Tech Start-up -- The climb's behind us

Chitra Phadnis

BY the time Aarohi Communications took shape, the ''fear of

start-ups'' had already set in. VCs were hesitant to part with their money and even potential employees, preferred the relative safety of their jobs with large companies to throwing their lot with a brand new start-up.

''It was sheer grit and determination that saw us through,'' says Shanti Subbaraman, one of the four promoters of the company.

Relating her role in the story, she says she quit Wipro in January 2000, when she found there was no scope to realise her product ideas.

For five years she had worked in the company's product development group until it wound up in 1997. She moved to Enthink which also wound up later.

One of her ideas was a product for storage networking. Shanti Subbaraman found others across the world who were uncannily thinking on the same lines. When she hooked up with the others - Sriram Rupanagunta, Ashwini Choudhary, Mukund Chavan, and Amar Kapadia - her idea grew into a chip for storage networking.

The Wipro network, the IIT Madras network, and the famous Silicon Valley bonhomie helped them reach the right people. The team met Kumar Malavalli through yet another ex-colleague, Sanjay Anandram, of Jump Startup, who would also later help out on the funding.

Shanti Subbraman sounded out her ideas with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Kumar Malavalli and Jayashree Ullal, (of Cisco) and validated her ideas.

Once the technology received the thumbs-up, it was time to go shopping for funds, but the VCs were wary.

The bubble had already burst and they wanted to see a customer before they committed to any funds. Kumar Malavalli's Brocade was one customer, but get two, the VCs said. Then, get a wider range of customers. Once that was done, they wanted to ''see'' the product.

The team was caught in a bind. To show the VCs the product, they needed money to hire people to build it.

They made do with several small investors in the interim, but the big money was still not coming in, despite the Malavalli backing.

''Looking back, all that probing was actually good for us,'' says Shanti Subbaraman. It crystallised their idea, honed their strategy and made it more market-oriented.

''We were stressed out at that time, but finally, we were ready with all the answers by the end of it.''

In April 2001, they had done everything, but somewhere something was wrong. They got on board Amesh Divatia, a seasoned entrepreneur, who had started up a company, Pipeline, and sold it to Cisco. But even Divatia had not promoted a company in tough times.

It still took three months for the money to come in and for the company to finally take off.

It was headquartered in the US for practical reasons with development out of India. ''Ideally I would have liked it to be a fully Indian company,'' says Shanti Subbaraman.

People had doubted whether a product this complex could be successfully developed and marketed out of India. ''Why don't you build something that can spin money in a couple of months instead?'' she was asked. But the team was clear that it wanted to build the storage network chip, a very new idea (though a few others have already jumped on to the bandwagon).

The chip is planned to sit on the gateways that connect the Internet to fibre channels. The gateways allow storage to be accessed across the Internet.

The Aarohi chip is planned to sit in these gateways and switches and intelligently manage the networks.

''A chip and a card will do instead of a Pentium server at every switch,'' Shanti Subbaraman explains.

The struggle is still not over. The US office was flooded with applications, but India had a problem getting senior people, because of a certain wariness of start-ups. ''I am just starting to get people,'' she says.

The company recently closed a round of funding of $15 million. ''This should last us till 2003. As the product is expected to roll out next year, we may start making money and not need another round of funding,'' she says.

chitphad@thehindu.co.in