Why 9.4 CGPA isn’t the Key to Innovation: The Founding Journey of Sensio Enterprises and the Orbyt Smart Ring

A high CGPA reflects academic discipline, but true innovation demands much more. In the real world, building impactful products takes resilience, collaboration, risk-taking, and the courage to navigate ambiguity. This is the story of how three first-time founders built a healthtech startup and India's first ECG-enabled smart ring.

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Image by KamranAydinov on Freepik

The CGPA Myth: Why Scores Alone Don’t Signal Innovation

The belief that great grades equal great success is deeply embedded - not just in college, but in hiring processes too. Recruiters scan resumes for overall scores and internships; proof that you can follow instructions and learn from professors. High CGPA holders are often assumed to be natural innovators. But in the real world, solving ambiguous, human-centric problems requires more than academic excellence. It calls for risk appetite, emotional resilience, and the ability to work with uncertainty.

That’s not to say top performers can’t innovate - many do. But innovation doesn’t follow a neat GPA curve. It rewards experimentation, discomfort, and persistence more than polished report cards.

From Student to Founder: How the Shift Happened

When I started college, I wasn’t aiming to be a founder. Like many others, I planned for a secure job, maybe a master’s abroad, perhaps even a PhD. I wanted to build a strong resume, and I did - through internships, projects, and campus involvement. But something shifted.

It wasn’t a sudden epiphany, but a gradual realization: I didn’t just want to study innovation - I wanted to build something real, from scratch.

Academia Gives You a Foundation, But Not the Full Toolkit

College gave me structure, exposure, and a foundational understanding of science. It gave me access to brilliant mentors - one of whom later became my co-founder. But the system was rarely designed to encourage failure, rapid iteration, or real-world problem-solving.

What truly helped were mini-projects, technical clubs, and hackathons - spaces where I could build with purpose and curiosity. I sought out every opportunity to go beyond lectures. I joined project groups and spent late nights soldering circuits and writing code. Working in a team on a real prototype taught me things a textbook never could: debugging hardware failures at midnight, dividing tasks, and making quick design changes when needed.

In hindsight, these were the most industry-ready aspects of the academic experience. On the other hand, rote evaluations, one-size-fits-all placements, and an overemphasis on academic accolades often fell short in preparing me for the complexities of the real world. What’s still missing is an intentional bridge between academia and applied innovation. More spaces that let students build messy, imperfect ideas, and less focus on topping the test needs to exist.

Building the Orbyt Smart Ring

Even before I graduated, these informal, academic projects evolved into a real startup plan. I teamed up with my classmate and a professor, both of whom had been part of these builds, and we formally founded Sensio Enterprises in 2019.  Our goal was simple: to make a real difference in healthcare.

We weren’t just experimenting anymore. We had to think about user needs, regulations, circuit miniaturization, and market readiness. We had to learn product design, medical certification needs, business planning and a hundred other things. At first, we focused on monitoring one vital signal: blood pressure (BP), believing that this could significantly impact people’s daily well-being. But as we continued on our journey, we realized that true health is about more than just one number. Other vital signs like heart rate, oxygen levels, and sleep patterns are equally important in giving an overall  picture of health and wellness.

With that understanding, we took a step forward in creating the Orbyt Ring, a device that monitors multiple vital signs, making it a comprehensive tool for proactive health management. Our goal wasn’t just to create another piece of tech; it was to design a meaningful solution that could address real-world health and wellness challenges.

From the beginning, we were driven by a desire to bridge the gap between cutting-edge technology and personal wellness. What began as a small team with big dreams quickly became a focused mission to help people live healthier, more informed lives. Today, Orbyt is more than a product. It’s a platform built entirely in-house, from hardware to cloud software , and powered by everything we learnt (mostly) outside the classroom.

Lessons Learned: What Truly Matters

Looking back, our journey taught us that innovation is about grit, not grades. High GPAs show you worked hard on exams, but building a product taught us how to work hard on problems that don’t have known answers. The skills that mattered included creativity, collaboration, and the willingness to fail and try again.  From our experience, here are qualities and practices that mattered most:

1. Real-world problem solving: Building Orbyt meant facing technical puzzles that textbooks hadn’t covered. Hands-on projects taught us to break big problems into solvable tasks.

2. Teamwork & communication: With three founders and later a team of 15, we had to share ideas and align quickly. Daily stand-ups and peer reviews became crucial habits.

3. Resilience through failure: Many prototypes failed. Each time, we treated failure as feedback and iterated. This resilience kept the project alive.

4. Continuous learning: We constantly taught ourselves new skills (RF design, human physiology, app UX). Learning beyond the syllabus was a daily necessity.

5. Industry collaboration: Engaging with mentors, internships, and incubators plugged our knowledge gaps. Their feedback was more valuable than any off the shelf lecture.

In short, innovation demands flexibility and action. A high academic score can get your foot in the door, but to create something new you must learn on the move. In my case, embracing hackathons, projects, and real-world training was the key. These out-of-class activities transformed me from a passive learner to a proactive builder. 

Today, as Sensio looks forward to scaling Orbyt, I carry those college lessons with me. Our ring is stylish, data-driven, and engineered with end-to-end in-house tech, but its true strength comes from a team that learned to innovate together, well beyond any report card. We hope our story inspires other students: chase grades, yes, but more importantly chase experiences. Join projects, hackathons, internships – build things for real. That’s how you’ll be ready to truly change the world.

This blog isn’t a takedown of high achievers or colleges. It’s a reminder that CGPA is a metric - not a verdict. My story began with projects built outside classrooms and dreams drawn on whiteboards. And it grew into a full-fledged healthtech product built in India, by a team that dared to go beyond the curriculum.

Yes, we built a wearable. But more than that, we’re building belief - in the potential of Indian R&D, in solving real-world health problems from the ground up, and in rewriting what it means to ‘qualify’ to lead and innovate. 

Remember that all the resources in the world won’t be useful if you don’t make use of it. The drive to learn and innovate has to come from within.