Bengaluru-based, Hyderabad-funded start-up builds a smart calculator with WiFi

“If you go to an investor and say that you are building hardware, you are dead,” the Uttar Pradesh-born said.

Mishra was referring to a start-up ecosystem in India that an article in Forbes highlighted in 2016: Indian entrepreneurs in hardware found it challenging to raise finances in a nation obsessed with IT services.

The CEO of a government-backed venture capital, who the magazine’s writer spoke to, summed up the fear of financiers.

“Hardware start-ups have some limitation in terms of obsolescence, manual intervention, inventory and updations,” Forbes had quoted him as saying.

Mishra, however, had other ideas.

A start-up is born

The first step Mishra took was in 2017-18, when, with the help of the Emergent Venture Gramt from the George Mason University, he launched Tohands — a company operating out of Bengaluru that builds smart tools for small-time shopkeepers.

Praveen Mishra, the man behind Tohands. (Supplied)

His first product: An app called “By Buy” that helps stores sell merchandise online. Currently, more than 7,000 stores are listed on it.

“We are obsessed with helping small businesses grow,” explains the Tohands website.

Today, Mishra’s team consists of two key people besides himself: Satyam Sahu, who handles the software and the apps, and Shanmuga Vadival, who builds the hardware.

If his start-up was into apps, how did he develop an interest in calculators?

Problems of small businesses

Mishra said he came across a shop owner in Bengaluru last year who struggled to keep track of her daily transactions, and followed a process that was laborious, but also very common in India.

“With each customer, she would make her billing on a calculator, complete the sale, and write the amount on a piece of paper. She would total up the overall sales at the end of the day,” Mishra explained.

When he suggested that she use a mobile app instead to record the transactions, the woman said she found it “time consuming”.

“I met another shopkeeper facing the same problem,” Mishra said. “When I suggested he use a billing machine, the man said operating it is very complex and that he did not have any additional staff to handle the machine.”

These conversations planted the seed of a business idea: Why not build a prototype of a calculator to help them record their transactions? A product that would be an improvement on a Casio calculator available in the market.

While a Casio has a memory feature, it does not categorise data as ‘sales’ and ‘expenses’; and it does not sync the data on an app. Tohands did all this in the first version of the smart calculator.

Tohands raises funding

The prototype for the first version was ready in January 2021. Today, Tohands has three versions of its “smart calculator”.

“In the first version, we put a Raspberry Pi-powered prototype of the device in a box with buttons and connected it with our existing app,” Mishra said. “We got orders for this and immediately started working on the second version.”

The second version was much more refined.

“We used the 3D technology to print the calculations, and used OLED display with a 4X4 keypad. However, the touch and feel of the device was not good enough to replace an existing Casio calculator in the market.”

But with this version, Tohands won funding to build the third and the final product.

In March, Tohands raised ₹50 lakh in funding from Startup India Seed Fund and T-Hub, a Hyderabad-based innovation intermediary and business incubator.

The grand finale

The final product is entirely custom-built. “From design to production, with the help of our vendors, we custom-built everything. In the end, every customer will get the same version mass produced by us,” he explained.

The Tohands smart calculator.

“You can see the size of the product is big, the display is big as well to accommodate more digits. It has decent brightness capacity for easy use in the night. Buttons are big for easy manoeuvrability for shopkeepers and it contains all the existing functionality of calculators such as M+, M-, MRC, etc.”

There are also two key buttons — “Cash in” to record sales and “Cash out” to record expenses. “Shopkeepers can not only record the sales and expense data and sync that data to an app, they can see analytics and download reports,” said Mishra.

“Further, it contains 2400MaH battery and a local memory of 16 MB that can store up to 50 lakh transactions. It also connects with WiFi to sync with the app,” Mishra added.

The WiFi feature helps a shopkeeper view and download sales details from anywhere. It helps them track finances even when they are not in the shop. This gives full transparency to the user.

The integration of the app and the device is seamless. “On the app, users can see the data on daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis and download reports in PDF and Excel format.”

Priced at Rs 2,999, this is the “most affordable book-keeping device available in the market”, Mishra claimed.

In India, most of the bookkeeping is done with paper and pen. Then there are big billing machines that are mostly used by organised stores. Those sell in the ₹25,000 to ₹40,000 range.

The smart calculator is an easier alternative at an affordable price, said Mishra, adding: “We do not compete with accounting software because our target audience currently does not use them. Our focus is on the bookkeeping part. In the future, we might integrate with accounting platforms.”

In September, Telangana IT Secretary Jayesh Ranjan launched Mishra’s calculator at an event. And that was the validation the Tohands team was looking for.

Hitting markets soon

Tohands starts deliveries in November. Currently, its capacity is to manufacture 2,000 units monthly, but “we are planning for a yearly capacity of more than one lakh units in 2023”.

“Our calculator is meant to replace Casio devices. Why, you ask? They have refined their product in the last 40 years, but the bad part is that there is no innovation in Casio products.”

And Tohands’ competition, Mishra claimed, were billing machines.

“Every store, no matter what size it is  — whether it is Tanishq or a Tapriwala — has a calculator. Most of these are however made in China and available at₹50 or less. Our product is priced ₹2,999 but is still affordable,” he said.

Mishra, claiming that his company’s current order volumes are “pretty decent”, said he plans to target Mumbai and Hyderabad after the commercial launch in Bengaluru in November.

“But we are accepting orders from other cities and states as well,” he clarified.