Monetising innovative solutions

Conversations with his boss at Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC) where Sanjay Deshpande, a research scientist at the time, learnt about the plight of technology R&D in India, inspired him to become an entrepreneur.

EC Subbarao, who was director at TRDDC, explained to Deshpande that the problem lay in the average Indian research scientist’s inability to commercialise his innovation(s) to provide solutions to the end customer.

Sanjay Deshpande, 43, is the brain behind Uniken, which works with banks and financial institutions to help them interact with their customers on a scalable, secure private network platform called REL-ID, Uniken’s flagship product.

The platform provides enterprises with templates for creating standard business apps, with a secure digital user experience across devices (desktops, tablets, laptops, mobiles) and operating systems (Windows, iOS, Android.)

REL-ID supports multi-factor authentication and provides enterprise users with remote access to all business critical apps, user information and sensitive data through a private, closed network.

“REL-ID ensures that both the bank and its customers involved in online transactions are protected 100 per cent against identity thefts and phishing attacks,” says Deshpande.

A first generation entrepreneur, Deshpande studied B.Tech at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute and received his Masters in Computer Science from the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He is the founder CEO and Chief Innovation Officer of Uniken, and has a team of 120 people.

He started the company in 2003 as an R&D lab in Pune, and bootstrapped it with ₹20 lakh of his savings and $100,000 in angel funding from Ajay Dubey of Infosys.

“Science is about personal creativity while sales are about understanding the customer,” says Deshpande.

“Customers have plenty of creative reasons not to buy from you, but you need to understand their problems before make your sales pitch.” Dubey’s and Deshpande’s relationship goes back to 1999, when Deshpande’s wife introduced them to each other. Deshpande’s interest in commercialising innovative ideas and marketing technology R&D impressed Dubey, who offered him a job at Infosys.

Deshpande left TRDDC and joined Infosys in 1999 where he led its mobile computing initiative in Europe, and for the first time handled business development of life-sciences in the US. He created a team with 15 new engineering graduates, and worked with them till 2001. He left Infosys that year and worked with Persistent Systems for a year before he decided to start his own venture. “People who have the ability to employ others, should not be employed themselves,” he says.

Using the idea of “commercialising science”, Uniken worked with several multinational corporations providing them R&D services in the areas of embedded systems, high-performance computing and security. In 2007, after a meeting with the Director of DRDO, Hyderabad, who told him that the need of the hour is to create a massively scalable, closed private Internet network with military-grade security for India, Deshpande and his team decided it was time to build it.

That was the turning point for Uniken, which transitioned from an R&D services company to a product company with its flagship Internet platform called REL-ID, built over 18 months.

Deshpande was introduced to a former RBI Governor, who directed him to Bank of India. Partnering with HP, Uniken bid for a tender for two-factor authentication for BoI and won it. BoI started using Uniken’s REL-ID platform and apps to conduct secure banking transactions in 2008. Today, three of the top six banks such as State Bank of India and Axis Bank, and various financial institutions such as Birla Sun Life and Reliance Capital, rely on REL-ID, says Deshpande.

Uniken has 1.3 million users across banks and enterprises in India and is targeting a user base of 100 million over the next five years.

The company has offices in Pune, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and Israel. As of 2013, Uniken earned $1.2 million in revenues and acquired two US patents. The company’s revenue has been growing 100 per cent year-on-year.

“We want to take REL-ID to global markets starting with the US in November. Therefore, we decided to get a stamp of approval for REL-ID by security experts in Israel. After two months of testing our product and not being able to break into it, Hacktics, which is EY’s international security testing team based in Israel, gave us the thumbs up. Hacktics has agreed to be our customer reference site,” says Deshpande. Uniken has received its first round of investment of $5 million from Nexus Venture Partners to support its global foray.

Deshpande’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: “Quit your IT services jobs and experiment more. Although product innovation is a lengthy and painful process, the rewards are very satisfying. “You are helping to build brand India as a hardcore R&D technology hub.”

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