Twice a month, Prakash Mugali leaves behind his spreadsheets in Belgaum and heads to Mumbai. Not to attend a start-up synod but to spar with Deepak Rao, an instructor of hybrid martial art form Jeet Kune Do, pioneered by Bruce Lee.
The patience of a stance, the precision of a strike, the fact that you cannot out-negotiate a proper joint lock—all of it, it turns out, translates rather well to running a deep-tech company out of a Tier-II Karnataka town for two decades.
Mugali is the founder and chief strategy officer of Enerzi that manufactures industrial machines that use microwaves, not traditional heat, to process materials like rubber, ceramics and food, using less energy.
1 October 2026
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Back Story
Mugali grew up in a small town not far from Belgaum, studied at a government school and went on to complete his graduation in electronics and communications engineering from KLE Society’s College of Engineering and Technology, Belgaum, the same city that, 20-odd years later, would become Enerzi's headquarters.
He didn't take the route most 22-year-olds would: the safer information-technology-sector job he snagged during campus placement. Instead, in 2002, he joined a manufacturing company in Bengaluru, switched jobs twice within 18 months chasing exposure to different domains. By December 2003, he birthed a manufacturing unit making measuring devices.
In 2005, Mugali met MS Krupashankara, who had just returned from the US and was looking for a team in India to build industrial microwave components. Mugali and his team spent two years, 2005–07, learning the ropes of manufacturing basic products such as solo microwaves, grill microwaves and convection ones under Krupashankara’s guidance. This was on top of the company's original instrumentation business.
By 2007, Mugali was confident enough to formally pivot the company's core focus to microwave technology. The years that followed were about turning a lab capability into an industrial one. Enerzi built turnkey microwave-based solutions for rubber processing, ceramic sintering and drying (a process that makes ceramics stronger and more durable), food disinfestation, which eliminates pests from grains, and sintering furnaces for laboratories.
These industrial microwave-based systems consume 30-40% lower energy than conventional alternatives. Enerzi's clients range from defence labs to research institutions.
Sustainable Solutions
Kirankumar Hittalmani, Enerzi's chief executive today, has known Mugali since 2004, when he joined the fledgling company straight out of college as a junior engineer. He stayed for a year, then left to build a career in the automotive sector. The two kept in touch. When Enerzi needed to reinvent itself, first around 2015, then again in 2020 as Covid forced a rethink of products and focus areas, Hittalmani's automotive-industry discipline segued seamlessly into Mugali's manufacturing instincts.
Enerzi wants to be a global brand in sustainable-energy solutions for a greener future. The aim is to provide economical, energy-efficient and eco-friendly solutions for sustainable-energy generation and application.
Enerzi manufactures industrial machines that use microwaves, not traditional heat, to process materials
Being headquartered in Belgaum rather than Bengaluru or Pune is a trade-off rather than a compromise, says Mugali. It brings low employee attrition, a lower cost of living, minimal commute that translates into productivity. The costs are real too: air connectivity to metros is patchy and hiring top-tier talent is harder from a Tier-II address than say Bengaluru.
Mugali is candid about the clean hydrogen bet. “Microwave plasma attracted me because it can split methane into [clean] hydrogen [gas] and solid carbon without direct carbon-dioxide emissions, while using significantly less electrical energy than electrolysis,” he says. “The combination of energy efficiency and a valuable carbon co-product [which has industrial uses] gives it the potential to make clean hydrogen more economical and scalable.”
That advantage only matters if the lab-scale promise can morph into commercial reality, and Mugali is equally direct about where the R&D effort goes from here. “Our R&D roadmap is focused on three priorities: reducing energy consumption per kg of hydrogen, scaling our microwave-plasma reactors from pilot systems to commercially viable capacities and strengthening our IP moat,” he says.
The Money Story
For 17 years, Enerzi ran almost entirely on bootstrapped capital—about ₹3cr in total. That changed only recently with an institutional funding round that opened in late 2024 and closed in mid-2025, raising ₹17cr in venture capital (VC). The round valued Enerzi at ₹105cr and was led by VC firm Capital-A and joined by 8x Ventures.
The next round will fund a commercial plant roughly 10 times the size of the company's current pilot facility.
The revenue trajectory backs up the ambition. After years of hovering at ₹2–3cr, Enerzi crossed ₹10cr in 2021–22 and closed its most recent financial year at ₹17.5cr.
It is tempting to read Mugali's twice-a-month pilgrimage to a Mumbai dojo as a footnote to the real story—the funding rounds, the pivot from microwave tech to green energy, the small town-to-crore-club arc. But these Mumbai visits honed his resilience and taught him to get up from the mat and resume the bout.
