Vishal Koul

Tequila, gin, vodka, triple sec and white rum – add half ounce of each and a splash of Cola. The long island iced tea is an all time favourite of cocktail lovers. Now what if one could make it a little stronger, say, by adding a little more of vodka or, even better, experiment to make one’s own drink – all of this in under a minute. Delhi-based start-up Barsys is making the tippler’s dream come true through its tech-enabled hardware for making cocktails and mixed drinks.  

Founder Akshet Tewari got the idea while at his graduation party. Tewari, who wanted to pursue a career in automation, felt that marrying his passion with his love for cocktail could be a good idea. After almost two years of product development, Barsys was incorporated in February 2017. 

This fully automated robotic cocktail maker coupled with an app allows users to decide what goes into their cocktails. The app, which provides around 2,000 combinations, also allows the users to customise existing recipes. The hardware comes in the form of a tabletop machine that can hold up to six inverted bottles. It pours the ordered drink into the glass placed on a linearly moving tray in less than 40 seconds. Barsys monitors the consumption patterns and notifies when ingredients are running low. All the data is stored in the cloud, helping inventory management and developing data-backed consumer insights.

“Precision is a lot higher this way,” notes Tewari. Barsys makes sure that there’s no spilling or breaking of glasses, and data obtained helps the bartender understand what drinks are sold most at a particular period of time. In fact, Tewari feels that the product adds more life to parties. Take for instance, when Barsys became a huge hit at his Diwali house party. People started making drinks of different combinations on their own and named it after themselves. “By morning I was asking few people how I knew them. Turns out, they were invited by their friends to try out the machine,” Tewari laughs.

Having invested around Rs.3 crore initially by Tewari, his father and some New York-based angel investors, the start-up started getting orders since April. Till date it has sold around 45 machines named Barsys to B2B clients at around Rs.75,000 per machine clocking about Rs.33.75 lakh revenue. The start-up has over 200 pre-orders, and is introducing two more variants priced at Rs.1.2 lakh and Rs.2 lakh by next month and the first quarter of 2018 respectively. The team also plans to launch an e-commerce portal by November. Although the product has been designed in-house, its components are sourced from manufacturing houses in the UK and India and later assembled by Barsys’ 12-member team. Tewari plans to expand to the US by the second quarter of the next financial year. As of now, it already has an office in New York apart from Delhi and Mumbai. Now, the next time you're craving to make your own drink — just the way you like it — Barsys can be your go-to solution.