Together on the IT Highway

By Shreyasi Singh

Anupama Arya (L) and Puneet Vatsayan started their third venture out of a garage in
Chandigarh, true to the spirit of Silicon Valley that they had left behind.

When “serial entrepreneurs” Puneet Vatsayan and Anupama Arya moved back from the United States to Chandigarh in 2003 to take care of his ailing mother, they started missing the intellectual, almost nerdy, charm of Silicon Valley, where they had lived for nearly a decade.

“Chandigarh is a great place, but it is just not the Valley,” Puneet tries to explain. To ensure they were not missing out on the dynamic climate, the partners decided to create their own island of innovation, right in the backyard of their Indian home. “And that’s how Mobera struck root,” says 42-year-old Puneet, who by then had already co-founded two venture-backed IT services companies in the Bay Area with Anupama.

For a venture born as an afterthought, Mobera Systems has had a phenomenal ride. In addition to its unlikely home base in Chandigarh, this high-end “contract R&D” company also has offices in the United States and France. It counts several global marquee companies, mainly in the US, Europe and Japan, as its clients and develops cutting-edge products in mobile gaming, embedded technologies and bio-informatics for them.

Before becoming entrepreneurs in California, Puneet and Anupama, both graduates of the Thapar College of Engineering, had worked at bluechip high-technology firms, such as Lucent, Honeywell and Synoptics.

Mobera, their third venture together, was started with just Rs 1 lakh. And true to the spirit of a Silicon Valley start-up, it began operations out of a garage. It’s come a long way since then, growing organically at 100 per cent year-on-year. Says Anupama: “Our customers have funded and seeded the company.”

With their network of former colleagues and contacts in the field of high-technology, the couple were able to lay their hands on challenging product design work and deliver it out of a town that many of their clients had never even heard of! Now, Mobera has an equity base of Rs 10 crore. It is one of the few companies of its kind in the region, and was one of the first companies north of Delhi to be a member of Nasscom, a national association of software companies. Although, says Anupama, it has been “one heck of a journey”, it is establishing this culture of innovation that has been challenging, more than managing funds, or getting clients. In a company that needed the ingenuity of its people to thrive, spotting talent was really the game-changer.

“We initially got people with a US background because we were committed to bringing in the product development culture. We knew that for the kind of work we wanted to do, we needed the right flow, the right atmosphere,” recalls Anupama.

For example, one of their first projects was to build a central system for a Fortune 500 medical equipment company that wanted make the hospital bed, drug delivery system, endoscopic equipment and other systems in the operating room “intelligent”. This technology, claims Mobera, has been used to upgrade several hospitals in the US. Over the past seven years, the company has worked with more than 25 clients developing products such as this. These include an intelligent home design for IBM Research Labs and a hacker-proof secure transactions system for an innovative French firm. “People told us we would need to move to Bangalore to get the engineers we wanted because its pub culture and entertainment options had them hooked,” says Anupama.

So, the husband-wife duo trawled through the pubs of Bangalore to find engineers and understand what was important to them.

Interestingly, they found not one typical engineer in the pubs. This disconnect in perceptions was an interesting insight. It also helped them develop the perfect bait to get a star employee hooked. “The biggest draw, we realised, was the type of work you get to do, the importance of the job to your career. So we give them high-skill projects, which enables them to get out of the maintenance, coding cycle,” explains Anupama.

While Anupama is driven by generating new IP and monetising ideas, Puneet, as a charter member of the Chandigarh chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), and a part of the Indian Angel Network, immensely enjoys nurturing entrepreneurs. “Being your own boss, creating your own world is very exhilarating,” says Puneet.

In fact, it was Puneet’s itch that set the ball rolling for them. While quitting his job at Centigram Communications in 1999, Puneet had requested his boss, who knew the venture capital world well, to put him in touch with the right network. Roughly, a month later, Puneet got a call from Bob Kagle, a veteran of the venture industry, and an early investor in e-Bay. “I was overwhelmed. This guy was prime time. I told Anu I couldn’t go alone to somebody like him. So, she came along. As luck would have it, he liked what we offered,” Puneet recalls. In less than a week, they received a term sheet and set up VivExchange.com, a B2B company in the healthcare space.

Although doing business together has meant “an almost perfect alignment of interests” for the couple, Anupama confesses how challenging it has been to make it work, especially in Chandigarh. “Puneet and I ran companies together in the US as well, but things are conducted in a different way here,” she adds. They found the personal and professional spaces decidedly separate in the US, but that did not happen in India. “As a couple running a business, you are expected to do things together. The relationships between husband-wife entrepreneurs are more fused here. And that was a big challenge,” she points out. Puneet seconds her opinion. “It’s been tougher for Anu in India because people outside, like our CA or lawyers, would assume she would sign on documents I had already signed on,” he says. Between their distinct, but complementary, skill sets, they have structured the company in such a way that they each take final calls on what they are responsible for. Anupama is in charge of product development, product engineering, quality control and human resource issues, while Puneet handles all sales, marketing and business development concerns. “These areas don’t really work together, so we lead fairly separate lives at work.”

According to Puneet, understanding the skills each partner brings to the table as individuals, and making sure each one pulls his or her own weight are critical ingredients for the success of any partnership. Being happily married doesn’t really help here, he adds. “You could have a happy married life. But, to succeed in business, you need to respect the skill set of the other person. It’s not about being cosy with each other.”

It’s this understanding that has kept their relationship afloat—and Mobera successful. Buoyed by increasing mobile and internet penetration, the firm’s confident of growing rapidly over the next few years. “We have always had the people. Now we are at the point that we have a growing market, even in India for our products,” claims Anupama, who has been conferred the Athena India Leadership Award in 2007, as well as the All India Outstanding Woman Entrepreneur Award in the same year.

Despite their ambitious plans, they have no plans to seek funds to shore up their services. “VC money comes with lots of pulls and pushes. We have taken it before. But at this point, it will probably be a path we come down to last.”

It would make sense to believe them. If they could engineer an afterthought the way they have, a determined path is more likely to route them to a perfect sunny valley.

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