Founder project. Live product.

OptiBill.

I was the user. Then I built the fix. An AI electricity bill auditor for Maharashtra's commercial and industrial sites, born from a two-hour government queue and 28 factory conversations.

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Founder, designer, research lead 2025, ongoing OCR + Gemini LLM 20 percent of recovered amount only
94%AI audit accuracy in production
28Factory and shop interviews first
₹7.8kFirst recovery, a friend's showroom
₹0Upfront. Pay after credit hits the bill.

Founding story

I waited two hours. Paid ₹1,200 in travel. Took a day off work.

All of that for a billing dispute that should have taken five minutes. One office. One person who could fix it. No reason for them to make it easy for me to fight back.

I got the money eventually. Then I kept thinking about the owners who would never go. Factory floors, shop counters, thin margins, bills that quietly take more than they should.

The real insight was not the errors. It was the silence around them. People assume the bill is correct.

Power factor penalties

Drop below 0.90 and MSEDCL adds a 2 to 8 percent surcharge. Old motors and AC units are usually why. Nobody tells you.

Max demand breaches

Peak above sanctioned load in a 30-minute window, and the excess can double. A busy Monday morning can cost ₹50,000.

Peak hour premium

Heavy use between 18:00 and 22:00 sits on a different rate. Easy to miss if you only look at the total.

Dedicated area: scan

Show the finding before you ask for an email.

Factory owners drop any form that asks for a phone number up front. The product opens with a live read of the bill: camera or PDF, confidence score, then leakage in rupees.

MSEDCL HT-1 · March cycle

Consumer 27/222333333 · Bharat Steel

Flag: PF 0.86. Silent surcharge about ₹18,400 this month.

Research

28 interviews. Three clear user types.

Rajesh Patil, operations

"I get a 40-page bill. I do not have time to decode it. I just pay it."

Kulkarni Castings, 500 kVA, 3 meters. Found ₹1.8L in penalties after 9 months.

Priya Deshmukh, director

"I went to complain once. Three counters. I gave up."

Commercial realty, LT-II Large. Time-poor. Needs a result, not a tariff lecture.

Santosh Patade, MD

"Tell me what is wrong and fix it."

Cold storage, 3 connections. About ₹3.2L a year across meters. Wants one dashboard.

Product

Kanban for a legal process people already understand.

Drafted, filed, review, done. The IGRC filing stops feeling like a black box. The approval gate sits before we file. Pricing is UX: 20 percent only after credit appears on the bill.

Drafted

IGRC-0482 · ₹38,200 · PF + ToD

Filed

IGRC-0452 · ₹42,500 · PF + MD

Review

IGRC-0501 · ₹27,800 · PF

Done

IGRC-0934 · ₹68,000 recovered

Outcomes

What shipping as the founder teaches you.

₹7.8kFirst recovery. Still the story I open sales with.
28Interviews before a single production screen.
94%Audit success across PF, MD, and ToD.
LiveMaharashtra. optibill.in