About Abha
Abha is a Sanskrit word meaning brilliance, radiance, splendour.
A Hip That Broke. A Knee That Held. A Wound That Healed.
Three encounters. None of them planned. All of them consequential.
The Surgeon Who Stayed
Around 2016, a woman in her early sixties slipped outside her bathroom in a Bengaluru, Karnataka. She broke her hip. She had come to Bengaluru with very kind and noble intentions to support her daughter. Who was nursing a seven-month-old baby girl, while her son-in-law was away on a business trip to Hungary. Due to this fall, now her elderly mother needed immediate medical attention.
The orthopaedic surgeon who took the case did not simply perform the surgery. He calmed the anxious mother-in-law, instilling enough confidence that she stopped panicking. He gave clear, firm instructions to the hospital staff, at times scolding them when care fell short of what his patient deserved. And before discharging her in just three days, he gave her something more valuable than any prescription: the conviction that she would walk again.
She recovered fully in just over two months. She could not sit on the floor any longer, but she was functional, independent, and free. A persistent pain in her lower back near the same hip, likely from an older, untreated injury, had also quietly disappeared.
That surgeon was Dr. Sudheendra M. Rao.
That son-in-law was Deepak Chaturvedi.
They did not know it then, but that hospital room was the first chapter of something neither of them had planned.
The Knee That Did Not Need Surgery
About four years later, Deepak’s wife slipped on rain-soaked stairs while buying school shoes for their daughter, who had just been admitted to first grade. She fell hard on her knees. The pain was severe. A doctor examined her and recommended probable surgery for a torn ACL.
Before consenting, Deepak took her to Dr. Rao for a physical examination. Dr. Rao asked her to perform some sit-ups. He watched carefully. Then he said, with the quiet confidence of a clinician who trusts his hands more than a scan, that physiotherapy and proper physical rest would be enough.
No surgery was needed. She recovered fully.
Two encounters. Two members of the same family. Both times, a surgeon who chose the minimum necessary intervention, who treated the patient with directness and dignity, and who was right.
A Wound That Lasted 38 Years
In 1984, Deepak’s father met with a severe accident in Ajmer, Rajasthan. His tibia and fibula shattered into multiple fragments. The initial surgery was poorly executed. Six months later, the wound was infected so badly that maggots had formed in it.
A second surgery followed. The bones were re-aligned. But the gap between them never healed properly. Chronic osteomyelitis set in.
What followed was not a medical episode. It was a lifestyle.
For the next 38 years, Deepak’s father cleaned that wound every single day. No exaggeration. Every day. Somewhere along the way, he stopped believing the problem could be solved. The wound became part of daily life.
In 2022, Deepak finally convinced his father to travel to Bangalore. He contacted Dr. Rao, sent photographs of the wound, and explained the history spanning nearly four decades.
Dr. Rao’s response was calm and precise: “Bring him. I will examine him. We will decide what imaging is required.”
That clarity mattered.
The surgery happened in May 2022. A follow-up in 2023 confirmed what the family had not believed possible. No further surgical intervention was needed. A targeted regimen of Rifampin, applied for chronic osteomyelitis, finally resolved the infection.
For the first time in nearly four decades, the wound healed.
“What Do You Do for a Living?”
After the surgery, Dr. Rao asked Deepak a simple question.
When Deepak explained his background, 22 years in embedded systems engineering, 11.5 of them at Bosch building safety-critical automotive platforms across four continents, Dr. Rao spoke about something that had clearly stayed with him for years.
He ran a small clinic. He did not have the space, capital, or infrastructure for large radiology equipment. The portable X-ray systems he had evaluated were expensive, difficult to operate, and poorly designed from a clinician’s perspective. He had a question that no equipment manufacturer had answered to his satisfaction.
“If large LED TVs can use thin-film transistor arrays to emit light, why cannot we use photodiodes to capture light from a scintillator?”
