Shivang Dave, CEO & Founder, "PlenOptika: Vision for India & Beyond"

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How his grandfather succeeded despite being blind inspired Shivang Dave, Ph.D. to change the world. As an accomplished bioengineer and a founder, he aims to bring high-quality eye exams to the masses in India with a new device. The Madrid-MIT M+Visión Fellowship was crucial to building a capable and cohesive founding team for PlenOptika. Shivang was a cheery and inspiring guest; great interview!

Some highlights:

• Shivang Dave, Ph.D. bio
• Shivang introduces his wonderfully multi-disciplinary co-founders: Eduardo Lage, Ph.D., Daryl Lim, Ph.D., and Nick Durr, Ph.D.
• Device looks like binoculars from Star Wars.
• Addresses a massive problem: 1.5 billion worldwide don’t have the eye glasses they need.
• The scarcity of trained vision professionals and the large size of optical equipment creates bottle necks outside rich countries.
• Market research with NGOs and other stakeholders pointed to the need for an accurate, portable and cheap autorefractor.
• As they spun out from MIT, they discovered that there was also a need for their device in high-resource setting such as the US.
• Founding story: Madrid-MIT M+Visión Fellowship, an MIT program set up with the government of Madrid to support 34 post-docs working together over 5years in identifying solutions for important problems. Daryl Lim, an optics-related Ph.D., discovered that poor vision was a major health problem. Nick Durr also had optics background.
• Shivang had worked on translating technology to address global health issues; Eduardo had built scanners used by GE.
• Plan was to create a work-saving device to multiply the capacity of trained professionals.
• Interplay between the perfect image and what your brain expects to see.
• PlenOptika and Zipline parallels.
• Shout-out to MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS).
• Leave a review on iTunes for Angel Invest Boston.
• Go to market strategy for PlenOptika.
• Business plan: sell the device. Massive market.
• Competition: disrupting desktop autorefractor. Other portable technologies; complementary?
• Slower to market but best-developed device.
• Fail fast not always applicable; particularly in medical devices.
• Backed up by independent studies. De-risks tech for users.
• Launched in India a year ago, launched in the US five months ago and both are going well. In 2020 expect to be expanding globally.
• Influenced by poverty in India and his grandfather’s blindness, Shivang felt compelled to do something to improve the world.
• First thought of being a doctor but realized that biotech could have impact on a much larger scale by creating medical tools.
• Publishing papers was not enough; wanted to take the technology out into the world.
• Worked at Celera Genomics; colleagues saw Shivang’s entrepreneurial spirit and urged him to pursue it. Grandfather was an entrepreneur despite blindness.
• Shivang’s fundraising advice for device companies; make sure to focus only on investors that invest in hardware. Chasing the wrong investors wastes a lot of time.
• Surround yourself with good advisors.
• Getting to no faster can actually save time.
• Sal say to angels, don’t BS founders; if you know you won’t invest, tell the founders right away.
• Shivang advises founders to steel themselves and their teams to the challenges of raising money and building the product. Don’t be surprised that it’s hard.