The Story of Olivescript…
Published:
Greetings from Olivescript…
We have been receiving many messages from our viewers asking what exactly Olivescript is and what we actually do. There has been some confusion since we have been working on multiple domains. In order to provide you a better understanding lets go back few years..
Me Buddhishan and Ahamed were good friends following our Electronics & Telecommunication Degree at University of Moratuwa. We had both participated in numerous hackathon competitions and worked separately on small startup ideas, when one day in 2016 while we were chatting about ideas we understood that we wanted to do more than just focus on competitions. Thus Olivescript was formed.
Initially we were brainstorming for an idea for Olivescript to cater some needs and develop a product out of it. We were really passionate about what we wanted to do. (hence our tagline “passionate innovators”) We were inexperienced and we had a lot to learn about entrepreneurship and startups. Different ideas were tested and small apps developed. It was a real primitive stage, but yes we learnt a lot, a lot of important things on different vertices.
The actual turning point of Olivescript arrived when we got the idea of “Clardia” , a single device for your entire family to collect all your key health parameters. We wanted to build a family health assistant where we could extract parameters such as the Heart Rate, PPG, Weight, Body Fat just by standing on a bathroom scale connected to a mobile application. Clardia turned out to be the signature of Olivescript which most of you have heard of.
It was a tough ride, being in our final year at university we started the project of working on developing the hardware of clardia. It was a really motivating period for us even though we were really busy. We were woking on the electronics, sensors, enclosures, communication, the software and the mobile application. When you really believe and are passionate about what you are focussing on achieving, trust me you don’t feel tired. You just keep on visualizing your success and working continuously to improve.
The development started at the beginning of 2017 and couple of months down the line we had an initial prototype. Dilshan joined our team providing us with the medical expertise required for the product development. The Microsoft Imagine Cup Sri Lankan selections were also coming up, where we decided to participate since we felt it would pace up our development and obtain some feedback about the idea. In the end we managed to become the 2nd Runners Up in that competition and obtained numerous feedback and insights where we started to see the new challenges present in the healthcare industry along with its tough regulations.
We kept on developing the product adding necessary changes through the received feedback and finally found ourselves at the finals of Disrupt Asia 2017 Startup Battle. And Yes we won it! It was really great experience. We met a lot of people from diverse vertices and was able to obtain valuable feedback and input again and meet many potential investors. Consequently we were also able to continue the winning streak becoming Winners at the Commonwealth Digital Health Awards under the category of Non Communicable Diseases.
For More information regarding Clardia :
- Product Video - https://youtu.be/wgWlGTinScc
For us Olivescript was really fun and entertaining. We never missed an opportunity to celebrate with our friends and enjoy. We had great support from our friends at ENTC 13 (Electronics Batch at UoM) in order to carryout Olivescript operations and numerous mentors. Hence we celebrated our first anniversary of Olivescript as well as our achievements with our friends, and had the best time creating many memories…
We registered Olivescript PVT Ltd subsequently and started to search for funding which proved to be a tedious task. Healthcare industry has inherent risk and once it is coupled with the manufacturing bottlenecks of hardware in Sri Lanka the task of raising funds are hard due to the significant research required at the early stages of Clardia. The credibility we possessed as undergraduates were also questioned by potential investors where they were uncertain that we would be capable of conducting a comprehensive research with our limited experience in research.
Hence we were faced with many hurdles and coupled them altogether with our final semester examinations we were unable to secure any source of funding. Hence we started to work on our weaknesses & mistakes. We were focussed on proving our point that we are capable of conducting the research. Clardia was entirely bootstrapped and we focussed on publishing the initial research we conducted for Clardia to prove ourself. Again our efforts were fruitful, where we were able to publish our maiden research paper as undergraduates without any external supervision.
For any entrepreneur realizing your first dream idea is a hard task. Most work on couple of ideas and if you are lucky you will be able to find the perfect product market fit. We also tried couple of things where we tried to develop a recruiting platform called mycareers.lk with our friend Amitha and a couple of more friends.
Future Clardia Research…
Our initial Clardia idea had to be restructured. Hence we brainstormed for possible ways of tweaking the idea in order to develop the health assistant and provide the predictive health analytics that we were focussing on. We are currently continuing our efforts through focussing on a MSc Research at University of Moratuwa in the related area of Clardia which would enable us to enhance our credibility as well as ensure the development of Clardia.
So what is this new writing initiative ?
In addition to our key focus areas of engineering and the current ongoing research, I love to read and write which are my main hobbies and pastime. I find it really interesting to read about startups and analyze industries and markets to identify potential opportunities. I have maintained a number of blogs with creative writing posts and scientific articles. Buddhishan on the other hand is more interested on designing, video editing and also digital marketing. Our simple elegant designs and flyers are a result of his skills.
The past couple of years have also enabled us to gather many experiences meeting Sri Lanka’s leading entrepreneurial personalities. Thus we thought of sharing the small experience that we have, as we believe it would be of some value to our friends pursuing their dreams in the same path. Hence we have currently converted olivescript.com to a space where we can express ourselves and create content expressing yourself / your startup story to the community.
We are looking forward for your thoughts on how we can improve this initiative, and please let us know the type of articles which would be valuable towards the community. If you are interested in content creation or expressing your unique story please contact us at contact@olivescript.com
Our research interests related to Clardia would be carried out as a full time research focussed and you will be able to access more info through clardia.com
Team Olivescript wishes you all the very best in your future startup endeavors, and we hope that this article will clarify the doubts you had on Olivescript & Clardia.