It was a surgeon’s question, not an engineer’s. And it was precisely the kind of question an engineer needed to hear.
That conversation did not produce a business plan or a pitch deck. It produced something more durable: a shared conviction that the gap between what Indian patients need and what Indian clinicians can access is not a market opportunity. It is a moral obligation.
Two Practitioners
Dr. Sudheendra M. Rao is a senior orthopaedic surgeon with decades of clinical practice. His approach to medicine is defined by a principle that sounds simple but is rare in practice: do what the patient needs, nothing more, nothing less. His patients trust him not because he promises outcomes, but because he is honest about what he sees, confident in what he recommends, and present when it matters.
Deepak Chaturvedi is an embedded systems engineer with 22 years of experience building things that must work when lives depend on them. His career spans Hical Magnetics, Fujitsu, a five-year stint co-founding Technology Uncorked, and 11.5 years at Bosch, where he led safety-critical body computer and gateway ECU platforms, earned the 2017 Bosch Automotive Award (top 3 worldwide), and served as GenAI SPOC for over 1,000 engineers. He builds on refurbished hardware in a rented flat in Bengaluru. He breeds three species of earthworms for vermicomposting.
The ten-kilogram fermentation trials run every quarter, on a constrained experimental setup in Bengaluru. Padma Rekha Krushi Vardhan, the 9,000-square-foot family farm in Mangalore named after his mother-in-law and his mother, is where the system is meant to live at scale and run continuously. Getting it there is the work, and it is not a description of today.
Deepak is the founder of Abha Technologies. Dr. Rao is its founding clinician: the first user of the clinical assistant, its hardest critic, and the person whose question MAX-Ray exists to answer. That is a statement about roles, not about distance. They are two people whose lives kept intersecting through crises, and who eventually recognised that the intersection was the point.
The Question That Shaped the Work
There is a third practitioner in this story, and she arrived eleven years before the hospital room did.
In the summer of 2005, Fujitsu Components Asia was running a workshop on thermal printers at Hotel Atria in Bangalore. Deepak was a newly appointed field application engineer at Hynetic Electronics, there to learn from one of the product line’s Japanese designers, Sumio Watanabe-san, his first guru.
The lights went out. Complete blackout, several minutes of it, and in that dark room a question formed that became Shoonya.
There were more than a hundred people in that room. One of them was Pallavi Shetty. Five years later she became his wife.
Pallavi has built a career in verification and validation at Bosch Global Software Technologies, where she works today as a technical expert in the software V&V centre of competence. She is a Bosch-certified verification and validation strategist, an ISTQB Advanced Level Test Manager, and an ISO 26262 functional safety engineer. She has been asking whether things actually work for longer, and more rigorously, than Deepak has.
Her question, then and for the twenty years since, has never been is it clever. It is always but does it actually work?
That question is not a personal anecdote. It is the reason this company writes the test before it writes the feature. It is why nothing on these sites is called demonstrated unless somebody outside this house could check it, why every product carries a status label instead of an adjective, and why our evidence page lists what we have not proven alongside what we have. Test-driven development is the entry condition for every piece of work here, human or machine. That discipline did not arrive from a standards document. It arrived from twenty years of living with someone who validates things for a living.
The two careers ran alongside each other for years. Both of them ended up at Bosch, and at one point Bosch sponsored them both through the same programme, the Bosch Engineering System for Product Engineering. Their department heads and group managers knew what each of them was good at and backed the two of them attending together. Not every employer would think to do that, and neither of them has forgotten it.
She holds no title at Abha Technologies, and if she ever wants one it is hers to take. But that framing undersells the thing. When Deepak left a salaried job to build this, she was the one carrying the household risk alongside him and asking the question that kept the work honest. She is his life partner, which is the larger arrangement of the two.
Two journeys began in that dark conference room. Only one of them was about energy.
