Arjun Arunachalam, Founder, Voxelgrids
Explaining his “nightmare”, a word that crops up multiple times in his conversation with businessline, Arunachalam cites the example of super-conducting wire that is made by the United States, Germany and Japan. Bringing it through shipping lines would mean the consignment will have to come through the conflict-hit West Asian region, and importing by air would mean higher costs and possible delays, he says. “So, (a) small company trying to do all this is a nightmare, leave alone big companies who struggle by themselves… they have mature lines for everything,” he adds.
But the silver lining is that Voxelgrids has stakeholders that have supported its 10-year-old journey, including difficult times during Covid-19, he says, adding that they understood the value of the Intellectual Property (IP) being created by the company. Be it the Sathya Sai Institute, Zoho, Tata Trust, Social Alpha and the Central Government, he says, “Without them, we would not be here today… we were an R&D (research and development) company trying to master a very difficult technology.”
A difficult investor would have made matters more difficult, he says, pointing to pressures that come with increasing the company’s human resource and scaling up manufacturing.
Arunachalam is confident that their MRI scanners would be 40 per cent less expensive than others in its category, dominated by major multinational companies. “We didn’t build a cheap system, we built a different system,” he says, explaining that the technological features of the product contribute to its cost effectiveness.
Orders at hand
Voxelgrid’s MRI is installed in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur Cancer Hospital, and it has six more orders to install MRI scanners at healthcare institutions, says Arunachalam, pointing to orders from Tata Trust, Gates Foundation and the Sathya Sai Institute. The company is presently servicing these orders and stabilising its manufacturing facility to be ready to take on “external” orders, he says. As it scales up, the company is growing its projects and installation teams, he said, to be able to service future orders.
Outlining the “gigantic” exercise at hand, Arunachalam says, “We are expanding our factory building so that we can have more capacity to store inventory. For example, every magnet has 70 kilometres of wire. Six magnets – now we have 420 kilometres of wire itself.” By mid-July, he is optimistic, they would be able to make 25 products, in two shifts.
An electrical engineer and MRI physicist, Arunachalam and his team were clear they would not make “me-too” systems. “You need to build something that is unique and differentiated,” he says.
On the supply bottle-neck, the company is now sourcing some materials locally and qualifying it to the specifications that they need, besides looking at sourcing from regions like Japan, he says, adding, “We’ll survive and we’ll get past all this.”
Published on March 5, 2026