Daikoku Innovations – Genuine Product Design Service Company –

Interviewer: Sudarshan NS – Founder & President & Sanket Bandyopadhyay – Co-Founder & Vice President at Daikoku Innovations.

Sudarshan NS – Founder and President of Daikoku Innovations.

Techmesin: Can you share an overview of DAIKOKU INNOVATIONS?

Sanket: Daikoku Innovations is a product design service company that was founded in 2016. You can say that we are an ODM without manufacturing. However, we have a memorandum of understanding with a contract manufacturer that allows us the flexibility to start production based on customer requirements. We are well spread across the communication, medical, industrial and aerospace segments. As we speak, 90% of our projects have started from a paper design and gone all the way to production worthy. We are constantly innovating and helping our customers turn their product concepts into reality. Our core strengths are hardware engineering, firmware engineering and industrial design. We are trusted partners to our customers all the way from product conceptualization to bringing it to full production.
Techmesin: What are the latest products you’ve delivered or are working on?

Sudarshan: We are working on passive optical networking products, medical wearables and several products in the smart energy segment. We have developed an ML-based seed sorting algorithm that can also be used in the textile and manufacturing industries.

The core team has deep experience in multiple technologies and this makes Daikoku simply not limited to the products we have delivered or are working on, but much more and that includes blue sky innovation.

Techmesin: Please discuss the passive optical network products you are developing?

Sudarshan: PON uses point-to-multipoint fiber to the endpoints, where optical splitters allow a single optical fiber to connect to multiple endpoints. There are three main devices in a network: 1. OLT (Optical Line Terminal), 2. ONU (Optical Network Units) or ONT (Optical Network Terminals) and 3. Splitter.

Daikoku is working intensively on the products below in this field.

1. XPON to Ethernet ONU
2. Single-band XPON ONT (802.11n)
3. Dual Band XPON ONT (802.11n/ac)
4. Wi-Fi 6 XPON ONT (802.11ax)
5. GPON/EPON OLT
6. XGS-PON OLT

Techmesin: Please discuss any difficulties the company is facing during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Sanket: COVID-19 has been a challenging time for all of us, but exciting projects have kept us extremely busy. The main difficulties were in rotating the engineers between the laboratory and their homes. We have a lot of hardware to work on along with the firmware where remote access to the hardware may not always be efficient. Also, customer agreements are inviolable to us, we fully protect customers’ IP, hardware, firmware, etc. and it never allows us to move anything sensitive outside the Daikoku office premises. We are extremely careful about this. Because of these firm principles, we had to meticulously manage work between the office and home, which was a challenge we were able to overcome.
Techmesin: Since you were talking about IP, how do you manage the IP addresses of multiple clients?

Sudarshan: We have NDAs and waterproof agreements with our customers. We go through multiple rounds of discussions with our clients before finalizing and signing a contract. These discussions are part of our trust-building process along with impeccable documentation.

We openly discuss what is possible and what is not and make sure everything is black and white. We separate independent servers for sensitive customer data with all necessary protections. Upon transfer, depending on the terms of the agreements, we perform a full IP transfer without leaving a trace on our side.

There are other models and one of them is when we work on a freelance basis.

Techmesin: Please share few details about the expansion and growth plans of the company in India?

Sanket: We are growing steadily and have plans to expand into tier 2 cities of India in the future. We want to decongest the metro and provide employment in tier 2 cities and also in tier 3 cities. This is our long term vision. At the same time, we plan to increase our presence in the American market by having an office in this geography. Discussions are ongoing for all of these and when the time is right, they should all come to fruition. We are a traditional-minded company, but we are very pragmatic. India has traditionally been an IT powerhouse and a preferred destination for in-house design centers. We intend to create value for our clients and fill the gap of genuine product design service companies in India. The world needs to know that world-class products can be created in the Indian ecosystem.