Sometimes what drives us is what makes us who we are. Through uncertain changes and wavering wills, the one who stands tall in all odds creates a stigma that remains incomparable. The everlasting legacy a person can leave behind derives from their laser focus efforts and ability to do things differently. One such extraordinary person, driven with passion and imparting excellence throughout the country is Shivendra Kumar.
As the CEO and Co-founder of Chipmonk Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Shivendra has made his mark in the Tech-industry. Being an avid reader in technology trends, his expertise in telecommunications makes him a tech-evangelist and a true business leader. What makes him suited to create innovative solutions for customers is a very good mix of technology, delivery and extensive sales experience. Shivendra is known for being a people person and his drive makes him apt for building strong and long-term relationships with the clients.
He was very interested in Math and Physics since childhood. He hails from a village and that didn’t stop him from attaining a rank of 2180 in IIT JEE. After attending Bachelor’s in Geophysics in IIT Kharagpur for two months, he changed his mind and opted to study electronics and communications in NIT Warangal where his interests lied. After graduation, he went on to work with ABV and spent a brief stint. With a disappointing experience he left ABV and joined Wipro for working on AT&T class five switches. Shortly, he went to USA and worked there for a certain amount of time. He also worked on satellite communication system and optical fiber network in Wipro after coming back from the US.
Shivendra’s wish to do something on his own was too great and he wanted to build new IP’s from India. This wish resulted in the birth of Chipmonk Technologies.
The Journey of Chipmonk
With the help of some of his colleagues, Shivendra established the company in 2013. Now, he spearheads the business by building, maintaining and executing customer relationship. With a total of 14 employees, the firm is headquartered in Bangaluru, Karnataka.
“We at Chipmonk, pride ourselves with cutting edge IOT and AI solutions, by building a smart city, smart appliances and Industrial IOT solutions,” says Shivendra. Claiming to be big in IoT and AI Innovation, Chipmonk has a partnership with the largest company in India for deployment of the smart city solutions. It is also partner to Swiss lighting company involved with intelligent office lighting system. “We are expanding our horizon, while developing AI solutions for a UK-based Company right now and growing simultaneously,” adds Shivendra.
The company built its first industrial IoT product in September 2015 which was for fault prediction and condition base maintenance, built in analytics at that time. Chipmonk’s main focus was on four different areas namely smart city, smart things, industrial IoT and artificial intelligence. Now, the complete attention has been shifted towards AI and building predictive modeling for smart appliances. It is also involved in energy saving charge, energy forecasting with fault reports and drill-down of fault reports along with prediction of faults.
The Up-hill Battle
With each passing day, India is witnessing tech-enabled advancements like never before. Flooded with noteworthy opportunities, running a tech start up in the country is not an easy task. Investors like to invest in E-commerce and other business yet for more practical reasons; they avoid putting money in tech-based industries. “The journey has been quite challenging, sometimes raising funds has been a big challenge,” claims Shivendra discussing the issues faced by him as a tech-entrepreneur. One of the key issues encountered by Shivendra was financial backing for the sustenance of the company. The other problem was acquiring long term customers in which the firm was quite successful. “But we are still looking forward to acquiring few more long customers,” tells Shivendra.
All The Way Up
“What drives me to work every day is to build great solutions for customers,” informs Shivendra while talking about the motivation behind his success. He considers himself fortunate enough to imbibe excellence as a culture and to deliver it in his workplace quite early in the business. He took a lot of inspiration from his grandfather who was a great doctor from BHU. His grandfather received a lot of respect from all around and this became the driving force for Shivendra to strive for success. “I am married and have a beautiful daughter named Tia. She obtains gold medals every year in Math and Science Olympiad. I am very proud of her. I can see she is carried on that consistency of excellence,” rejoices Shivendra while telling this story.
Industry Dynamics with Sage Advice
According to Shivendra, last few years in India has been kind of mixed as per the industry scenario. There have been momentary challenges such as demonetization and application of GST for medium and small businesses in India. The environment MSME’s have been very difficult and lots of small scale enterprises have closed down due to this. There needs to be better environment for MSMEs, particularly for startups.
For the next generation of entrepreneurs – Shivendra establishes some ground rules by saying, “Be a tough nut. Before you start your business, you have to be technically capable and self-sufficient. Also, you have to be legally and financially savvy so that no one can take advantage of you. You have to be everything when you are an entrepreneur. It is not easy and not for the faint-hearted, definitely. But once you take up the journey go full throttle, go all the way; be willing to give your 100% and more. Then only you will see success.”
Shivendra Kumar: A Tech-Enthusiast Driven by Excellence!
