The Bangalore-based start-up, founded by a team that was earlier part of the products division at Infosys, has built a software product based on artificial intelligence. It is now live on the portals of ICICI Bank and is expected to rake in a slew of new customers across telecom, retail, insurance, healthcare and airline industries.
"The long experience with Infosys apart from general techniques, marketing and my contacts with other banks helped me to bring value to the company," says Sharad Hegde, who led the development of Finacle, Infosys' core banking solution, during his two decade stint with the IT service major. He was the first non-founder employee of the firm.
As entrepreneurship gains pace across the country, supported by greater risk capital and a new class of angel investors , more employees of technology majors are leaving their cushy jobs to launch their own ventures. "We are observing an increase in number of IT employees launching their own ventures," says Nasscom vice-president Sangeeta Gupta. "There are some 1600 tech start-ups in the country and about 80% of them are being launched by experienced IT employees, working in India and overseas." India Emerging profiles a bunch of start-ups spawned from the high-tech crucible within some of the country's most exciting technology firms.
Customer XPs
"Customer relationship management software is mainly built on transactions. Ours is based on intelligence that works based on our likes and dislikes," says Rivi Varghese, founder-CEO of CustomerXPs, whose team spent 6-9 months reading up on Class-12 mathematics and books on psychology to build the product. Along the way, the team sought counsel from the couple who formed part of the iconic early team of employees at Infosys. Clearly, it was a connection that worked for both mentors and founders.
"Customer XPs is founded by a mature set of people. Coming from Infosys, we have the same kind of value system -trust, mutual respect and passion," says Hegde. He and his wife Anuradha Hegde are now the primary mentors of the start-up, besides having put in angel investment of about `3 crore.
"This product that Customer XPs is building will pull out information from credit cards and loans," says Anuradha Hegde, who spends about two days a week with Sharad Hegde at the Customer XPs office mentoring the team. "It pulls out the essence of your relationship with the bank." The founders gave up salaries for three years, relying on the hard scrabble ways learnt at Infosys where they went tight on cash but pushed the envelope on quality of the product.
Prakat Solutions
After co-founding the software testing services group at Infosys, India's second-largest software services firm, and growing it to 8,000 people and $300 million in revenues over eight years, Anuradha Biswas quit her job in December 2009 to launch her own venture, Prakat Solutions, which offers software testing services. The Bangalore-based start-up is building a network of qualified testers to perform independent testing over the cloud and aims to have 10,000 testers in the coming years.
This crowd-sourcing model includes students, housewives, retired professionals and people on sabbatical, who can remotely access, process and store information on computers 'in the clouds' or data centers. "For example, if the nature of work is in the area of energy, we will outsource the work to some professor who has expertise in that area," says Biswas, chief executive of Prakat.
"I decided to go on my own as tier-I companies concentrate only on bigger customers and I was interested to tap small and medium enterprises, which is a huge opportunity," says Biswas.
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