So along with his SRM College classmate Sudeep Sabat, third-year student Eshwar Vikas invented DosaMatic, an automatic dosa-making machine the size of a microwave oven. Their mission is to bring consistently crisp, delicious and inexpensive dosas to hotel tables everywhere.
“Dosas cost anywhere between Rs 25-50 in a place like Bangalore or Chennai or Hyderabad. But if you go to Delhi you might have to spend Rs 80-120 for the same thing. With a product like a burger, the cost remains the same no matter where you go. The cost for Indian food products are not standardised as they are handmade and have no automation,” says Vikas.
DosaMatic serves up one perfectly rolled dosa every minute. All you have to do is pour batter and oil and into its separate containers, select the thickness you want and press the start button. The mix is pumped onto the hot plate using Archimedes’ screw system, then smoothly spread and peeled off using the principle of a motorcycle’s side stand.
The boys didn’t just put their classroom knowledge to use but also got help from unexpected places. When stuck with the problem of how to make the motor spread batter evenly, they had discouraging responses from IIT professors who said it was impossible or too complicated to achieve. It was a small shopkeeper in Chennai who improvised the solution with a series of chains and gears.
Vikas and Sabat had pitched the DosaMatic idea at a startup contest in Chennai in 2012, where they were noticed by Indian Angel Network who offered to incubate and later invest in them. The duo launched their company Mukunda Foods that year and graduated from both the college and the incubator in 2013. The product’s growth was very fast because its inventors did the prototyping and manufacturing simultaneously. This saved them both time and money.
Thirty restaurants in Bangalore have bought and started using DosaMatics already. Vikas says the company has got many enquiries and confirmed orders from other places in India and abroad. With a price point between 1-1.5 lac, the founders claim it can provide Return on Investment in five months.