Virtual Forest has partnered with Infineon Technologies, a world leader in semiconductors, for the “Infineon Solar Pump Motor Drive Design Challenge 2021”, which has been announced, in collaboration with Startup India, AGNIi – housed under Invest India.
The Challenge invites the industry, SMEs and startups to participate and compete for the best motor drive solution for solar pumps.
The winners of the competition, with support from Virtual Forest, will get a chance to see their ideas developed into working prototypes, thus getting
access to the fast growing Pump drive market for further development and manufacturing of their working solution or/and collaborate with an industry player / manufacturer to integrate their solution with an ongoing working pump project.
Virtual Forest, with its unique infrastructure footprint and competence, will help productionize the winning designs, enabling innovators to overcome the major hurdle of turning a concept to product that prevents innovative ideas from seeing the light of day.
“The Design Challenge fits well with the goal of Virtual Forest to become a virtual lab for Indian appliance manufacturers looking to turn their concepts into reality in a cost effective and efficient manner. As we are a start-up as well, it is extremely exciting to be supporting other start-ups jumpstart commercialization of their concepts,” said Omer Basith, Founding Director and CEO of Virtual Forest.
India’s vibrant pump manufacturing industry is able to meet most of the domestic market demand. However, electronics is still in infancy for this industry and most manufacturers rely on overseas suppliers for drives for these pumps. This leads to high outgo of Forex and results in a weak supply chain with dependency on other countries for the supply of drives. India has the potential to become a global lead in the solar pump industry once a complete ecosystem is in place.
