Store owners and calculators go hand in hand, especially in India where they play a vital part. From kirana bazars to jewellery stores or general stores, calculators play a crucial part in their day-to-day operations. Praveen Mishra has designed a device which can record data (transactions), and can do calculations for store owners thereby saving them time and also giving them a daily or weekly report analysis. Calculators are not simple calculators anymore.
Smart calculator was launched by Jayesh Ranjan IT secretary, Telangana in the month of September 2022. ToHands raised funding of Rs50 lakh from the startup India seed fund and T-hub. This helped them further innovate the smart calculator to include calculations, and credit-debit buttons and the screen was made smaller with a membrane keyboard.
Praveen Mishra co-founder of ToHands came up with the idea of a smart calculator although, in the beginning, he felt that the idea might not work and that there would be no demand. It was after he came across a small store being run by a woman in Sarjapur, Bangalore where the store owner couldn’t keep track of the transactions. Seeing this encouraged him that it could come into use for such store owners. Hoping that one day all these store owners would benefit from making their lives easier. The initial version of the smart calculator created by Praveen Mishra was a Raspberry Pi-powered prototype of a device including a keyboard like any other calculator, which included 2 added buttons which were ‘credit’ and ‘debit’. Currently, the cost of the smart calculator is Rs 3000 and has a built-in memory of 16MB storing 5 million transactions in it.
