AirTags, which reportedly sold over 20 million units in 2021 alone—its debut year—is among Apple’s best-selling accessories. However, these tags haven’t found many takers in India.
For Sumit Kasturi, this gap sparked the idea for a startup. With Echo Tracker, the security-tech company that he co-founded with Amrit Kumar Pati, Kasturi hopes to solve the problem of lost and stolen valuables with a smart tracker that works with multiple operating systems.
“Between 2020-23, AirTag became a billion dollar run-rate product for Apple. But I noticed that its sales in India were pretty minimal. I spoke to some of the distributors and found out that the first batch of AirTags wasn’t close to selling out then. We noticed the gaps and decided to act on it,” he tells YourStory.
Founded in 2024, Mumbai-based Echo Tracker aims to focus on the B2B segment for now.
According to Kasturi, AirTags haven’t seen a wider adoption in India for a few reasons. First, the cost disparity. Although Apple sells AirTags for the lowest competitive rate in the country at Rs 3,190 per tag, it is still pretty high as compared to its US price ($25 or just a little of Rs 2000).
Second, Apple has a tendency to dominate and control its ecosystem. While that works well in the US where it has over 60% market share, the tech giant’s presence is limited to around 4.4% in India. AirTags heavily rely on ‘Find my network’, which uses the vast number of Apple devices to locate items. With not many iPhone customers in India, AirTags don’t work well.
Building a universal tracker in India
“We knew we had the budget to develop a tracker of our own as well. On top of that, there was an opportunity to develop a universal tag, which would be simple to use and allowed us to venture into the B2B market,” he says.
Kasturi is referring to Echo Tracker’s primary product Echo Trace—a universal tracker optimised across both Android and Apple ecosystems. In the company, Pati handles the hardware and tech side of things while Kasturi looks at the sales and finance aspects.
Pati is a seasoned professional in IoT and robotics for the past 15 years while Kasturi began his career with a startup a few years ago.
Currently, they run the company, which is incubated at IIT Madras, IIIT Delhi and Maker Village, on their own.
The startup is currently looking into the smart luggage market. A user can embed its tracker—a bluetooth low energy (BLE) chip—to their luggage and through it, can leverage Android or Apple ecosystems to track their belongings in real-time.
The chip used BLE technology instead of GPS, which tracks through the GPS satellite systems and needs a SIM card to propagate data. Instead, a BLE chip functions like a chirper, and has a predefined range and frequency (which can be set). So, the moment it finds itself out in that range, it will start chirping announcing its presence.
“With the BLE technology and our partnership with Android and Apple, all phones will constantly be on the lookout for such chirps without the need to download any particular app. And the moment it enters the range, for instance 150 meters (if the user has set it), it locates the tracker, determines its model and the network it operates in,” he shares.
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Once the chirps are located, it picks up that data and sends it to the server (Android/Apple) sharing its ID there. As Google now allows users to access that data. The company doesn’t need any access to the user’s server because their tech is already incorporated into the Google app.
“It is a technology that has been available for the past 15 years. However, we have removed the requirement of a physical tag to be attached on the tracker. Since a user can more easily interact with our product now, we believe this will increase the amount of its adoption by multifold,” he says.
And since it doesn’t need satellites, it doesn’t require a large battery. The tracker runs on button batteries.
The startup has conducted pilots with three companies and plans to formally launch the product by the year-end after a few more trials. It will sell the product between Rs 300 and Rs 500—depending on the features.
In the pilot tests so far, Echo Trace shows an item’s last known location as 15 minutes old for Apple products and about 5 minutes old for Android. However, more thorough testing with Android devices is still pending.
The luggage industry and other challenges
According to a recent survey, India ranks second after Ireland in luggage getting lost at airports. The data shows the probability of one in 96 passengers losing their bags. This is precisely the reason why Echo Tracker decided to focus on the luggage industry first.
The founder says that they found out through their surveys that the luggage industry is facing a unique challenge. Legacy companies faced a lot of losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. And right after the pandemic, VC-backed new-age companies had hit the market with money to spend and the legacy companies were put in a difficult spot by their investors. To balance their account books, they started moving towards premiumisation to increase their margins and that is where Echo Tracker saw an opportunity.
“We realised that we were in a good position to provide more features to their customers while ensuring the unit economics stay the same. We wanted to provide such companies with the option to build smart products into their line-up. So luggages would come with our tracker built in them,” says Kasturi.
The company wants to venture into the B2C market only after some traction in the B2B space. As their product can be used across multiple industries—apparel tracking, pet tracking, bicycle tracking—the startup doesn’t want to build its own brand and D2C customer base right now. Instead, they want to be agile and quickly move from industry to industry increasing its B2B clientele.
Funding
The two-person team usually hires freelancers to develop its products and has no plans to have an in-house staff yet. With an initial investment of Rs 10 lakh, the startup recently won a Rs 5 lakh grant—sourced from MeitY’s Genesis Scheme—from a round of interviews conducted by its incubator Maker Village.
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With no plans to raise any funding rounds anytime soon, Echo Tracker instead plans to start manufacturing its piloted products from two manufacturing hubs: one in Ahmedabad and the other in Schenzen, China—an option the founding team discovered from their peers.
“Nothing is finalised yet. We are actively looking for options to build a manufacturing hub in India,” he says.
The startup directly competes with Jio (JioTag Go) and Apple (AirTag). But Echo Tracker gets a competitive edge in two forms: a cheaper price and optimisation with both Android and iOS ecosystems.
“Because of our universal tracker, we are able to go into the B2B market, which they aren’t able to. Additionally our cost is lower than them as we have developed the product ourselves.”
Edited by Affirunisa Kankudti
