Exploring Life and Business with Naru Muraleedharan of Aptus Engineering

Today we’d like to introduce you to Naru Muraleedharan.

Hi Naru, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I’ve loved aviation and technology ever since I could remember. I taught myself to program when I was around ten and used that to design and program aircraft for flight simulators. I rarely went to school – I had a lot more fun collaborating virtually with groups of developers and building awesome tools.

When I was in college, my roommate (now business partner) and I spent our time designing and building drones and other fun technologies. We started a company back then that built a no-code platform for Arduinos and DIY embedded electronics. However, we didn’t have the business or marketing knowledge or experience to scale that. But you know what they say about the tech industry – failures are just opportunities to learn!

During my graduate research work, I started another company that built battery management systems for unmanned aircraft. Our solution performed a thrust profile optimization across not just power draw from the battery but also the flight profile and allows aircraft that originally flow for only 45 minutes to fly as long as 3 hours! We worked with an unmanned aircraft manufacturing company and supplied systems to Edwards Air Force Base.

What we really wanted to do was to build a company and culture that allows and encourages the smarted people in the world to unleash their genius in a positive manner. We had a lot of fun creating innovative products and solving difficult problems, and we wanted to keep doing that. So, we started Aptus Engineering, Inc. – a development service company that allowed us to do just that. We grew a team that shared our goals and vision.

We worked on a lot of amazing projects over the last few years, but more importantly, we had a lot of fun and created some amazing novel technologies to further the industry.

We built flight simulation training systems used by the US Navy.

We built flight control and autopilot software for novel drone concepts.

We built AI software that allows for real-time prediction of failures in jet engines.

We built AI that can look at a patient’s hip X-ray and accurately suggest whether they needed hip replacement surgery.

We built AI that created 3D models and renderings of anatomy by looking at patients’ MRIs.

We built AI that diagnosed patients based on their MRIs – and this was tested to be more accurate than human board certified radiologists!

We shortly realized that we are creating so much value in lots of different industries and that we were more of a think tank or innovation hub than a development company. So in 2019, we decided to transition our business model to that of a Venture Studio.

We have a very effective, brilliant, and motivated team of engineers, physicists, mathematicians, developers, and problem-solvers that are amazing are coming up with novel technologies and solutions. We create products.

Over the last two years, we’ve built some amazing products that have spun off into their own separate companies.

Stax.ai is a document AI platform that lets you search through the contents of all your files – photos, scans, emails, PDFs. And it also draws meaningful insights from your documents. We have a research group in one of the largest medical institutions using Stax.ai’s Insights and AI to understand diseases and treatments better.

Stratum is another company we created – it uses AI to predictively scale your server resources up and down so you only pay for the servers you actually use. Stratum is saving companies anywhere from 30 to 90% of their cloud compute bill!

And we have a few more.

In 2021, we partnered with another group to form Inventives, Inc. – which includes vMocion – a company that does ground-breaking work on galvanic vestibular stimulation with the Mayo Clinic. This is a VR solution that enhances your virtual experience by allowing you to feel motion!

We are very excited for the future!!

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I don’t think entrepreneurship is ever a smooth road. There were months at a time where I only had 2-4 hours of sleep a day! In our early stages, the founders were doing the work of 2-3 full-time jobs at our company to maximize our revenue.

There were also a lot of lessons that we learned about business and strategy. But I strongly believe that we learn a lot through these hardships. And this has clearly molded us into who we are today.

I’m honestly excited to face more issues in the future so we can learn how to work around them and solve those problems!

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Aptus Engineering, Inc.?
We are a Venture Studio! We partner with investors, entrepreneurs, and business people to create, deploy and scale companies.

We have built diagnostic medical AI, document and natural language AI, cloud resource management AI, an information search platform, a construction estimation AI, and a lot more!

We have historically been focused on B2B products – but our long-term vision is and has always been to bring amazing technology to everyone! In fact, the vision of Stax.ai – our flagship product, is to bring your data closer to you!

This fall, we’re launching a personal version of Stax.ai that allows anyone to find what they’re looking for within their files very quickly. College students will be able to search through their handwritten notes! A mom can go through their bills and find exactly what they pay for. And so much more! We’re really excited about this as part of our move to be more accessible!!

How do you define success?
I believe success is the journey, not the end. It’s the feeling of loving what you do, knowing that you make a positive impact on the world, and you make yours and others’ lives better.

Contact Info:

• Email: info@aptusai.com
• Website: https://aptusai.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aptusai/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aptusengineeringinc
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/aptus_ai
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-xSnWqd7680H_LUOw7pxfg