A first entry. A statement of intent. A list of chapters yet to be written.

Revised August 2026. Some of these chapters have since been written, and a few paragraphs said more than we could prove. Both are corrected below. The original version is kept in our records.

Chikitsa, the clinical assistant, takes more of our engineering time than anything else. Ambient notes. Clinically-correct reports. Sovereign infrastructure. Speech that changes language mid-sentence. The work is immediate, the feedback loop is tight, and Dr. Rao, our founding clinician, is simultaneously our hardest critic and our most patient teacher.

It is not the only thing we carry. Attention now moves across five critical paths, and the chapters below are the list of them.

But Chikitsa did not appear from nowhere. Neither did we. And the chapters we intend to write after this one have been in preparation for a very long time.

This page is about those chapters. Not because they are urgent, but because they are real. Not because we are chasing them today, but because we have been building towards them for over two decades. And because somewhere out there, someone might read one of these paragraphs and recognise their own unfinished question in ours.

The Chapters

A portable X-ray machine that goes where the patient is.

Dr. Rao has been thinking about this longer than Abha Technologies has existed. He runs a small clinic. He does not have space for large radiology equipment. The portable systems he evaluated were expensive, difficult to use, and designed by people who had never stood where he stands, next to a patient who cannot travel.

Our PCT application is published as WO2025158461, so you can read it without asking us. An Indian application covering the hardware and the software was filed on 21 August 2026. We are designing the circuit board and we expect a working generator by the end of 2026. Our first application areas are agricultural imaging, including seed and germination work and post-harvest assessment, and industrial inspection, including solder, weld and joint quality. The need there is just as real. We are not going to pretend we know how long the medical route takes until we have taken advice on it.

This chapter is called MAX-Ray.

A biorefinery that turns what farmers burn into what farmers need.

In 2005, during a Fujitsu Components workshop on thermal printers at Hotel Atria in Bangalore, the lights went out. Complete blackout. Several minutes of darkness. In that void, sitting among a hundred engineers waiting for the power to return, a question formed: how can we store the Sun’s energy in a form that is compact, storable, and available whenever and wherever it is needed?

That question never left.

Something else happened in that room, and it belongs in this story rather than in a footnote. Among those hundred-odd participants was Pallavi Shetty, who would become my life partner five years later. She has spent her career in verification and validation, and she is a Bosch-certified V&V strategist, an ISTQB Advanced Level Test Manager and an ISO 26262 functional safety engineer. Her question has never been is it clever. It is always but does it actually work?

Twenty years on, that question is why this company writes the test before it writes the feature, why nothing here is called demonstrated unless someone outside this house could check it, and why the pages on this site carry a status label instead of an adjective. The discipline that governs everything we build did not come from a standard or a process manual. It came from her, over two decades of dinner-table cross-examination.

Years later, Bosch sponsored us both through the same programme, the Bosch Engineering System for Product Engineering. Our department heads and group managers knew what each of us was good at and backed the two of us going together, which is not a thing every employer would think to do.

She has no title here, and if she ever wants one it is hers to take. But that framing undersells it. She is my life partner, which is the larger arrangement of the two.

Two journeys began in that room that evening. Only one of them was about energy.

Twenty years later the first one has answers. Agricultural waste is broken down into fermentable sugars. Fermentation produces high-purity ethanol. We now culture our own industrial yeast at bench scale, which matters more than it sounds, because at this size the culture is one of the larger recurring costs of every batch. What remains after extraction is returned to the soil, and vermicompost is where that ends: three species of earthworms that have been breeding in a Bengaluru flat since early 2025.

The ethanol is not meant to be burned in an engine. Our intent is to run it through solid oxide fuel cells after dark, so a site that makes its own electricity from the sun during the day can keep making it at night from what it grew. That is a design intention and not yet a result. No fuel cell has run on our output, and saying so is the whole point of writing this down.

The same sugars can go somewhere else entirely. Technical-grade lactic acid, and the reactive distillation that purifies it, have both been through trials here. Optically pure lactic acid is the doorway to compostable polymer, and the separation and concentration steps that get there are the real work. Lactic acid is an unglamorous commodity: leather tanning, textile processing, industrial cleaning, packaging. From zero waste to zero compromise.

