I was a co-founder of INGOLABS, a social enterprise built on a single principle:
technology that protects life and safety should not be priced out of reach. In 2012, vehicle GPS
tracking units sold for upwards of ₹7,000, with recurring server fees layered on
top. We brought that down to ₹999–₹1,999 — and provided lifetime server
access at no cost, a model no competitor offered then and, to my knowledge, still does not
offer in 2026, where server charges remain the industry norm.
Those units went into hospital and emergency-service ambulance fleets, school buses,
and private fleet operators, as well as government vehicle fleets deployed under non-disclosure
agreement — applications where reliability is mission-critical and a dropped signal has real
consequences. Ambulance tracking was among our largest deployments: helping hospitals locate, dispatch,
and monitor emergency vehicles in real time. At our peak we kept roughly 1.2 lakh active units
running on our servers free of charge. Under the same no-margin, service-first principle, INGOLABS also
supplied affordable medical devices — dermarollers and similar — at near-cost prices.
The venture did not survive the decade. Shifting macroeconomic conditions softened demand; telecom
carriers raised connectivity costs beyond what an affordability-first model could absorb; a large-scale
cyber-attack compromised our financial systems and caused heavy losses; and the COVID-19 disruption was
the final blow that pushed the company into bankruptcy.
What stayed with me was the motivation underneath it all — reaching large populations with something
that protects their health and safety, affordably and at scale. That is the same instinct that brought
me to community medicine: the same goal, pursued now through public health and research
rather than hardware.
