Mr Ashok Soota, who recently quit as the founder Chairman of MindTree Ltd, has started a new company called Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt Ltd. Mr Soota, Chairman and Managing Director of the new venture, said that his aim was to make Happiest Minds the fastest IT company to touch the $100-million mark.

The company would have six lines of businesses: IT services, R&D, software product engineering, remote infrastructure management, testing, and consulting.

“For ten years, there has been no highly successful IT services company,” Mr Soota said. While the company was announced today, he said that it would be launched around five months from now.

Regarding the timeline, Mr Soota said that even as late as April 1, he had not shared his plans with the VCs. He said that it would take around six weeks for him to get funding, and since he had enough funds to run the company for the initial few months, he would not have to divest his MindTree stake during that time.

While the company would take some time to go public, Mr Soota said that the standards of corporate governance followed by his company would be similar to a publicly-listed company. Stressing that there was no non-compete clause with MindTree, he said, “Whoever wants to reach out to me can reach out to me.”

Regarding his plans for becoming the fastest company to get to the $100-million mark, Mr Soota said that he wanted to target large segments like BFSI and sectors that are undergoing a transformation such as media, retail, entertainment, energy and healthcare.

While Mr Soota is yet to reveal the names of his second rung of command, he said that Wipro's joint ex-CEOs, Mr Girish Paranjape and Mr Suresh Vaswani would not be a part of his new venture