We hold Indian patent 552002, granted in October 2024. We run ten-kilogram batch trials every quarter, on a constrained experimental setup in Bengaluru, and we publish the inputs so the numbers can be argued with. The 9,000-square-foot farm in Mangalore, Padma Rekha Krushi Vardhan, named after two mothers, is where this system will eventually live at scale. That is where it is going, not where it runs today. Its own buildings will be the first serious test of Nirmaan.

With the world watching crude oil supply lines fracture under geopolitical pressure, Dr. Rao recently asked a question that only a clinician would frame this way: “How does Shoonya fit into a world where the things we depend on are suddenly not dependable?”

We do not have a complete answer yet. But the question tells us the chapter is closer than we thought.

This chapter is called Shoonya.

AI that helps engineers build safety-critical systems without drowning in paperwork.

This one is not a product head like the others. It is the engineering practice the software learns from, and it is here because its history explains where Yukti came from.

Engineers building car electronics, medical devices, and industrial control systems spend a great deal of their time not engineering. They write documentation. They maintain traceability records. They prepare for audits. In my experience it is a large enough share to delay products and exhaust good people.

This problem is personal. Deepak lived inside it for 11.5 years at Bosch, across ASPICE and ISO 26262 environments spanning four continents. When Bosch’s Leadership Gym programme assigned him a six-month project on “Software R&D efficiency using GenAI,” the assignment became the prototype for what would eventually leave the building with him.

59 AI-assisted workflows. Engineers decide; nothing gets written to the record without human approval. We are having exploratory conversations and we have not signed an engagement yet. When we do, this paragraph will say so.

This chapter is called SafetyForge.

Engineering software that produces work you can check.

Two of these are open to try today. Nirmaan grounds tender and project documents into cited, downloadable deliverables and drives real CAD and BIM models. Yukti takes a protected switching supply from schematic to routed board to a fitted printable enclosure, in one governed workflow, and reports honestly that nothing has been fabricated or bench-tested yet. Both are deliberately narrow. A small proof that holds is worth more than a broad claim that does not.

These chapters are called Nirmaan and Yukti.

The Chapters We Cannot Yet Name

There is a detector material we keep returning to: organic-halide scintillators, trialled here as a cheaper route to our own X-ray detector. The early results were promising enough to keep. Growing large crystals is the hard part and we have deliberately put it down until there is bandwidth for it. Promising is not proven.

There is multilingual clinical speech, where the honest state of the work is that we are still rebuilding the hardest part of it.

And there are ideas that have not yet earned the right to be called projects.

We keep them close. We do not pretend they are ready. But we do not abandon them either, because every one of them traces back to a specific moment when one of us encountered a problem that nobody was solving in a way that made sense for India.

Why We Are Writing This Now

Not because we are ready to work on all of this simultaneously. We are not.

Not because we are looking for funding. We are bootstrapped by conviction, not by accident.

We are writing this because the most important collaborations in our lives have started when someone recognised a shared question. Dr. Rao recognised Deepak’s engineering instinct in a post-surgery conversation. Deepak recognised Dr. Rao’s clinical clarity the first time he watched him treat a frightened patient with confidence and dignity. Sumeet Mulani recognised a fellow tinkerer in a hostel and kept his desktop running for days so a homemade FM transmitter could be field-tested across campus. Mr. Mudaliar and his son Karthik recognised, in a visiting engineer’s wide-eyed fascination, that the pride they take in their purple Ecoturbines with the Indian flag was understood. And in a dark conference room in 2005, two people recognised each other before either of them knew what they were recognising.

Every meaningful collaboration started the same way: one person’s unfinished question finding resonance in another person’s lived experience.

If you work in healthcare and believe that accessible diagnostics is an engineering problem, not just a policy problem, we would welcome your perspective.

If you work in agriculture, energy, or waste management and believe that what Indian farmers burn could instead become what Indian farmers earn, we would welcome your perspective.

If you work in safety-critical systems and believe that AI should augment engineering judgement rather than replace it, we would welcome your perspective.

If you are simply someone who has been chasing a question for longer than you can explain at a dinner table, we understand. We are the same way.

A Belief We Share

There is a verse from the Bhagavad Gita that lives in the walls of this venture, not as decoration, but as daily practice:

Karmanye vadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachana.