T-Fiber will open rural doors to startups: Quantela

Hyderabad Hyderabad is a progressive city with a greater opportunity to provide better citizen services and digitize urban infrastructure. The State-led program, Telangana Fiber Grid (T-Fiber), is a further boost for startups looking for continuous innovation, according to Sridhar Gadhi, founder of Quantela Inc.

T-Fiber will provide affordable broadband across 33 districts and 8,778 gram panchayats in the State through optic fiber and network infrastructure.

US-based Quantela Inc, an urban infrastructure digitisation solution provider, has been in the news recently. Allegations have been made against TerraCIS Technology Limited, its technology and strategic partner Quantela and founder Gadhi Sridhar Raju, regarding access and control of data on the Dharani portal (Telangana’s official land records management platform) developed by TerraCIS.

Talking about the issue, Sridhar Raju said, “We just maintain the Dharani software. It is a small maintenance and support project for us. We are paid a fixed fee on a monthly basis.”

In 2021, the US firm entered an agreement to gain management control of the Indian business of Gurugram-based TerraCIS Technologies Ltd. “We are interested in acquiring any smart infrastructure or applications that are provided at scale and have a transaction-based service or recurring revenue model,” said Gadhi when asked about his take on growing Quantela through acquisitions.

“For Quantela, APAC (Asia Pacific) is one market where we are looking for one acquisition, and then there is one each in Europe and the US,” he added. The outcome-as-a-service (OAAS) tech firm Quantela entered India with its first office in Hyderabad, where its leadership and engineering team of 100 employees are based. “The State will soon have T-Fiber Grid, and with the infrastructure in place, we and similar startups can look at what kind of new applications can be developed, for example, to provide healthcare, e-learning,” the founder said, highlighting the available opportunities in Telangana for startups working on smart city solutions.

In reply to a query about Quantela’s plans for doing business in Hyderabad, Gadhi said, “We haven’t done business in Hyderabad for long. This city is big on safety and security, with a large number of cameras installed. For example, Quantela could look at providing better citizen services with the same infrastructure in place.”

A solution provider for smart cities, Quantela has supported over 100 smart city projects across its major markets. Speaking about India’s Smart City Mission, Gadhi said that under Smart City 1.0, the basic platform was built, including setting up fiber, a single command control center, and different sensors and solutions. “Now, with this infrastructure in place, startups can find each use case or citizen service as a plug-in. Additionally, the city is collecting a huge amount of data. If someone develops an application to mine this data to provide better service to society, there will be many use cases.” According to Sridhar Raju, projects that will be developed under Smart City 2.0 will be performance-based, with payments based on service level agreements (SLAs). This is because governments are not typically tech-savvy enough to own, operate, and get the full value out of these projects.

Quantela disclosed its plans of going public last year, but due to the sluggish US market, those plans were put on hold. Sridhar Raju said that they are closely reviewing the market and not rushing into anything. “We are making our company internally ready in terms of statutory and governance. We will file for an IPO only when the market is right. Moreover, with the funding winter, our focus is on consolidating and making sure we are profitable,” he said.