An ingenious solution

The name Thanos invokes fear in every Avengers fan. After all, he’s the one who aimed to restore the earth’s balance by killing half the population. Despite adopting a name with such a grim connotation, Thanos Technologies is a start-up that hopes to help farmers with its drones. The IIIT Hyderabad Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and ICRISAT incubated start-up incorporates the finesse of aeronautics in making life easier for farmers.

Pradeep Palleli, the founder, talks about the start-up’s journey. “Thanos is a drone technology company building innovative aerial solutions for conventional terrestrial problems. Incorporated in May 2016, we initially started off by providing aerial surveying solutions using the off-the-shelf drones we had procured. Some of the surveying solutions include Orthomosaics, Contour Mapping, Elevation Mapping, Digital Terrain Mapping, 3D Modelling and Crop Health Monitoring.”

So how did a vision of one become a company of three? “Towards mid-2017 when I realised that agricultural pesticide spraying has a real use for drones, I started building one myself but soon realised I can’t do that and manage the other activities all by myself. Around the same time, Prathyush (Akepati) was tinkering with drones of various sizes and configurations for different types of purposes. I came in touch with him and we got talking,” Pradeep recounts.

“We started working on a market-relevant agricultural spraying platform. By end of 2017, Prathyush came on board as co-founder and CTO and handled everything related to building, designing and testing drones,” he adds.

So how exactly does a swanky sophisticated drone fit into the lives of farmers? “While demonstrating our solutions and pitching our company at any and every start-up-related event that was happening in Hyderabad, we were approached by a handful of progressive farmers and IT employees who had agricultural farms back home that were managed by other family members. Almost every one of them who approached us seemed to have the common problem of labour availability and efficiency.” That was team Thanos’ Eureka moment. “We wanted to know how serious and big this problem was and conducted surveys and in-person interviews with dozens of farmers over the next couple of months. We realised there were a few problems pestering the agricultural pesticide spraying activities in India. Primarily, dwindling availability of manual labour in agriculture, inefficient manual labour-based spraying, and health hazards from manual spraying.”

The team aims to work primarily in the areas of agri-tech, agri-automation as an aerial spraying platform, agri-intelligence in terms of crop monitoring and plant count, apart from its more ambitious projects of working on army military and defense fields. “We did a little work for the R&D wing of Indian army by fixing one of their small aerial platforms. We also customised an off-the-shelf drone for payload delivery application,” recounts Pradeep.

HT02