Sumukha Nadig

Sumukha Nadig is a Bengaluru-based entrepreneur and engineer who co-founded Remster, an Indian sleep-technology startup, while completing an MS in Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. IIT Madras awarded him two prizes at his 2025 graduation: the Institute Research Award, which recognised him among the top five MS scholars from a cohort of more than 200, and the Chinmay Deodhar Prize for Entrepreneurship, given for his contributions to NIRMAAN and the Centre for Innovation alongside the founding of Remster.⁴¹³ He holds gold medals in triathlon from 2024 and 2025 competition seasons.¹

Education

Nadig completed a bachelor's degree in engineering at Anna University, graduating as the class gold medalist.¹ He then enrolled in the MS program in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at IIT Madras, forgoing a job offer at the time, motivated — in his own words — by a desire for "intellectual stimulation."⁴ The decision put him in the IIT Madras research and innovation ecosystem at a moment when the institute was expanding its incubation and student-startup infrastructure significantly.

Aerodynamics research

At IIT Madras, Nadig worked under Prof. Santanu Ghosh on computational fluid dynamics of bio-inspired flight — specifically the unsteady aerodynamics of plunging airfoils at low Reynolds numbers relevant to flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles.² His MS thesis produced a paper, "Lift enhancement via leading edge vortex delay in flapping flight utilizing kinematic modifications," published in Physics of Fluids (Volume 36, Issue 11) in November 2024.²

The paper investigates "peak-shifted" kinematics — skewing the sinusoidal curve governing a plunging airfoil's effective angle of attack to delay the formation of a leading edge vortex. Unsteady simulations on the SD7003 airfoil at a Reynolds number of 10,000, conducted in Ansys Fluent, showed that peak-shifted kinematics produced a 4.5% increase in mean lift and a 7.9% reduction in mean drag compared to a baseline sinusoidal profile, at the cost of a 42.9% increase in power requirement.² Nadig presented related work at the AIAA Aviation 2024 conference in Las Vegas.³

In April 2025 IIT Madras gave him the Institute Research Award (MS) — one of five awards given to a batch of more than 200 MS scholars.⁴ He described his advisor's role in planting the intellectual seed: "My research advisor in the aerospace department, Prof. Santanu Ghosh, planted the idea of insect aerodynamics in me. With his guidance, I researched how flapping wings help insects fly, and then built a drone which could mimic that."⁴

WingFlap and student innovation

Parallel to his graduate research, Nadig led WingFlap, a student team at IIT Madras's Centre for Innovation (CFI) dedicated to building flapping-wing drones — unmanned aircraft that generate lift and thrust by mimicking insect or bird wing motion rather than using fixed rotors.¹⁵ The team's work connected directly to his aerospace research: where the academic paper explored computational simulation of wing kinematics, WingFlap gave him the context to translate that simulation into physical hardware with students.¹⁵⁴ He also worked with NIRMAAN, IIT Madras's student pre-incubation body, which would later facilitate key institutional introductions for Remster.¹³

At his convocation in September 2025, when Nadig received the Chinmay Deodhar Prize for Entrepreneurship from IIT Madras, he cited his contributions to NIRMAAN and CFI — including WingFlap and then Remster — as the basis for the award.¹³ On stage he quoted a line from Casey Neistat, the American YouTube filmmaker-entrepreneur he had followed since 2016: "You've never really made it — with each success comes a bigger, more ambitious goal." He applied it to a broader philosophy of career: using first-principles thinking to pivot between fields and embrace interdisciplinary work, a pattern he said his IIT Madras degree enabled by teaching him how academic research works.¹³

Founding Remster

Nadig co-founded Remster — initially registered as NidraTech — with Shubham Gupta while both were enrolled at IIT Madras. The startup makes a temperature-regulating bed cover that uses water circulation and an on-device machine learning model to manage thermal conditions during sleep.¹⁰ The idea draws on a body of sleep science linking core body temperature to sleep stage quality, and Nadig's aerospace background in thermal fluid dynamics gave him a technical foothold in the hardware side.¹⁰²

