Who is building this
Harit Trivedi
Founder, WhatsNext Systems
Lived, not studied.
Six years designing battery, power-electronics and embedded systems for drones, defence platforms and EV infrastructure. The exact instruments and rigs Sidekick reads.
2,000+
UAV BMS units shipped
MIL-STD
VTOL battery packs
45 kWh
DC fast-charger architecture
Why this exists
Every floor I worked on lost what it learned. The engineer who knew how to read the cycler moved to another programme and took it with them. The evidence for a result sat in a folder on one laptop. A soak would fail at hour three and nobody would know until the morning, and the worst part was never the lost chamber time. It was that the same thing had happened before and nobody could point at when.
Why a box, and not software
Because the rigs that matter cannot take software. They run vendor tools on machines change control will not let anyone touch, some of them have never been on a network, and no amount of integration work fixes that. A box that reads the screen does not need permission from the vendor, the IT department, or the decade the software was written in.
What I have built before
Battery management for UAVs that shipped in volume, battery packs qualified to military standards for VTOL platforms, and the architecture for a 45 kWh DC fast charger. DVT, EVT and HIL floors are where I have spent my working life, not a market I read about.
Where this honestly stands
SK-01 is pre-production. The units on the bench are 3D-printed and actively cooled, the screen-read and alert path run on real hardware, and Weave is being built alongside the first pilots rather than after them. I am looking for a small number of pilot partners rather than customers, and the difference matters: you would be shaping what gets built next.
I write about this in public.
Mostly about the drone and EV ecosystem in India, and about systems engineering as it actually happens rather than as it is taught. The full record, including the work history, lives on my own site.
Talk to me directly.
There is no sales team. If you run a validation floor and any of this sounded like your week, the fastest thing is to say so and we will find twenty minutes.