Once in 2011, Abhishek Latthe had to take a train at Liverpool in order to go to Southampton. He boarded the train, placed his luggage in the compartment, and then got off it to beat the boredom. There was still some time for the train’s departure. By the time he re-boarded the train, the cops had come in on a routine check, noticed the unattended baggage and took it away and put it in the lost-and-found centre. That was when Latthe first contemplated a venture in the lost & found space. He was then doing an MSc in mechatronic from the University of Southampton, studying advance digital control, sensors & signal processing and instrumentation. Soon after his post-graduation, he worked as a management trainee and then moved to become the head of operations in his family-owned business in Belgaum that was into alloy castings and manufacturing.
In 2013, he decided to revisit his lost & find idea, and launched a venture called SenseGiz in Bengaluru.
He decided to experiment with sensors and wearables, ideas that were just emerging at that time. “People thought I was pursuing a bold experiment,” he says. Last year, Latthe’s team launched their first product called Find, a Bluetooth based tag that can be used to track and find keys, pets, laptops, mobile phones or luggage. The small square device can be synced up with your smartphone through an Android, iOS app. Find consists of 25 different components including micro controller, sensor, buzzer, and a battery unit, and is manufactured and assembled in Mysuru. Some 20,000 customers have been using it. Among the customers are some US retailers. One uses it for geolocation, for pushing notifications on your phone-if you are looking for shirts, it will alert you on the best deals on the shop floor. SenseGiz recently floated a subsidiary in San Francisco where it employs a few sales professionals. It has also raised $600,000 from Japanese investor Indigo Ventures and Karnataka Semiconductor Venture Capital Fund.
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