Harsh Sarvaiya is the co-founder of Tesseract 3D. Coming from a pure financial background, a qualified Chartered Accountant, Harsh ventured into a completely different world of 3d printing. Heavy on technology, 3d printing was a no where near to his commerce background.

3D CULTURE: Today we have Harsh Sarvaiya, who is into 3d printing for quite a few years. Harsh, you are a chartered accountant by education. And first of all, we will like to know about your journey from being into the finance field to how you started with 3d printing. And you are impacting a lot of 3d printing activities in this ecosystem. So welcome to the 3d culture.

HARSH SARVAIYA: When I was in my CA and I was doing my chartered accountancy course, we used to audit a lot of manufacturing companies. At that time, I had some inclination towards manufacturing. And I was very curious about the processes, which used to be followed by the clients. And being in a commerce background, I didn’t really much understand what the technicalities are, but the process was very fascinating. So we were researching on a few ideas and 3d printing was very nascent and not heard of at that time. We visited a lot of companies during our research on 3d printing. During our research, we realized that it’s a very potential and emerging community, which is going to come up because compared to today if there are 500 to 1000 players in the market, that time there were less than 100. It was still a very new stage and not completely commercial, maybe only for industrial use, not for the B2C segment. So we happen to stumble upon the idea of venturing into this. And started our first journey in 2016 with a setup of one machine and three co-partners back then.

3D CULTURE: We’ll be keen to know what kind of services you’re providing? What kind of products you have in your portfolio? Basically, we want to know what Tesseract offers to the customers and the larger 3d printing community.

HARSH SARVAIYA: Our main focus is on 3d printing services. We have a firm size of around 100 3d printers in our setup which includes a mix of FDM and SLA technology. We support a lot of 3d printing companies In India since we have a good farm size. So to give you a very recent example, last to last year when the first initial lockdown had come, there was a huge demand for face shields before the injection molds are made. At that time we supported a lot of companies with their requirements plus our own requirements to supply to the hospitals and doctors. The other service is we are into filaments and spare parts manufacturing. We have an exclusive tie-up with rubber industries, where we supply our materials to our clients all over India, and abroad. In filaments, what we do primarily is we have dedicated a few machines for R&D. We try out new and existing material and the applications. We try to optimize the print settings and all that. So 3d printing filaments is another market where we have a good presence right now, where a lot of clients are using our filaments. Apart from that spare parts is something which we started exploring last year and are focusing on. Apart from that we do CAD designing and reverse engineering services. For any client who comes with an idea, we execute the entire process right from designing their concept to executing it. And apart from that, we also have our own products which we have launched in our different brands. So we do a lot of B2C products like gifting products and home decor products. We have our own range of products which we are selling online on different portals. We continuously make new products, test them in the market to see how the responses are and according to that we curate and make our own products. And lastly, since the clients come to us for manufacturing services, we help them in the entire process right from design to mass manufacturing.

3D CULTURE: Where do you see this market, at least for India going to and from where we are today to maybe in the next five years? How does the market shaping up?

HARSH SARVAIYA: The industry has seen good growth. From the time we started to now we’ve seen the industry scale up a lot, many companies have started up and exploring into different ventures. That time there were 100 companies now I can tell you there are more than 500 companies, who are in some way or the other providing or using 3d printing services in some of the applications or are associated with either only the filaments or scanning or the design part. And with more industries with more sectors are adopting 3d printing, it’s further going to be upheld, where you will see more and more growth in this industry, where people will come up with a particular niche. Like they might focus on only one industry, but they will have a complete variety of options and services, which they will be providing. Like to give an example, how in COVID medical sector started using 3d printing. You never know when one industry can open the door and start exploring it to its ultimate potential and there are many developments happening in that space.

3D CULTURE: Are you focusing on a few specific industries or it is like wherever we can get lead to all areas?

HARSH SARVAIYA: Primarily we are focused on product development, which is a very key application for 3d printing, where it’s regularly being used. The R&D companies are one of our focus areas where they’re constantly 3d printing services. Apart from that architecture and home decor, again, is a very promising space, because a lot of architects are venturing into 3d printing, they want to make some offbeat decor or art installations. And gifting is established in the last 2-3 years, where a lot of posts and gifting options can be done with 3d printing, which earlier would be done by laser cutting. And lately, there are a few niche industries like robotics, drones, where some applications of 3d printing are regularly being used for the parts for testing. And apart from that engineering is been since day one where these prototypes and all.

3D CULTURE: Large organizations have their own setups of 3d printers. But how do we differentiate as a service provider in this space having a total niche with the army of printers, people and resources available? Vis-à-vis your client which can potentially set up their own setup.

HARSH SARVAIYA: Yeah, there are clients who have their own machines, but they face challenges in operating on a very regular basis because that is not their main line of business. So eventually what happens is they come to us for the small requirements and generally what happens is if it’s like a big company, these machines are there in education institutions or not, but it’s not being used on a very regular basis. So there’s regular downtime and we keep getting these requirements from colleges, especially if they have 3d printers but it’s not being used in a while and it’s not working properly. So that gap is still there. But in-house using it versus giving it to a service bureau makes a vast difference because even if you have the machine in-house, you have to continue, they have to have the right print settings, the right filaments, and the right kind of finishing tools and everything. So there are many aspects that define them. And if you don’t have that and still try to prototype in-house, then you might face a challenge.

3D CULTURE:  Initially when we started working with 3d printers including me, print failures, all those challenges and great learnings. But from your experience what other challenges did you see or faced?

HARSH SARVAIYA: Initially being a startup we were bootstrapped and had limited funds. We didn’t have a team, so three of us would do the entire thing, right from marketing to production to delivery also. So major challenge with Bootstrap startup is that you don’t have enough liquidity at the start for having a team. Getting the right team at the start is very important and that challenge is definitely been faced by everyone unless you have an investment or an investor. Second was in the start we faced an issue was when we were coming from a commerce background, we were operating machines and there were many technical things which would come up in the start. And one thing which helped us to overcome the challenges, we got connected to a few of the companies back then. We would continuously be in touch with them to know more and take more knowledge on how to operate it effectively. So luckily, we were able to overcome most of it and post that the next challenge would come in the form of getting clients. So why would someone give business to a startup who are not engineers? But slowly we learned how to speak to them. And that’s how then we started acquiring clients. Then we got confidence and moved on to industrial corporate clients.

3D CULTURE: That is really a great learning experience to hear from you. Since we just talked about startups, any advice you will give to startups or students who are just coming out of college wanting to do something in 3d printing.

HARSH SARVAIYA: One piece of advice is that you should start where you are. A lot of times people say we are waiting for money or for getting a few client orders and then we will buy the machine. That is a very common mistake, which everyone would make. So one piece of advice would be to start off very well, don’t wait for anything, the work is there in the market and is going to come in some way or the other. And apart from that, I think it’s very important to connect to companies in the space who have been operating for the past few years and to take their advice on what industries right now are working, and what potential industries can come up and keep in mind and operate with those industries. Right now, what happens is startups come up, they want to do everything. They focus on architect work, home decor, gifting products, jewellery and R&D engineering. So once you do everything in the start, it becomes very difficult to keep your focus on any particular industry, then you won’t be able to maybe specialize or create a niche in anything. So start off with a few limited industries. And once you get a good foothold into it, then go for other options.

3D CULTURE: One interesting thought while you were talking about jewellery and medical area where we have a very good and large-scale application of 3d printing in dentists area. Especially now we have people started doing surgery planning, they are quite advanced in terms of the machinery. And particularly the jewellery sector, do you see is this area where we have quite well-settled machines? Is it disengaged from what we are doing into other areas or is there any relation? Because I’ve seen many people who are into either of the one area either they are into large machines only building tools, or somebody only building jewellery items, nothing else?

HARSH SARVAIYA: DLP is the technology which caters to all the jewellery requirements. In fact, jewellery was one of the first industries in India which 3d printing was adopted to. The prima facie jewellery which used to be made by hand would take somewhere between seven to eight days. And with 3d printing, that same piece can be made in under maybe two or three hours. The resolutions are very high tech, you can get quite accurate parts, which are almost around 50-to-80-micron tolerance and you can have around 100 pieces in a day. 3d printing has also given the option of customization without having to make a mold or a dime.

3D CULTURE: I know a few people who are dealing with the machines and the chemicals used in making the teeth compounds and those implants. And they work with people who have large setup of just creating tooth maybe like lakhs of tooth in a week or so.

HARSH SARVAIYA: Yeah, there are dental processing labs. Their main focus is on making those dentures. And that happens with SLA technology. The speed of the process is quite high. So you can remove that kind of an output on a very regular basis. Accuracy is higher and the finish is very precise.

3D CULTURE: You are doing research at your own factory or set up. But how these businesses are collaborating with the institutes in doing research, maybe at the juncture where we are in India, I think we can start. That’s my personal opinion, we should be starting with research in like material and recycling of the waste material or recycling the filament for example.  

HARSH SARVAIYA: It’s a good point you said because recycling of filament is something which the entire industry is looking into because there is wastage which is left in the FDM technology. Maybe this year or early next year, we might see a proper plan of action where there will be solutions on how you can reuse the material, recycle and use it in some other applications.