Charging
Towards Change

Above: Khushboo with her husband and Coloumb AI co-founder, Shantanu, in their home office, virtually connected with the rest of the Coloumb AI team. Photo: Zoya Khanday/UNWomen

“You have to get your hands dirty,”

Khushboo Shrivastava recalls her father saying as he handed her a wrench to dismantle an old bike in their family garage. An only child, Khushboo grew up in Indore in Central India. She remembers her father’s insistence that she dismantle appliances around the house, sparking a curiosity to solve problems. 

As she speaks, Khushboo is planning her day, scheduling work calls, and instructing her domestic help, in her quiet home office in Bangalore’s Whitefield. In between laughs she adds, “I have always been interested in solving problems that bother me. It all starts from looking at the very basics and solving from the ground up”. 

Above: A battery health monitoring data visualization, generated by the Coloumb AI dashboard. Photo: Zoya Khanday/ UN Women

Khushboo is the co-founder of Coloumb AI, a cutting-edge enterprise offering innovative climate solutions, including predictive battery analytics software for electric vehicles (EVs) to boost their performance and extend their lifetime. EVs play a large part in decarbonizing road transportation and contribute to the net zero agenda, to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero to solve the climate crisis. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2021 (COP26) more than 20 countries pledged to phase out fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2040, while 30 countries have agreed to work together to make zero emission vehicles accessible, affordable and sustainable in all regions by 2030 or sooner. 

As the world is moving more aggressively toward EVs, Coloumb AI aims to solve a problem that, so far, has beset the transition to EVs: battery lifecycles. Coloumb AI has developed a battery analytics software that provides real-time analysis of battery performance, increasing the time efficiency of the battery and reducing the total cost of ownership. The company offers complete data transfer services (often from manual bookkeeping) to the software, with the promise of improving battery health and decreasing failures and downtime.

The curiosity Khushboo cultivated in her formative years created a shield against social perceptions that dissuade many women from pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Stereotypes about who is and who is not well suited to STEM fields play a major role in the low percentage of women working in these fields. These beliefs become a self-perpetuating cycle: girls are not encouraged to enter STEM fields and so girls are less likely to develop necessary knowledge for it — thus making them less likely to express interest in STEM careers.  

In a batch of sixty, Khushboo was one of three women who chose to specialize in automotive engineering. This mirrors a global trend; women represent only 28 per cent of engineering graduates, 22 per cent of artificial intelligence workers and less than one third of technology sector employees globally. 

This gap often widens when women look to become technology entrepreneurs. Khushboo recognizes the need for mentorship for women in the start-up space. “No one really knows what it means to be a founder unless you are one yourself. The journey is exhausting and having someone point you in the right direction is hard to find”. Through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Women’s Investor Consortium, Khushboo was introduced to Hanisha Vaswani. “People had been dead ends, making empty promises under the pretense of investment. Hanisha wasted no time, she immediately started connecting us with customers”, Khushboo added.

Above: Khushboo’s father’s car, damaged in an accident (left) and several months later after Khushboo rebuilt it (right). “My father still uses this car. It still gears up great!”, she added. Photo: Khushboo Shrivastava

Hanisha Vaswanihas over two decades of experience in the start-up space, is the founder of the Majority Fund and a former mentor in the United Nations Investor Consortium. Reflecting on her journey working with different entrepreneurs, Hanisha observed that “the support founders need is not just monetary. Entrepreneurship is a lonely journey; it helps to have someone remind you that you are not alone”. She is now anAdvisor at Coloumb AI and has made a small investment in the business, “It’s somewhere between a friendship and a professional relationship, and it’s not one-sided. We discuss product, new hires, employee issues, in both our companies but calls always tend to go longer than scheduled”, Hanisha added smiling.

After being a part of several accelerators and consortiums in India, Coloumb AI was selected to be a part of the prestigious Y Combinator cohort of 2021, securing a place as the only woman co-founded business in the technology space in the cohort. ForKhushboo, the work of Coloumb AI is just beginning. “Anyone we hire has to fit in our company; we are not in the business of just creating a product, this is also about solving a real problem”, she said. “Everyone here is committed to the cause, there is a sense of ownership, we believe in what we are trying to create”.

Khushboo’s team consists of her co-founder and husband, Shantanu Mondal, and their team of AI experts and technical engineers, most of whom are male. At least for now. Currently apart of several mentorship programmes, Khushboo often declines invitations to host talks for aspiring entrepreneurs. “If it’s not a sustained interaction, it does not work”, especially for women, structural biases and stereotypes act as hindrances and need to be addressed by women who have had experiences overcoming them, she adds.

Her family’s early rejection of gender roles played a large part in Khushboo’s journey as an automotive engineer. Her father’s encouragement and support enabled Khushboo to gain confidence in her ability to solve problems, with some surprising results.   When she was 22 and in her fourth year of engineering college, Khushboo’s father’s car was totalled in an accident. She spent months rebuilding the entire body of his car and presented it back to her father. “When a car stops working, the solution can come from anyone”, she adds coyly.