Monitoring long assets such as bridges, railway tracks, and pipelines presents a complex challenge. Most traditional sensors record the condition only at a single point and require a power source at that location. Folium Sensing, a company based in Chennai, is developing a method to monitor entire sections of infrastructure without the need to install autonomous sensors along the route.
Founded in 2024 and located in the IIT Madras Research Park, the startup utilizes existing fiber optic cables intended for communication. According to CEO and co-founder Sanidhi Chaturvedi, the company's technology can detect changes in temperature, sound, and voltage on a cable section longer than 100 km using equipment connected only at one end.
Chaturvedi graduated from IIT Madras with an electrical engineering degree in 2026 and leads the company with three other co-founders. CTO Venkatesh Varadhan is an alumnus of the institute with an electrical engineering degree from 2007 and has twenty years of industry experience. Non-executive co-founders are Professor Balaji Srinivasan and Professor Krishnanan Balasubramaniam, who founded 14 startups.
Chaturvedi notes that this technology is the result of over two decades of research conducted at IIT Madras. The first year after the company's registration was dedicated to visiting potential clients to understand their needs.
The Folium Sensing system sends a pulse of laser light through the fiber optic cable. When a disturbance occurs in the cable, part of the light scatters back to the source. The time it takes for this light to return allows for the precise location of the disturbance to be determined.
The returning light carries three types of signals: Rayleigh scattering is used to detect sound, Raman scattering measures temperature, and Brillouin scattering determines voltage, i.e., the stretching or compression of the cable.
These signals generate significant volumes of data, which are processed by machine learning models using edge devices and cloud systems. Filters eliminate background noise, and the team's image recognition model identifies unusual changes. Upon detecting an event, the system generates an alert specifying the location on a Google Maps link.
The models were trained on test ranges at IIT Madras for application on pipelines, underwater objects, railway tracks, and bridges. The startup has also filed patents for its technology.
Chaturvedi states: 'Our AI can determine if a person is walking, if a bicycle engine, JCB, or a leak is occurring. We have trained it for all of this, and it indicates the location and the event happening there with an accuracy of about 96–97%.'
Folium Sensing offers five products, including Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS), and Distributed Strain Sensing (DSS). The DATSS system combines all three methods.
The company sells software and hardware to enterprises and government agencies in the oil and gas, defense, railway, and infrastructure sectors for comprehensive monitoring of industrial asset conditions. The company has begun implementing its technology in real-world scenarios. Folium Sensing supplied DTS units for a tunnel on the Mumbai-Pune expressway in partnership with Forbes Marshall. Additionally, it completed a project with TDK Ventures on controlling HVAC systems in 'smart' buildings.
Other projects are in the conceptual validation stage, including: pipeline leak monitoring with GAIL, CPCL, and IOCL; mine monitoring with Tata Steel; and bridge monitoring in Kolkata.
Folium Sensing has not attracted external funding. It is housed in the IIT Madras Incubation Cell and IIT Madras Pravartak Technologies. Over the next year, the startup plans to focus on data centers, border intrusion detection, pipelines, railways, and tunnels.
Chaturvedi added: 'Our first target is the Middle East, where we want to work with companies involved in oil and gas pipelines.' After this, the company intends to expand into Southeast Asia and Africa, and then to the USA, where it already collaborates with some clients.
Folium Sensing is part of the Tech30 cohort from YourStory—a showcase of India's most promising startups of 2026, presented at the TechSparks Bengaluru event.