Divanshu Kumar, CEO and co-founder, Solinas Integrity. Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India; Directed by Kapil Kashyap, Background image by Shutterstock
For Divanshu Kumar, being an entrepreneur was serendipitous. A college project incubated at IIT-Madras turned into a large business for the enthusiastic boy from Gaya, Bihar. Kumar developed robots to clean septic tanks and manholes as a safer and alternative solution to manual scavengers. That was the stepping stone for founding Solinas Integrity in 2018.
Despite manual scavenging being banned in India in 2013, it still exists. Manually cleaning, carrying, disposing or handling human excreta from dry latrines, drains and other sanitation systems lead to hazardous diseases and deaths. Around 928 sewer workers died between 1993 and 2020, with the highest casualties in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, according to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK), a government-appointed organisation that oversees the conditions of sanitation workers.
Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Solinas Integrity, is driven to find a permanent, and effective solution to the cruel practice of manual scavenging. They were approached by a team of manual scavengers to develop safer solutions for manhole and septic tank cleaning. Over the course of one year, they worked on a prototype and expanded it to clean water pipelines. Kumar completed his graduation in mechanical engineering from IIT-Madras and later earned a master’s degree in product design.
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He recalls the pain and endurance it took to build robots which could clean blocked drains, septic tanks and even inspect pipelines as narrow as 90 mm. “Once we got the confidence in 2021-22 that we had the right product and we were solving a real problem, we never looked back. The seed funding in July 2022 gave us the capital we needed to further grow and pushed us to where we are today,” adds Kumar.
Moinak Banerjee, 31, joined Solinas in 2020 and is currently CTO and co-founder. Initially, apart from Kumar and Banerjee, there was another co-founder, Bhavish Narayani, who was Kumar’s lab mate at IIT-Madras. However, Narayani exited the company in 2024.
Kumar claims that Solinas Integrity is the first company in India to leverage robotics and artificial intelligence to solve the problem of water and sanitation in a holistic manner. “Our solution in pipeline inspection and management is not only reducing cost, minimising labour efforts but also saving water and preventing flooding in urban areas,” Kumar adds.
Currently, Solinas works in two aspects: Cleaning of septic tanks, drains and sewers, and inspection and cleaning of water pipelines. Based out of Chennai, the company has developed two robots: Endobot and HomoSEP. Endobot crawls through a water and sewer pipeline of any material and of diameter ranging from 90 mm to 1500 mm.
“HomoSEP is India’s first septic tank and manhole cleaning robot that comes with cleaning blades, suction mechanism, storage and transportation option,” says Banerjee. One of the key advantages of HomoSEP is its ability to homogenise hard sludge, transforming it into a slurry for more effective pump-out.
A third service provided by Solinas is Swasth AI which is a cloud-based storage and data management solution. The data collected through EndoBot is processed for defect localisation with GIS tagging and a customised report is generated in the Swasth AI dashboard. It has filed for 10 patents and has received patents for two products.
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Solinas has raised capital worth $5 million from a clutch of marque investors, including SBI Ventures, deeptech firm 8X Ventures, Rainmatter, Veltis Capital, family office of Weizmann Group and Ramesh Mangaleshwaran (as angel). The company closed FY24 with an Ebitda loss of Rs2.8 crore and a revenue of Rs4.5 crore. It estimates to close FY25 with revenues of Rs15 crore and is expected to break even based on a large order book.
“Solinas’ work is in line with the government’s mission of providing clean water and sanitation to every household. It fits well in our portfolio of allocating funds towards clean water and sanitation,” says Suken Shah, principal investment officer (Neev Fund), SBI Ventures.
Solinas sells robot cleaners and offers maintenance services to clients mostly in government civic bodies, housing societies and factory units. Its clients include Suez, Veolia, Jindal Water, L&T, Daimler, and municipal corporations like Chennai, Aurangabad and Sangli.
“We envision to build a Rs500 crore business by FY30, impacting over 100 Indian cities and 10 countries in eliminating manual scavenging,” Kumar says.
Divanshu Kumar (28)
CEO and co-founder, Solinas Integrity
Industry and Manufacturing
(This story appears in the 07 February, 2025 issue
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