Shubham Gupta
Co-founder of Remster; engineer and MS student at IIT Madras
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Shubham Gupta is an engineer and co-founder of Remster, an Indian sleep-technology startup he founded alongside Sumukha Nadig while both were MS students at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.19 His background spans electric vehicle energy systems and embedded hardware — a research arc that runs from a 2020 paper on regenerative braking energy in two-wheelers through a graduate MS program at IIT Madras focused on Li-ion cell lifecycle.23 At Remster he led the company's engagement with the HTIC MedTech Incubator, completing a DST NIDHI PRAYAS prototype development project — a completion confirmed by a post from the incubator's own LinkedIn account.4
Gupta's published engineering research centers on electric vehicle energy systems. He co-authored a paper in 2020 with S. Sabarad titled "Quantification of regenerative braking energy in a two-wheeler incorporating various duty cycles," presented at the International Conference on Computational Performance Evaluation (ComPE 2020).3 The paper models how energy recovered through regenerative braking varies across different real-world riding patterns — a topic with direct relevance to extending range and battery life in small electric vehicles such as scooters and motorcycles. As of April 2026 the paper had 2 citations and an h-index of 1 on Google Scholar.2
His LinkedIn profile lists participation in Shell Eco-Marathon Asia 2018 in Singapore — the annual student engineering competition in which teams build and race ultra-energy-efficient vehicles, with the winning team determined by the distance traveled per unit of fuel or energy.1 The competition draws student teams from across Asia and requires both vehicle design and systems engineering, giving competitors practical exposure to drive train efficiency under competitive conditions.1
At IIT Madras, Gupta's MS research focused on Li-ion cell lifecycle — indexed on Google Scholar under his IIT Madras institutional email address.2 His LinkedIn profile notes that the work involved building a data acquisition system and deploying it on a two-wheeler electric vehicle, suggesting hands-on instrumentation of real hardware rather than purely simulation-based research.1 This engineering approach — physical measurement on deployed hardware — carries through directly to his role in Remster's hardware development.
Gupta co-founded Remster — initially registered as NidraTech — with Sumukha Nadig while both were enrolled at IIT Madras. YNOS lists both as the two founders of the entity, incorporated in Chennai in 2024.9 The startup makes a temperature-regulating bed cover with water-circulation hardware and an on-device machine learning stack for adaptive thermal control during sleep.6
The connection between Gupta's EV background and Remster's thermal product is not superficially obvious — he moved from battery lifecycle research to sleep-tech — but the underlying skill set transfers: both domains require embedded hardware instrumentation, power management, and sensor-based feedback loops operating in real-world conditions.16 Gupta's LinkedIn profile describes the rationale simply: "At Remster, we're building sleep solutions that bring people closer to nature, even as..."1
Gupta led Remster's engagement with the HTIC MedTech Incubator at IIT Madras, completing the DST NIDHI PRAYAS prototype development project there.45 The NIDHI PRAYAS scheme, run by India's Department of Science and Technology, funds hardware prototype development with grants of up to ₹10 lakhs per innovator; recipient startups must remain enrolled in an approved incubation program for the full grant duration of up to 18 months.5 The HTIC MedTech Incubator at IIT Madras is one of the scheme's approved hosts, and specialises in health technology and biomedical devices.5
The completion of Gupta's NIDHI PRAYAS project was confirmed when the HTIC published a LinkedIn post naming him as a graduating "Prayas EE" (Early Entrepreneur).4 Separately, co-founder Nadig announced in November 2025 that Remster had also won the NIDHI PRAYAS grant itself — suggesting the two engagements tracked different phases of the incubation programme.13
Gupta's involvement in Remster's hardware development has been direct and physical rather than supervisory. In April 2025, when the team built the second iteration of the product inside the IIT Madras campus, Gupta assembled the console unit himself while co-founder Nadig wired the harness and a team member named Kaushik handled firmware.10 Nadig documented this process with the argument that hard-tech founders must build by hand: understanding the product from a placed button to a display brightness setting requires doing the work oneself.10
By September 2025, the team had accumulated more than 1,000 hours of real-life user testing of the bed cover, with Gupta and Kaushal Harish leading the ML and hardware validation effort.12 Testing covered summer heat conditions, monsoon humidity, varying air conditioning environments, and person-to-person thermal preferences.12
In February 2026, Nadig posted that Remster had begun designing a custom PCB board entirely in-house — from the circuit design upward. The stated goal was to enable over-the-air firmware updates and intelligent alarm functionality that the MVP hardware could not support.15 Gupta was named as a co-author of the update.15
At the IIT Madras convocation in July 2025, Gupta graduated alongside Nadig. Both demonstrated Remster to National Security Advisor Ajit Kumar Doval, who attended as the ceremony's chief guest.8 Gupta graduated at the same ceremony.8 The session was arranged through NIRMAAN and the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; IIT Madras Director Prof. Kamakoti Veezhinathan was present and supportive.8
Gupta authored the public account of the team's experience at Sangam 2025, the flagship alumni event of the IIT Madras Alumni Association.11 The event, which he described as "a blast," featured a personal pitch to Prof. Kamakoti Veezhinathan on the floor of the alumni gathering.11 He recounted two informal conversations that stood out: Prashant Pitti, CEO of EaseMyTrip, offered product feedback from a user perspective during what Gupta described as "a natural conversation." Tarun Mehta, CEO of Ather Energy, shared practical knowledge on building a direct-to-consumer brand in India — advice Gupta characterised as directly applicable to Remster's trajectory.11 He wrote: "It actually hit us how resourceful the IITM Alumni ecosystem really is."11
By December 2025, Remster had moved its primary operations from Chennai to Bengaluru, where Gupta and Nadig continue to build the product.14 Prior educational details beyond the IIT Madras institutional record — pre-IIT schooling, hometown — are not documented in independently sourced material as of this writing.24