Bridges, railway tracks, and pipelines often stretch across long distances, making them difficult to monitor. Most conventional sensors measure conditions at a single point and need a power supply at that location. Chennai-based Folium Sensing is developing a way to monitor entire stretches of infrastructure without installing powered sensors along the route.

Founded in 2024 and based at IIT Madras Research Park, the startup uses fibre-optic cables already laid for communication. According to CEO and Co-founder Sanidhya Chaturvedi, its technology can detect sound, temperature changes, and strain at points along a cable extending 100 km or more, using equipment connected at just one end.

Chaturvedi graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from IIT Madras in 2026 and leads the company with three co-founders. CTO Venkatesh Varadhan is a 2007 electrical engineering alumnus of the institute with 20 years of industry experience. Professor Balaji Srinivasan and Professor Krishnan Balasubramaniam, who has co-founded 14 startups, are the non-executive co-founders.

Chaturvedi says the technology is the result of more than 20 years of research at IIT Madras. The first year after incorporation was spent visiting potential customers in the field to understand their requirements.

Folium Sensing’s system sends a pulse of laser light through a fibre-optic cable. When the cable is disturbed, some of the light scatters back towards the source. The time taken for the light to return helps determine where the disturbance occurred.

The returning light carries three types of signals. Rayleigh scattering detects sound, Raman scattering measures temperature, and Brillouin scattering measures strain, or the stretching and compression of the cable.

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