#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Ankur Verma, Co-Founder, Lightscline
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Significant Cost Reduction in Sensor Data Pipeline Management
Lightscline is building AI-based software that helps engineering teams achieve up to 90 percent cost reduction in sensor data pipeline management. The software collects 2-10x fewer data, reducing the power, compute, storage, transmission, and latency in digital transformation applications. Deep tech-focused founder Ankur Verma gave us insight into his background as a student entrepreneur operating with his University’s support, his experience navigating the U.S.’s immigration system, and his goals for Lightscline.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Lightscline?
I'm currently a fourth year researcher doing my Ph.D. at Penn State’s industrial engineering department. Lightscline was born directly out of my Ph.D. research—my PhD advisor and I sought out a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant specifically for customer discovery for deep technologies with the goal of bridging the gap between research and practical, real-life solutions.
What does Lightscline do?
In industry, manufacturing, utilities, transportation infrastructure, satellites, and more, critical devices are monitored with sensors, and create and send signals amounting to trillions of data points. The resources required to transmit, store, process, and understand this data are not insignificant in terms of monetary cost, but also power, compute, and storage. By 2025, there will be 73-plus trillion gigabytes of sensor data, but we don’t actually need all of that data for analysis. Through software at the point of collection—e.g., in a CCTV camera, in a wind turbine, or on a drone—our product directly addresses this sensor data problem by collecting less data more efficiently, without losing any of the necessary insights from that data.
Right now, we’re in our initial commercialization stages, looking at different industrial manufacturing verticals that collect very high volumes of data per day. During more than 120 customer discovery interviews we conducted, we honed in on machine condition monitoring, video surveillance, satellite data, and drones where some of these pressing data problems exist. We have current pilots in these verticals with small companies and Fortune 500 companies alike.
What’s been your experience with the U.S. immigration system so far?
Since I’m in a PhD program, I have better leverage on the kinds of visas I can access after my F-1 visa is up. That being said, I’m always wary of seemingly harmless things that have the potential to harm me down the road. For example: before I sign an NDA, I have to be aware of anything written in it that could affect me because of my status as a non-citizen. The problem is, we need lawyers to review such documents, and we usually can’t afford them. So we’ll have to go through the university’s student legal services, and they typically only have one or two attorneys, usually inexperienced in our issue areas, available to help.
I’m currently looking at the EB-1 and O-1 visas and have been following the requirements to attain those. The process has been fine in a general sense, but there is a lack of assistance and resources for immigrant founders. As I mentioned, as a startup, we often don’t have the resources to consult with lawyers to address my questions/concerns about the process —I’ve had to get advice from other founders instead to solve these issues. So there’s no real system for assistance in this area. Even basic questions like: can I work on my own startup on curricular practical training (CPT)? What about using the STEM extension? The few lawyers I’ve talked to say that these are all legal gray areas for immigrant founders. This confusion slows down the execution of our product and affects our momentum.
Are there any other challenges you’ve faced as an immigrant founder?
The SBIR grant and many other federal funding sources require fifty percent of a company’s ownership to be held by a US citizen. My co-founder and I are both on F-1 visas. So that eliminates many federal opportunities for us—we’re forced to search for alternate grants like the NSF’s Partnerships For Innovation (PFI) program. Thankfully, I haven't faced any questions from investors regarding my visa and immigration status to date, but I anticipate that it at least has an effect on the way they evaluate my company.
On the tax side of things, my immigrant status presents an additional issue: there are very specific categories of businesses that can be incorporated on an F-1 visa. Because of that, I need to be very careful that what I do does not qualify as work—I can only do customer discovery, and we’ve incorporated as an LLC. This affects who we can contract with, some of our legal operations, and to some extent our ability to raise capital from private investors.
What’s been your experience working in conjunction with an academic institution while simultaneously building your business?
There are all these issues we face building the business—there are different taxes, legal hurdles, things like IP protection and licensing. For our three person team, it can all get very overwhelming, because we also need to have pilots going very quickly so that we can do more fundraising and transition from federal grants to more private funding. But we just have limited bandwidth in terms of all the things going on.
For example, since our product was born of our research at the university, we need to work through IP, licensing, and tech transfer issues with them. Even though they have been very supportive of us, we will still need to negotiate IP agreements with the tech transfer office in the near future. We have a few provisional patents for our technology and negotiation around these have been tricky. Typically, we’d have to decide if we want to do an exclusive deal with the university or let other people license our product, and in our case, a few fortune 500 companies have expressed interest. If we communicate this interest with the university, however, it demonstrates the value of the technology and they’ll want a higher percentage of our profits.
Another issue is around timing communications. From a Ph.D. perspective, I need to publish papers, but from a commercialization perspective, I need to talk to prospective clients and I want to apply for patents. That creates issues for us, though, because there are differences in how much we can share with who, and when. I’ve managed to navigate this process, but there is no guidebook to get me through these things.
What are your goals for Lightscline moving forward?
In the next three to four months, we want to have five to six more pilots. To progress with our pilots, however, we need a scalable and repeatable revenue model. So we’re currently working with companies to test our product and determine pricing. We hope to get to revenue soon and move on to both private and non-dilutive fundraising. We also want to expand our verticals into aerospace and manufacturing.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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