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e-con Systems — a leading player in embedded camera solutions for a range of industries — is in the process of raising $10 million from private equity (PE) firms as the 18-year-old Chennai-headquartered company seeks to grow its revenue to $100 million in the next four years, up from $26 million this year, supported by a favourable global order outlook.
“This will be our first fund-raise programme. We are in the final stages of discussion to raise money from PE investors. We are already a profitable company and are looking for investors who will help us in our overseas expansion, in addition to providing funds, which will be used for business development and R&D,” Ashok Babu, Founder and President, e-con Systems India Pvt Ltd told BusinessLine.
The company expects the embedded vision to completely change the landscape of how cameras and sensors are used in the devices. “Given the current order visibility from our customers, we hope to hit the $50 million revenue mark in the next two years, he added.
e-con was co-founded in 2003 by Ashok Babu, Harishankkar and Maharajan Veerabahu, who returned to India after working on embedded platforms for a leading Japanese tech firm and handling numerous projects to start their own company. In 2004, Maheshwari Dhayanandan joined them in the management.
The company has built over 250 designs, which have been converted into products for mass production. It has shipped over 2 million cameras to 90 plus countries globally.
e-con was focussing on providing design services for a decade. In 2014, they decided to shift to products and as a result revenue mix changed – products which made up 10 per cent of its revenue in 2013-14 grew to 90 per cent in 2021-22.
Supporting business expansion
The company has primarily been delivering vision and camera solutions to three industries — retail, medical and industrial. “There are only a few companies in the embedded vision area and we are the leader now. If you take any embedded platform, we would have supplied our cameras,” said Babu.
He said e-con is an R&D-driven and value proposition company. About 20 people are working on end products, 60-70 people are focussing on camera-related R&D, while we also have an engineering team of 70-80 people who focus on customisation.
The money from PEs will be used to support business expansion in key markets such as the US, European Union, Japan and Korea. About 95-98 per cent of its revenue come from exports. “We will set up a business development team comprising application engineers and marketing personnel in these markets,” said Babu.
Overall, the company will increase staff strength from 430 to 1,000 in the next two to three years. It is planning to hire more engineers to support the expansion.
e-con also sells products online . Through its webstore, the company sells 20-30 cameras per day. These are delivered to people in several markets. It has also built warehouses in key markets. “We get over 2,000 overseas visitors to our webstore every day. This is a growing segment and we will strengthen the focus on e-commerce sale of our products,” he added.
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