What They Are Building
There are five of these, and attention moves across all of them. Chikitsa is the one that takes the most engineering time: a clinical assistant for small clinics that listens through a consultation and drafts the notes, the reports, the accounts and the records. Multilingual, self-hosted on infrastructure they own and operate, and built so the clinician approves every word before it enters a record. It does not diagnose. It is in regular testing with Dr. Rao as the founding clinician, the first user and the hardest critic, and it is a private pilot rather than a product anyone can sign up for. It is not yet good enough for daily clinical use: below a certain accuracy an assistant costs a doctor more time in corrections than it saves, and closing that gap is currently the largest consumer of engineering time here.
Nirmaan and Yukti are the two anyone can try today. Nirmaan grounds tender and project documents into cited, downloadable deliverables and drives real CAD and BIM models. Yukti carries a protected switching supply from schematic to routed board to a fitted printable enclosure, in one governed workflow, and says plainly that nothing has been fabricated or bench-tested yet. Both are deliberately narrow, on the principle that a small proof that holds is worth more than a broad claim that does not.
MAX-Ray is Dr. Rao’s original question given engineering form: a portable X-ray device that goes to the patient who cannot travel. That remains the long-term purpose. The engineering under way is nearer: the generator, its high-voltage electronics, the safety and interlock system around them, and the test bed. The PCT application is published as WO2025158461, so anyone can read it, and an Indian application covering the hardware and the software was filed on 21 August 2026. The circuit board is in design and a working generator is expected by the end of 2026. The first application areas are agricultural imaging, including seed and post-harvest work, and industrial inspection of solder, weld and joint quality.
SafetyForge is not a sixth product. It is the engineering practice closest to Deepak’s own working life, and the one the software learns from: AI-assisted workflows for teams building car electronics, medical devices and industrial control systems, who lose a large share of their engineering capacity to documentation, traceability and audits. 59 workflows, born from 11.5 years inside ASPICE and ISO 26262 programmes. Exploratory conversations are under way and no engagement has been signed yet.
Shoonya is the strangest one, and the one closest to Deepak’s heart. A biorefinery that converts agricultural waste into high-purity ethanol and, on a second track, into lactic acid. They now culture their own industrial yeast at bench scale, which matters because at this size the culture is one of the larger recurring costs of every batch. The ethanol is not intended to be burned in an engine: the aim is to run it through solid oxide fuel cells after dark, so a site that makes its own electricity from the sun by day can keep making it at night from what it grew. That is an intention and not yet a result. Indian patent 552002 was granted in October 2024, and ten-kilogram batch trials run every quarter, on a constrained experimental setup in Bengaluru, with the inputs published so the numbers can be argued with. The family farm in Mangalore, Padma Rekha Krushi Vardhan, is where the system is meant to live at scale. That is the intent, not the current arrangement, and its own buildings will be the first serious test of Nirmaan.
Its origin traces to that same blackout at Hotel Atria in 2005, when Deepak sat in the darkness and asked how the Sun’s energy might be stored in a form that is compact, storable and available whenever it is needed. The room gave him two answers that evening. This is the one that took twenty years.
The Belief
There is a verse in the Bhagavad Gita that both of them carry, not as philosophy, but as operating principle:
Karmanye vadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachana.
You have the right to perform your duties, but never to the fruits of your actions. Act without attachment to outcomes, without anxiety about results, without waiting for guarantees before beginning.
Abha Technologies did not begin because the market was ready. Deepak started it because the work was ready, and because two decades of unfinished questions had finally accumulated into something that could be built rather than only argued about.
The conviction they share is simple: go as far as you can see. When you get there, you will see farther.
One patient at a time. One plant at a time. One joule of energy at a time.
Brilliance is not a destination. It is a practice.
Abha Technologies was founded in Bengaluru, India in 2026.
Dr. Sudheendra M. Rao practises in Bengaluru. Deepak Chaturvedi builds from Bengaluru.
If any part of this story resonates with your own work, the conversation is welcome: collaborate@abhatechnologies.com