The archive · Small Business & Money · Product decision · 2024–2026
CIBOS builds solar smart carts for India's street vendors, cutting cooking costs ~90%
A Gujarat startup outfits street vendors with DC solar appliances, smart carts and a WhatsApp stall-finder, cutting monthly cooking costs from ~₹3,500 to ~₹200.
CIBOS Techno Solutions
What it had to solve
India's street food vendors typically cook on gas or charcoal because standard heating appliances need 1,500–2,000W AC power and a grid connection; meanwhile nearly 90% of the ecosystem has no online visibility, licenses or loans.
How it works
Street vendors power India's informal food economy, yet most run stalls that are invisible online, depend on expensive gas or charcoal, and sit in a policy grey zone between formal enterprises and rural schemes. Electronics engineer Aditya Dave founded CIBOS Techno Solutions to build the missing infrastructure layer for these mobile food businesses.
The core innovation is energy hardware designed for off-grid life: DC-powered infrared cookstoves, cold boxes and smart solar carts that run on batteries and small PV arrays instead of 1,500–2,000W AC appliances. CIBOS also created Laari Khojo, a WhatsApp-first web platform where vendors publish their location, take orders and manage money — avoiding aggregator apps that informal workers cannot easily join.
The results are measured in operating costs: vendors who spent ₹3,000–4,000 a month on cooking energy now spend ₹100–300, a 90–97.5% reduction. By early 2026, around 500 vendors across Indore, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Chhattisgarh were using CIBOS products and services, and the company had won the International Solar Alliance's SolarX Startup Challenge in 2024.
Why it lands
- DC and solar hardware removes the grid dependency that makes standard appliances useless on a cart.
- The ~90% cut in cooking-energy costs directly raises thin street-vendor margins.
- A WhatsApp-based discovery layer reaches vendors and customers where they already are, without app-store barriers.
- Designing coils and compressors in-house slowed early scaling but fit the components to real vendor conditions.
- The ecosystem approach — hardware plus discovery plus financing help — tackles more than a single product could.
What it did
Cooking costs fell from ₹3,000–4,000 a month to ₹100–300 (a 90–97.5% cut); 500+ vendors across Indore, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Chhattisgarh adopted the system, and CIBOS won the International Solar Alliance's SolarX Startup Challenge in 2024.
What you can take
Serving an informal market means redesigning the whole stack — power, hardware and discovery — around its actual constraints (no grid, no AC, no app stores), not porting over formal-economy tools.
Since then
By early 2026 CIBOS remained in an early growth phase with about 500 active vendors; its clients included independent sellers, franchise employees, kiosk operators and NGO partners such as SELCO Foundation and Pratham Education Foundation. The 2024 SolarX Startup Challenge win gave the startup credibility for ecosystem technology. Founders continued to argue that scaling requires policy recognition of street-vendor infrastructure, affordable credit, and institutional pilots — and kept building rather than narrowing to a single cookstove product.
Sources
- 500 Vendors, Up to 90% Lower Costs: Gujarat Startup Is Rebuilding Street Vendor Economics
- Cibos Techno Solutions
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