circle: how does DrinkPrime create water affordability by installing water purifiers?

author-image
Laxitha Mundhra
New Update
drinkprime

Water scarcity has become a worrying issue across the country along with clean and safe drinking water. Accessing clean drinking water has become challenging for thousands across the nation. DrinkPrime is an innovative venture in Bangalore. It has achieved affordability by installing water purifiers in the premises of the customer and providing them with drinking water. DrinkPrime is a WAAS Tech Platform. With CiOL, the startup charts the journey of the venture.

Advertisment

1. To start with, can you tell us about your venture ‘DrinkPrime’?

DrinkPrime is a Bangalore based startup which helps Urban Indians get access to safe and affordable drinking water. The startup manufactures and provides IoT enabled water purifiers on subscription to its users, wherein the users pay only for the amount of water they consume while DrinkPrime takes care of the cost of the device, installation, maintenance etc.

The one-of-its-kind venture is founded by Vijender Reddy, an ex-AMD researcher, and Manas Ranjan Hota), an MBA graduate who used to work in the software sector. DrinkPrime combines the convenience of a water purifier and the economics of bottled water into one product. It is a smart water purifier with a seven-stage filtration process, that gives its customers access to clean drinking water on tap.

Advertisment

At DrinkPrime, our mission is to make safe drinking water accessible and affordable to every resident in India. With our tech-first approach, we are taking up this audacious mission and we are confident that, with the support from people, we can contribute significantly in solving the issue.

2. How did you come up with the unique idea of DrinkPrime?

Staying in the same house in Bengaluru, Vijender and Manas faced a lot of problems in getting drinking water supply. They found that the bottle was often dirty while at other times the water inside was dirty or the supply was always erratic.

Advertisment

The idea behind starting up DrinkPrime was this water crisis of Bangalore. The people of Bengaluru come from various parts of the country and with many staying in rented homes, unsure of the duration of their stay, conventional water purifiers are not an option for them. On the other side, water purifiers are very expensive. It has a high upfront cost; high annual maintenance cost and extra spares cost. Only less than 5% of the urban population has a water purifier.

Due to this, many people resort to the use of bottled water cans (with 20l capacity) which, studies have found has an adverse effect on the health of the individual. We acknowledged the issue and that’s how DrinkPrime was born.

For people who need pure drinking water, DrinkPrime is the only solution for purified water that shows you how the levels of the purity of water that you drink. This has been made possible with an Internet of Things (IoT) application that keeps you informed on the purity standards of the water that you and your family consume.

Advertisment

With time, we have now evolved into an organization that is driven by a singular mission — to change the way people think about the water they drink.

3. What is the role of technology in your solution and what are the challenges that you faced?

Technology is our biggest weapon in addressing this challenge. DrinkPrime tackles the problem through a data-driven model that blends a water purifier subscription service along with sensors to track a household’s water input and consumption in real-time. The startup retrofits seven-stage reverse osmosis (RO) water purifiers with sensors that are synced with a user’s smartphone over Bluetooth. We use an amalgamation of IoT & Cloud technology to store data.

Advertisment

Unlike a TV or fridge, a water purifier is not a one-size-fits-all product, the water purification technology should depend on the quality of your input water and the maintenance cycle should depend on your consumption and environmental conditions.

DrinkPrime also has an app for its users which sends the consumption and other relevant data from the phone to the Cloud to track the usage and water input. The data which is sent from the IoT sensors to its servers is encrypted, which cannot be viewed without the decryption key. The data stored in the IoT device does not contain personally identifiable information. A user’s phone is connected to the purifier through Bluetooth and even if the handset is lost, there won’t be any issues. You can take any other phone and connect it to the purifier and you will get connected again.

4. Can you elaborate on your business model?

Advertisment

We have come up with smart water purifiers by leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) technology and a seven-stage filtration process. We allow the users to subscribe to use the company's advanced modular water purifiers, with a pay-as-you-use model. The customer not only gets the access to safe drinking 24X7 but also the option to pay according to the usage.

We offer different subscription packages starting from just Rs 374 per month. Also, one can top up with a recharge of Rs 50, Rs 100, or Rs 200 when they need more water.

On average, the price starts from Rs 4 per litre and goes all the way down to Rs 0.9 per litre.

Advertisment

5. What are your expansion & future plans?

At present, DrinkPrime serves over 12,000 households in Bangalore and Hyderabad. We started with Bangalore and then after receiving an overwhelming response there, we entered Hyderabad in 2020 itself. We plan to serve 100,000 households across the top cities of India by the year 2021 - 2022.

6. The Covid-19 outbreak has affected almost all sectors. How has DrinkPrime survived the global pandemic?

We felt that in these testing times, our users needed us more than ever. During the lockdown, we got special essential services pass and we're the only water purifier company to continue our services. Also, we did awareness and sanitizer distribution campaigns in the initial days of the lockdown when sanitizers were scarce.

The pandemic has certainly impacted DrinkPrime as the several offices which availed our services were shut down. Besides, DrinkPrime requires lots of groundwork which got hampered due to the lockdown. Nonetheless, the team was on its feet within a few days.

Besides, DrinkPrime purifiers continue to be popular among households and the word-of-mouth is gradually leading to an uptick in the sales. Also, this is a temporary phase and we are confident that once we are past it, people — in offices and households — would realize the need for safe drinking water more than ever and make a wise choice by picking DrinkPrime purifiers.

Earlier we used to reach out to the households but today, households reach out to us for water purifiers. There is a greater sense of responsibility among people now with regards to the quality of the drinking water.

As we are moving towards a new normal, we have introduced several measures for the health and safety of our technicians and customers

7. About the funding

In August 2020, DrinkPrime raised 21 crore Pre -Series A from Sequoia Surge and Omidyar Network India. The amount will be used to accelerate the growth in terms of expansion of our services and further strengthening the team.

drinkprime