A 10-step guide to building a hardware startup | Dhruv Agrawal | TEDxPUT [Video]

My talk on “A 10-step Guide to Building a Hardware Startup” will focus on very straightforward, practical lessons from building Aether Biomedical over the last 5 years. From dropping out of medical school at 19 and moving to Poland at 20, I have now raised over 15 Million USD in private and public capital for Aether, built a team of 50+ people, and scaled products across US, EU, and India.
Throughout the process of building Aether, as a first-time entrepreneur, I have learned many critical lessons – some from our successes and some from our failures. In this talk, I present my learnings in a 10-step guide for founders aspiring to build a startup – especially in hardware/deep tech.
In those steps, I cover my most important learnings across product development and validation, fundraising, sales & marketing, and team building – specifically tied to real-time case studies/examples from building Aether.
Beyond that, I also touch upon a very important topic of dealing with imposter syndrome as a young entrepreneur – based on my journey of starting a deep tech company and competing with billion-dollar enterprises without having formal training in engineering or business.

Dhruv Agrawal is the CEO and President of the management board of Aether Biomedical SP.z o.o.. He studied Medicine at Vardhmann Mahavir Medical college and Safdarjung hospital, New Delhi before dropping out to pursue a bachelors in business management. He also has a post graduate diploma in medical device development regulatory affairs from University of California, Irvine, and a masters in data science from the University of london.
Under his leadership, Aether Biomedical has achieved CE certification and FDA registration for the Zeus V1 bionic limb and established distribution across 9 European countries, the US, and India. Additionally, Aether has raised over 12 million USD in private capital from leading VCs and has been part of multiple European grants and research programs for an additional 2.5M USD in nondilutive capital. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx