Borrowed from SAMPADA old editions – for the 10th Anniversary Special Issue – Interviews section. This one is of Madhu, Praveen, Pradeep, 2009 CSE.
Cumulations is a technology driven company with the team consisting mainly of developers and designers. The company was founded in 2012. The Founders—Madhu, Pradeep and Praveena are all from same batch – 2009 CSE, UVCE. We thank them for sharing their startup experiences with us and hope it will motivate more students.
Team Sampada: How would you describe your journey as an Entrepreneur so far?
Madhu, Pradeep & Praveen: One of the best things about UVCE is its People. Friends you make here constitute a big part of your life. We friends always fancied the idea of joining the same company and working together as colleagues. Unfortunately, things didn’t happen that way as we got placed into different companies. We could only think of entrepreneurship, as an alternate solution to have college buddies working under the same roof.
We had to go through a year or two in our corporate jobs to realize that we should take the idea of entrepreneurship seriously. Again it was UVCE seniors and batchmates like Rajesh & Rohit (who had their stint in entrepreneurship started already) gave us the much-needed confidence to take the plunge.
Being developers at heart, we started coding a product by combining Location features to offer Social Networking solution to people. We made this an opportunity to work on technologies that we secretly loved, but were not able to exercise in our offices. Having entered into ‘Startup zone’, we also got selected to the incubator of IIM Ahmedabad. In the incubator, we got lots of opportunities to ponder over the business viability of our solution. We also pivoted our solution to cater exclusively to Shopping complexes and Malls.
However, our products did not succeed in procuring satisfying revenue streams and soon we saw an opportunity with another set of customers. We realized that we can add lots of value to customers who already have a business use case but need technical services to support & enhance their offerings. Thus we entered into Services domain.
In Services, we were inclined towards IoT domain as it provided us an interesting perspective to see hardware and software solution stacks working in tandem. We were quick to adopt IoT as our main service expertise and delivered projects on BLE, WiFi stacks. It opened us opportunities to associate with Wearable devices and App controlled Smart home appliances.
Today we are working with the good number of clients spread across North America and Europe. Our clientele also includes some of the big brands from India. We are a self sustained team with about 25 people team now. We are keenly associating with developments in Artificial Intelligence and looking forward to providing more solutions in this domain for coming years.
Team Sampada: Please tell us about a memorable incident you remember from your time at UVCE.
Madhu, Pradeep & Praveen: Since the second year of engineering, our classes were held at Lecture complex. Next, to Lecture complex, we had a solo tree where we used to hangout in free time. I cherish all the fun conversations we had there. I also remember VKR sir’s classes on Monday mornings which were always interesting as he used to share anecdotes from Ramayana, Mahabharata. It was always amazing to see him craftly connecting these anecdotal incidents to the subject at hand.
Team Sampada: What else impressed you about UVCE?
Madhu, Pradeep & Praveen: I think the kind of people we come across in UVCE is what gives its uniqueness. You have a Principal contributing all the money from his new book to the statue of Visvesvaraya, You have friends some of whom are learning German from a nearby community, who have patents already, Who are working on some big projects externally etc. I am sure one will find inspiring individuals all around and that to me was very helpful.
– Madhu, Praveen, Pradeep(Cumulations), Sampada-98
