Inside India’s Homes, an AI Guardian Wakes Up

Electricity is one of the few things we use constantly but understand the least. A switch clicks on, a fan hums to life, an air-conditioner cools a room and for most of us, that is where the relationship ends. We rarely know what happens behind the walls, in the maze of wires and circuits that keep our homes alive. And we almost never know when danger is quietly building up.

For Soumya Bhattacharya, founder of SustLabs, this hidden world of electricity held not just a technical puzzle, but a human problem waiting to be solved.

Back in 2016, SustLabs did not begin as a product company. Soumya and his co-founders were deep in the trenches of data analysis for large commercial clients like Delhi Metro and Mahindra Logistics. They weren’t building devices. They weren’t thinking of homes. They were simply helping companies understand their electricity consumption patterns.

But something wasn’t adding up.

Every client needed custom solutions. What worked for one failed for another. The insights were helpful, but they weren’t scalable. After months of wrestling with data, the team realised a profound truth: electricity is personal. No two buildings behave the same way. And no two households use power the same way.

The pivot came when a friend at Tata Power introduced the team to JUSCO, a distribution utility in Jamshedpur. SustLabs ran a trial across 1,000 homes. They didn’t install new gadgets. They didn’t upgrade meters. They simply compared households with one another and shared feedback.

The outcome stunned everyone 17.5% savings in electricity consumption across the pilot homes.

And yet, Soumya remembers this as the moment they realised something even more important: this approach wouldn’t scale forever. People adjust their behaviour when shown comparisons, but eventually the learning plateaus. Once consumers reach the “average”, the change stops.

To go deeper, SustLabs needed something more powerful real, continuous, high-resolution data straight from the heart of the home.

And so began the long, difficult journey of turning a service company into a deep-tech product startup.

Nine to ten months of prototyping later, SustLabs built its first hardware solution crude, clunky, and made of multiple parts. But it worked. It could sit inside a home’s main switchboard, read electricity patterns in real time, and push the data to the cloud.

Today, that early prototype has evolved into a sleek AI-powered device that quietly transforms homes into intelligent, self-aware spaces.

The device pairs with home Wi-Fi and begins decoding electricity consumption appliance by appliance. How much is the refrigerator drawing at 11 PM? Is the AC working harder than it should? Which appliances cause the sharpest spikes?

But what truly sets the device apart is not efficiency it is safety.

Most people don’t know what earth leakage means, or how sparking begins, or why an overloaded circuit can turn into a fire hazard. But SustLabs’ system does. It sees the electrical behaviour before the danger manifests physically.

If something abnormal happens behind the walls, the app alerts the user instantly. And if no one is home, the user can remotely shut off the entire house with a single tap.

In a country where electrical faults are among the biggest causes of home fires, this feature alone places SustLabs in a category of its own.

Soumya describes the feedback from early households with a kind of quiet pride. Once users know how much electricity they are consuming and where they develop a natural curiosity and responsibility. They make small adjustments. They begin to understand their home better. Many even become amateur detectives, tracking which appliances are secretly draining energy.

The safety notifications, on the other hand, create awareness where none existed before. People begin to appreciate the complex ecosystem hidden inside their walls wires, loads, surges, and faults they never knew to look for.

From just 1,000 pilot homes, SustLabs today is deployed in over 3,000 households, with growing interest from developers. Real estate giant Rustomjee has already started offering the device to its homebuyers in Mumbai.

The goal ahead is ambitious: a pan-India footprint, covering medium to premium homes, turning electricity into a language every household can understand.

In Soumya’s journey, SustLabs isn’t just a smart metering solution. It is an example of how deep tech, when guided by empathy, can change everyday life. It helps people save money, keeps families safer, educates users about their homes, and empowers them with control they never had before.

Some startups build products. Others build awareness. SustLabs has managed to build both and in the process, awakened a silent guardian inside the Indian home.