Prathamesh Gosavi, co-founder, Bots ‘N’ Brains, is building the world’s first full-stack ER&D ecosystem for the medical devices industry. In an exclusive conversation with NewsX, Gosavi said, “India’s R&D ecosystem is in shambles. We have made huge strides in the digital world but we are highly reliant on foreign technology—a case in point being the medical devices market in India, which is the fourth-largest in Asia. It is worth around $11 billion right now and is going to become a $60 billion dollar market by 2025. Yet, we very generously import more than 80% of all our domestic consumption. We have around 800 manufacturers in India, but an average turnover of just five to seven crores rupees. To reduce this need for imports and to help our manufacturers level up their game, we work as research and product development partners to build select medical device technologies, along with all the necessary support required, from concept to commercialisation.”“We are planning to build and commercialise at least 1,000 medical device technologies by 2025 in partnership with these Indian manufacturers as well as all other interested parties who want to start their manufacturing businesses in India. The biggest challenge in this is the high cost of failure and the limited access to the right tools, the right talent in training. This will probably make us India’s first true physical medical device company,” he added.Gosavi further shared his take on the ER&D ecosystem in India and important industry introspection. “To be very blunt, the ER&D ecosystem is not good by any parameters. We are a country of 1.25 billion population producing more than 15 million STEM graduates and we take pride in how our fellow countrymen and women are leading some of the biggest tech companies in the world. We aspire to compete with the likes of the US and China on technology leadership. But we have hardly 200 researchers per billion population. The US has more than 4,000 researchers per million. China is equivalent in terms of population, but they also have 1,600 researchers per million,” he informed.“Just last year, Indians filed only 15,000 patents, as compared to 600,000 reviewers and 1.6 million patents in China. More importantly, our academic institutes, which generally are the hotbed of research and innovation, are at least 20 years behind the technology challenges our industry faces right now. Countries like the US and China have grown into these economic payments on the backbone of their academic institutes transferring breakthrough research and technologies to the industry. So, there is a huge amount of work which is cut out for us,” he continued.Gosavi also talked about his entrepreneurial journey and some much-needed mantras for young minds out there wanting to make an impact. “I always feel that this is the best gift I have received. More than 80% of my engineering batch-mates have settled abroad. Even I was asked all the time about my plans to move to countries like Germany, the UK and the US. But I had one very simple answer: there are so many opportunities in India. I’ve always believed that trade is the basic fabric that ties this entire society together. And to be able to trade, one needs to identify someone else’s problem as an opportunity,” he shared. “Entrepreneurship is nothing but the art of grabbing these opportunities and solving problems at state,” he added.Talking about the contribution Bots ‘N’ Brains made during the pandemic, the co-founder elaborated, “Covid was probably the biggest blessing in disguise for us. For starters, very few people would say that. It exposed a new set of vulnerabilities in our economy, for which we needed solutions yesterday. We missed out on the first Industrial Revolution, but that’s not an excuse for policymakers. We also did a lot of research on different sanitisation technologies. Testing technologies, vaccines which are being developed, and benchmarking all the different drugs which will be repurposed for Covid treatment. Many of these reports are still available free of cost on our website.”“During one of these researches, we came across a very peculiar candidate, an Asian drug with an amazing safety profile and super effective in curbing the replication of a virus in the body. We shared our findings with the government bodies and actively consulted different stakeholders and presented all evidence. Now this drug is widely used across the country which gives a sense of pride in us, to know that a small team sitting out here in Pune could make such a significant impact in such dire times,” Gosavi further said.