The company's first hardware MVP debuted in January 2025 at the IIT Madras Research Park (IITMRP) during a sustainability-themed event called "Ground Zero for Net-Zero," co-organised around climate and energy themes. Nadig pitched NidraTech as a solution for sleeping without an air conditioner even at 42°C, and said the product consumes only one-third the power of a typical AC.¹¹ The pitch generated pre-orders at the event. Nadig noted learning directly from Sonam Wangchuk — the Ladakhi engineer and climate activist known for ice stupa water conservation — who was also present at the event.¹¹

The second product iteration, built in April 2025, was a hands-on exercise: Nadig wired the electrical harness himself, Gupta assembled the console, and a team member named Kaushik handled firmware.¹² Nadig documented the process with the argument that hard-tech founders must build manually: "There's a lot to learn while building. From the way a button should be placed, to the brightness of a display."¹²

By September 2025, the team had logged more than 1,000 hours of real-life user testing across summer heat, monsoon humidity, and air-conditioned environments.⁶ Nadig described the ML stack's challenge: "We've been learning to decode user comfort across varying conditions — summer day heat to rainy day humidity, person-to-person preferences, and the effect of air conditioning."⁶

Recognition and institutional moments

At the IIT Madras convocation in July 2025, Nadig and Gupta demonstrated Remster to National Security Advisor Ajit Kumar Doval, who attended as chief guest. Most graduates received their certificates in seconds; the founders discussed their product in detail. "The value of building a full-stack tech product in India was emphasised, while we explained the co-relation between sleep and body temperature," Nadig wrote.⁹ He added: "Our impact would be realised if Remster enhances productivity and cognitive abilities through sleep, for National Intelligence staff. That would be the ultimate testimonial."⁹ The meeting was arranged through NIRMAAN and the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at IIT Madras.⁹

Later that summer, both founders attended Sangam 2025, the flagship alumni event of the IIT Madras Alumni Association, where they pitched the institute's director Prof. Kamakoti Veezhinathan and had informal conversations with Prashant Pitti, CEO of EaseMyTrip, and Tarun Mehta, CEO of Ather Energy.¹⁴ Mehta shared his experience building a direct-to-consumer brand in India — advice Nadig and Gupta described as directly applicable.¹⁴

In November 2025, Remster won the NIDHI PRAYAS grant from the HTIC MedTech Incubator at IIT Madras — a Department of Science and Technology scheme for the most innovative startups in a given year, granting up to ₹10 lakhs per innovator.⁷ Nadig thanked Mohana Priya and Dr. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam from HTIC for taking the early bet.⁷

By December 2025, Nadig announced that Remster's headquarters had moved from Chennai to Bengaluru.⁸ He credited the IIT Madras ecosystem for much of the company's early trajectory and named mentors Vivek Sarda, Akash Anand, and Himanshu Verma as figures he and Gupta "look up to."⁸

In February 2026, Nadig posted that the team had begun developing its custom PCB board entirely in-house, from design upward, in order to enable OTA firmware updates and intelligent alarm functionality — capabilities the MVP-era hardware did not support.¹⁶ He acknowledged the risk plainly: "It will probably break a few times before it works."¹⁶

References

1. Sumukha Nadig | LinkedIn profile(accessed Apr 22, 2026)
2. Lift enhancement via leading edge vortex delay in flapping flight utilizing kinematic modifications — Physics of Fluids, 36(11), 2024(accessed Apr 22, 2026)
3. Sumukha Nadig — AIAA Aviation 2024 presentation | LinkedIn(accessed Apr 22, 2026)
4. Sumukha Nadig — Institute Research Award 2025 | LinkedIn(accessed Apr 22, 2026)
5. Sumukha Nadig — Awarded for MS work and startup by IIT Madras | LinkedIn