This Hubballi startup is no second-stringer Premium
The Hindu
If you thought you hear music through your ears, Navajith Karkera and Jagath Bidappa may correct you. “You don’t just hear music; you feel it through your body. Think of experiences like a clap of thunder or drums being played in front of you or being at a concert.”
If you thought you hear music through your ears, Navajith Karkera and Jagath Bidappa may correct you. “You don’t just hear music; you feel it through your body. Think of experiences like a clap of thunder or drums being played in front of you or being at a concert.”
The quest to see if headphones could impart a similar experience led the duo to found their own startup Rapture Innovation Labs. The Hubballi-based audio-tech company had a soft launch for its first product, Sonic Lamb headphones, recently. The product received 570 pre-orders from 50 countries. According to the founders, more than 60 per cent of the orders have been from the US.
“Loudspeakers and home theatre systems are able to reproduce the experience of feeling sounds through your body because they have subwoofers. But that is missing in headphones. We are looking to change that to allow people to have that experience with headphones as well,” Mr. Karkera says.
It all started with a college project in 2013. Karkera and Bidappa, both engineering students then, were working on a two-wheeler safety helmet with in-built infotainment systems. Taking it further from there, they looked into concepts like bone conduction and skin conduction that allow a person to perceive sound.
Currently incubated at Deshpande Startups in Hubballi, the startup has a patented technology which they developed after three years of research and development. In 2019 they decided to integrate their technology into headphones.
The entire design and development of the product is done in-house, except for a few imported components. For manufacturing, the startup works with a vendor in Delhi and packaging is done in Chennai.
The Silicon Valley of India, Bengaluru, is only about 400km from Hubballi. Yet the founders have decided to stay put and not look for an address in the big city.
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