Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sridhar Iyengar, CEO of Elemental Machines (Part 1)

We observed the movement of system administrators becoming DevOps engineers.

Sridhar is leading an effort of moving lab administrators becoming LabOps engineers with the help of cutting edge technology like IoT.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Elemental Machines.

Sridhar Iyengar: I’m the Founder and CEO of Elemental Machines. Elemental is my third startup. I’ve been doing startups ever since I finished my studies about 20 years ago. My education was in electrical engineering with a focus on signal processing and mathematical modeling. My Masters and PhD was in Biochemistry with a focus on biological and chemical sensors.

My entire career has been with sensors. My first startup was a continuation of my PhD work, which was in glucose sensors. I started that back in 2001. That company is still running independently after 20 years. It makes a lot of the blood glucose meters in the market. We actually make the CVS brand of glucose meter. We also make all of the white-labelled glucose meters of Sanofi.

Our claim-to-fame through all of that is that we made the world’s first medical device that can be plugged into the iPhone. We launched it in 2010. It was very early days of digital health. That was what caught Sanofi’s attention. What made the company sustainable was everything we did behind closed doors. The problems that I solved back then were the inspiration for what we’re doing today at Elemental Machines.

Back then, we were scaling up production of our glucose sensor. Those were being made in a contract manufacturing facility over in East Asia. The challenge that we had was when a product run was completed, it would be almost a month before we received those samples here in Boston to do quality control and acceptance testing. We were making anywhere between one million to two million sensors daily. That was a few million dollars at risk.

We had to understand what was happening in the factory right then and there and not have to wait a month to get the product. This was 15 years ago. This was pre-AWS and pre-cloud. Getting data off of the factory was challenging. We did that in a very manual way. We put dumb sensors around the facility. Temperature and humidity had a huge effect on the chemistry. We also had things like mechanical counters on machines to know how often they were used. All of that was typed into Excel and emailed to us.

Over the course of that 18 months, we were able to model production quality and predict two to three months into the future. That allowed us to reduce our average scrap from 20% to below 1%. That was a tremendous amount of savings in terms of yield that gave us the financial ability to go and bid aggressively for these white-label deals. That was a great learning experience. I realized the power of data. The challenge was, 15 years ago, there was not cloud, IoT, or Bluetooth. The lesson stuck with me. If you measure everything, you can do wonderful things that have real business value. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sridhar Iyengar, CEO of Elemental Machines
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