On most college campuses, there is one queue students know almost too well.

You have an assignment due in an hour. The document is ready on your phone, but the nearest Xerox shop has a line spilling out the door. Someone is printing 50 pages. Someone else is trying to get a project bound. You only need two pages, but there is no skipping the wait.

And even when there are several shops around campus, the problem often remains the same: more shops, more queues.

For Chennai-based entrepreneurs Pranav Senthil and Subeshwar P, this everyday frustration became the starting point for QwikPrint, a startup building self-service printing kiosks that work a little like ATMs. Instead of handing a file to a shopkeeper and waiting, users can upload a document, choose their print settings, pay digitally and collect the pages themselves.

A familiar problem, looked at differently

The idea came from experiences the founders knew personally.

During college, Pranav recalls having around 18 Xerox shops on campus, yet waiting about 45 minutes for a printout, whether he needed one page or 100. Subeshwar had a similar experience when he urgently needed to print a medical insurance bill and spent nearly an hour finding a shop and waiting for it.

That led them to a deceptively simple question: if there are already so many Xerox shops, why do people still have to wait........

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