Offering wide suite of electric mobility solutions, LimeAI offers modular solutions for B2C and B2B businesses, including in-house BMS, telematics devices, mobile apps, web apps, dashboards, analytics, and APIs.
During EV India Expo 2023, Aishwarya had an interesting chat with Sriteja Julapalli, CEO, LimeAI on their suite of IoT based products that are revolutionizing the battery landscape of India.
Tell us about the products you are showcasing at the EV India Expo 2023.
Typically, we offer the whole technology suite for lithium-ion batteries. Our products range from cell testing services, cell characterization, and cell modeling services, choosing the right cells for a specific application in a specific vehicle, designing the battery packs, offering the electronics that go inside the battery, known as battery management systems, and telematics devices Once the product is built and shipped to a customer, we have a cloud monitoring solution which is a battery intelligence platform that monitors the batteries throughout their life. Majorly this platform offers three key features. It extends the life of the batteries, keeps those batteries safe. And if anything goes wrong with the battery, we are notified in advance. An immediate alert is also sent to the customer about something going wrong. We also have predictive maintenance insights that can increase the performance at any point of time.
Is there an app for that cloud service you just mentioned or is it like a website?
For the end consumer, we provide a mobile application, both for Android and iOS, for the vehicle OEM, we offer a cloud-based dashboard that can run on any of the browsers and for the battery OEM, we offer the dashboard as well.
Let’s say there is a fleet operator who is buying a thousand batteries or a thousand vehicles as such, we give both the mobile app as well as the dashboard. We also have another solution that we give to the service partners of the OEMs. The field executives get the mobile application whereas the guys who are sitting in the offices will get the dashboards. It’s all real-time tracking and real-time insights.
Can you tell us about LimeAI IoT products and what is their USP, specifically on the electronics or the hardware part of it?
Our USP is primarily based on the reliability perspective, being cost-effective, and making it locally in the country. Those are the simple USPs of our products but that’s not where the real value is. The real value is in terms of the insights that you are going to get. I’ll just take an example from a case study. Let’s say there is a battery company, already an example of Tesla who is selling the vehicles and the batteries. If you can tell the customer a day in advance that the battery pack of this car is going to catch fire, that is much more valuable than whatever hardware that you put into the vehicle. We basically deal in life cycle management, safety management, and then performance management of batteries.
Can you brief us on the White Knight?
White Knight is what the team has come up with because they feel that it is fancier. But anyway, that’s a product that we have been working on for 7 years now. It’s an Indian-made BMS, and in terms of field deployments, we are the largest in the country today.
Typically, people rely on China for these products, but in terms of reliability these products often fail to reach the mark. Working on BMS for the last 10 years, we can ensure our solution’s reliability and accuracy in terms of predicting the status of charging, and health of the batteries.
Are these products customizable according to the needs of your clients?
We only offer custom solutions because we don’t believe in offering commodity-based electronics or cloud-based solutions. After all, generally, they tend to fail.
We are already witnessing the repercussions of buying Chinese products in terms of fires, failures, and not being able to solve the issues occurring during its operation. Although, Chinese products are a bit cheaper, but they are not reliable in terms of the life cycle cost. If you put the total cost together, then our products are priced lesser as compared to the Chinese versions. Also, when encountering an issue, they don’t respond, can’t customize, and can’t understand the customer’s problem. In the end, the consumer can only replace the product and do nothing about it.
Any future projects or expansion plans you are planning for in the next year or so?
We’ll increase the portfolio of products for sure as we are already working with major two-wheeler OEMs in the country to build custom products for them. Though, we can’t name them at the moment, but they are one of the major two-wheeler’s OEMs established in the country.