Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sridhar Iyengar, CEO of Elemental Machines (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about the company. Is it a funded company?

Sridhar Iyengar: We’re venture-backed. We’re a Series A company. We’ve about 35 people in the company right now.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you based?

Sridhar Iyengar: We’re based in the Greater Boston area, but we have a distributed team.

Sramana Mitra: From where you sit, what other IoT open problems do you see that you’re not working on that you would like other entrepreneurs to go after?

Sridhar Iyengar: There’s a long list of things I wish somebody would solve. Some of it is pretty obvious. When it comes to IoT, the number one challenge is power. If you want to install 500 sensors, you can’t plug them into the wall because you can’t find 500 plugs. It has to be battery-powered or energy harvesting. There’s an entire area around energy harvesting, energy efficiency, and energy storage that I think is ripe for opportunities. There’s definitely an opportunity there.

On the life sciences and bio side, we really don’t have great ways of measuring, from a sensor standpoint, what’s happening inside the body. My first company was a glucose monitoring company. There are companies now that have developed implantable glucose sensors. Here’s the challenge. Glucose is just one molecule. Even getting that one molecule in your body measured at an accurate enough level is still a challenge.

Imagine having implantable sensors that measure multiple metabolites. That’s going to require new materials, new molecules, and new sensing modalities. In implantable and continuous monitoring of different bio-molecules, there’s a huge opportunity for chronic diseases and chronic conditions. Those are the two ends of the spectrum.

If I look at something in between, how do you sense and detect people’s health and people’s movement? With COVID, contact tracing was brought into the media. A lot of that was done manually. We have to realize that we are in a society where one person can have global impact. If you look at what people have been doing in supply chain and logistics, we have technology for tracking packages around the world. Imagine if we are able to do that with human beings and protect people’s privacy. I don’t think anyone has actually solved that. There’s a technological solution, but they’re not able to translate that into an ethical solution. That’s less of a technology challenge but more of a practical sociological challenge.

Sramana Mitra: And political. 

Sridhar Iyengar: Very often, many of us who come out of the technology side of things often forget that having a pure technology solution isn’t going to cut it. There are non-technical barriers that need to be solved. Just having a better solution doesn’t mean you’re going to succeed. There’s politics and ethics. 

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sridhar Iyengar, CEO of Elemental Machines
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