Hello

2016 was an extremely eventful year – I had just published my first research paper from my postdoc, I had trained 3 summer students and successfully organized India’s first postdoctoral symposium at NCBS. By 2016, I had worked my way through a Masters, a PhD and 3 years of postdoctoral work all for one cause – trying to find how breast cancer cells work. 2016 was also the year I resigned from my job as a cancer researcher at one of the most sought-after institutions in India to start CloudKrate, a tech based startup to help scientists with material management.

One of the oft-asked questions I get is “Why did you leave science, why are you wasting all your training?” The transition from doing bench work to starting a business was not easy; it took a lot of work to get underway and even more learning about the nuances of the trade. But the crux of creating a solution was data – I had extensively networked with cientists and suppliers to carefully understand their pain points and bottlenecks in this fragmented ecosystem. Running a startup is not very different from how scientists work - I apply the same principles to CloudKrate: I observed scientists wasting their precious research time on managing resources, I hypothesized a good inventory management system that would help re-channelise time and I have been experimenting with CloudKrate to figure out the best product fit for solving the issue. My training in science has taught me these principles - robust data collection, critical thinking, and flexibility to pivot. I have never felt that I have wasted my training because it was never about the techniques, it was always about the attitude.

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“But why CloudKrate; why not another biotech startup? There are so many health concerns in India, surely we need more research done.” Saying I am helping scientists maintain their resources doesn’t sound as sexy as saying I am researching cancer. But scientists in India struggle to get their lab supplies on time resulting in inefficient project planning and delays. Through CloudKrate, I am helping researchers save time so that they focus on their research, be it finding a vaccine for dengue, a biomarker for cancer, or a cure for Parkinsons. We expect to save laboratories upto 400 man-hours a year over a year, that’s an additional 2 months of extra research time/laboratory. That means that even if only 6 cancer labs work with CloudKrate in a year, it would make up for my absence from the field. Improving research productivity in all these labs simultaneously is worth more than me working at a lab bench.

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Getting chemicals and resources has been a barrier for many labs wanting to start up and CloudKrate is changing that slowly, one lab at a time. Soon CloudKrate will have revolutionized the supply chain in life sciences industry, making research in India hassle-free.