Stuck In A 45-Minute Xerox Queue, Two Chennai Friends Built A Printing ATM

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 so long?

The answer, they realised, was not necessarily a shortage of printers. It was how people accessed printing. Every transaction still depended on a person being available behind a counter, a shop being open and a queue moving along.

QwikPrint was built around removing some of those bottlenecks.

Printing without the counter

The process is designed to be fairly straightforward.

A user scans a QR code, uploads a document from a phone or laptop, selects options such as the number of copies and print settings, makes a digital payment, and receives the printout through an OTP-based system. The company says the entire process can take about 60 seconds.

The kiosks are also intended to operate without staff and around the clock, which addresses another familiar campus problem: needing a printout after the nearby shop has shut for the day.

There is a less visible concern too. Students and professionals often print forms, identification documents, applications, and other files they may not want a stranger handling. QwikPrint says its system uses encryption and privacy-focused measures to keep uploaded documents accessible only to the user.

From a college frustration to a startup

QwikPrint was launched in June 2025. Since then, its kiosks have been installed at campuses including Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Dhaanish Ahmed College of Engineering and PSG iTech, with the company reporting nearly 45 kiosks across cities including Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi as of May 2026.

But getting there was not as simple as putting a printer inside a box.

The founders had experience building software, but the hardware brought a different set of challenges. Manufacturers were often willing to produce hundreds of machines, but finding suppliers prepared to make just a handful of prototypes for testing was harder. Convincing universities, suppliers and potential partners to trust two young founders was another hurdle.

Could printing become an on-demand service?

For something as ordinary as a printout, the larger idea is perhaps less about replacing Xerox shops and more about changing where and how the service is available.

QwikPrint sees potential for these kiosks in places where people regularly need documents in a hurry, including universities, hospitals and government offices.

Whether self-service printing becomes as commonplace as the ATM remains to be seen. But the problem that prompted the idea is remarkably familiar.

Sometimes, a startup does not begin with a futuristic technology or a grand prediction about the future. Sometimes, it begins with standing in a queue for 45 minutes when all you wanted was one sheet of paper.

Sources:

‘Printing ATMs: Chennai based entreprenuers build printing kiosks to ease the struggle of crowded xerox shops’ by Rakshitha Priya G for The New Indian Express, Published on 20 May 2026.

QwikPrint

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