What led you to the setting up Addverb Technologies and how do you rate the journey so far? Also tell us the factors contributed your success.
While working at Asian Paints, we got an excellent exposure towards industrial robotics and automation. We had the opportunity to set up some of the most advanced and highly automated factories and warehouses for Asian Paints. Between 2013 to 2016, multiple triggers such as the launch of Make In India, implementation of GST, Rise of E-Commerce and penetration of organised retail into small towns and cities made us believe that the time was right for Indian Supply Chain to use technology to make the most of these changes. I along with my colleagues Mr. Sangeet Kumar (alumnus of IIT Kharagpur), Mr. Prateek Jain (alumnus of IIT Mumbai), Mr. Bir Singh (alumnus of MNIT Jaipur), Mr. Satish Kumar Shukla (alumnus of Tata Institute of Social Sciences), Mr. Amit Kumar (alumnus of NITIE & PEC), started this venture in June 2016. Our journey till now has been very exciting and fulfilling, our initial few days were filled with a lot of sessions with a host of customers. We have been able to build a world class team of 400 engineers and have bagged more than 100 customers, including the likes of HUL, Marico, Reliance, Flipkart, Amazon etc. We always had the philosophy of creating more awareness about technology in our prospective customers, irrespective of the fact that they will choose us or not for the particular technology implementation. This helped us build very good credibility with our customers. Subsequently, we got opportunities to do some pilots & PoCs, which helped us win the confidence of the customer and helped us bag our first few orders. We were always very sure that we will manufacture our own hardware and build our own software, in a sense, we will be a startup which is into both hardware and software, and this helped us to customise our product offerings leading to their widespread adoption. Our extensive experience of implementing several large scale automation projects also helped us in designing very innovative solutions for our customers.
How do you assess the scope and potential for robotics and automation technologies across the manufacturing and supply chain companies / segments – the size of the market and expected CAGR? Could you also throw some light on the demand drivers?
As discussed above, there have been some key triggers in last five years which have changed India’s supply chain and manufacturing sector, such as the rise of E-Commerce and it’s spread into every nuke and corner of the country after internet data revolution, the growth of organised retail in major towns and cities, implementation of GST which led to the consolidation of small warehouses, the high real-estate prices in cities which forced the consumer warehouses to outside the city & supply and demand fluctuations.
These triggers necessitated a flexible supply chain to accommodate the demand surges & reliable warehousing operations that help in fulfilling the requirement within the stipulated time and in an accurate manner.
