GREEN STARTUP CO-FOUNDER
MITRA SACHITHANANTHAN
YEAR 4, COMPUTER ENGINEERING WITH A 2ND MAJOR IN BUSINESS
If he were to be a superhero, Mitra Sachithananthan would be Captain Planet.
“In 10 years, I hope that a newspaper headline will read ‘How Singapore became the zero food waste capital of the world’ and mention how other countries are following our lead,” the computer engineering student says.
Mitra leads startup ChangeX with other NTU students to save the earth with tech. To tackle the problem of food waste, the team went to restaurants to survey their end-to-end processes and learnt that they needed help to make data-driven decisions that would optimise food inventory management and reduce wastage. ChangeX is developing PanTree, an app that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to address this issue.
“Based on a restaurant’s data, we use machine learning to forecast how much food it should buy and cook in a week, to cut down on leftovers. We predict when items in the inventory are at risk of expiring before being sold or consumed. For example, if cream, mushrooms and rosemary are about to expire, the app suggests to the chefs that they make mushroom soup,” he explains.
This refreshing idea netted ChangeX up to $45,000 in grants from DBS Foundation, NTU’s CoLab4Good Fund and the College of Computing & Data Science’s innovation lab. The team aims to launch PanTree this year.
Mitra (far left) is co-founder of ChangeX, a startup that uses AI to reduce food waste. His team includes NTU students, as well as a recent graduate, who bring diverse expertise to the business, such as in AI, business, accountancy, computer science, environmental science and sociology.
Green beginnings
“I spent my childhood in Singapore hiking, kayaking and painting flowers and animals. Mother Nature is close to my heart, so I want to inspire and enable people and organisations to take up sustainable practices,” Mitra says. His passion also led him to become the NTU Students’ Union’s first Sustainability Executive in his third year in NTU, rallying various parties to reduce energy consumption and waste on campus.
“To me, the key to sustainability is technology. It’s the most impactful and cost-efficient way to change how we do things and reduce carbon emissions and waste. That’s why I decided to study computer engineering and start ChangeX,” Mitra shares.
Mitra plans to use the $5,000 grant from the NTU Talent Scholarship to drive meaningful impact in the green space.
He says: “NTU has so much talent in its students, faculty and staff. What we need to do is to bring willing hearts and minds, knowledge partners and financial powers together to roll out tangible solutions to environmental problems. We must empower our people to create a community-led green revolution.”
Visual: DALL-E
HEY! tapped DALL-E for a creative interpretation of Singapore as a “zero food waste capital” that could materialise with the help of Mitra’s startup, ChangeX.
This story was published in the Mar-Apr 2024 issue of HEY!. To read it and other stories from this issue in print, click here.
