Mumbai-based early stage VC Fund house Unicorn India Ventures has announced its fourth investment from Rs 400 crore Fund II in IOT enabled Smartgrid automation startup Probus Smart Things. The Company has raised an undisclosed seed round from UIV which will be used for scaling up the platform and entering new geographies.

Probus develops integrated hardware and software solutions for utility providers.

Probus digitises the distribution grid and functions as an IoT platform based service. They are winners of the “Best Startup in India” for their sustainable solution at the 2019 Seedstars Delhi. The company and the underlying technology has been awarded by Indian Smart Grid Forum twice for the solution in 2018 and most recently in 2020. Probus is a powerful IoT solution for electricity distribution utilities that helps them achieve distribution grid analytics and automation, which subsequently enables a much more efficient distribution of electricity along with quicker restoration of electricity after power disturbances. Probus further enables reduced operations and management costs for utilities, and ultimately lower power costs for consumers.

Anand Singh, Co-founder CEO, Probus Smart Things, says, “India is a power surplus country, but the distortions in the power sector has costed the Indian economy $86 billion in 2016 alone. Current technologies like SCADA are expensive and not scalable in terms of the size & complexity of India's electricity distribution grid. Using our IoT enabled wireless, modular hardware & data analytics platform, we cut through these issues and are enabling electrical utilities to make last mile connectivity reliable by helping India achieve an efficient electricity grid within a fraction of their current costs.”

Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, says, - “The electricity distribution infrastructure is ripe with opportunities for innovation and the ability to embrace the elements of smart grid infrastructure. Probus enables electricity distribution companies to rapidly digitize their infrastructure and processes by bringing cost reduction and operational efficiency. This is a service that isn't just pertinent in India but will fare well in the rest of the South East Asian market and Europe as well.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic the need for digitized distribution grid was reinforced for efficient and timely billing and loss reduction. Probus is strongly placed to be the natural partner for utilities in driving this change.

This solution gives the distributors real-time visibility of asset performance, outages, root cause analysis, along with predictive and preventive maintenance through sensor data with scheduling and tracking of on-field personnel.

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