We recently turned three. While it may not seem like a big feat in the industry, it is a big milestone for us, given how we started and how far we’ve come. TheMathCompany’s first employee, Prajwal Revanasiddappa, talks about how this journey unfolded.
“Reflecting on the start-up scene in late 2015 and 2016, the general enthusiasm and sentiment towards the country’s tech start-ups had fallen steeply. Experts said India was edging towards its first start-up bubble burst – and they could not be more correct. A well-funded grocery delivery startup financed by Sequoia Capital and a top E-commerce retailer shut down its delivery operations, while a unicorn food delivery app laid off 300 staffers[1]. While 2015 had recorded an 87 percent increase in the number of budding startups when compared to the previous year, this number dropped by 67 percent in 2016[2]. It was safe to say that 2016 was not a good year for tech start-ups, who hit the lowest of lows.
Skeptics and the risk-averse might say that this wasn’t the best time to kick-start a start-up, but it wasn’t so much about the timing as it was about the vision for our founders – Sayandeb, Aditya, and Anuj. The founders envisioned a company that would enable viable and valuable analytic transformations so organizations could become analytically self-sufficient – a proposition that no other solution provider in the market had offered up until then. And that’s how TheMathCompany, an Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning firm, came to be.
At TheMathCompany, we did not want to merely be passionate purveyors of analytics – but have our goals and values go hand in hand; believing in work as a baseline to narrative, value as a means to valuation, and standardization as a means to customization.The three co-founders and the leadership team, with an experience of over two decades in the industry, truly believed in doing the right thing for the customer as the only way to go forward. While we, early employees, joined because of the faith we had in the co-founders and their vision, the same faith continued to trickle down to the growing TheMathCompany fraternity. And we owe a big part of the success that we’ve seen at such an early stage to all our people. It’s not every day that you come across a team that is so tuned in and passionate about the corporate vision, and readily goes beyond their call of duty to deliver excellence – we think it comes with loving what you do.
In just three years, we’ve outgrown four offices and have a 300-member team. In a time when tech start-ups had been struggling to secure funds and remain cash-neutral, we managed to stay cash-positive throughout our journey. What’s more, is we doubled year-on-year revenue from the start and continue to have engagements with our earliest clients.
It’s interesting because, we never started with revenue as our focus, even though it was the end goal. It has always been about offering cutting-edge holistic solutions; and we’ve transformed our organization and the scope of our services from time to time, to meet this purpose. While we were a pure data science firm when we began our operations, it wasn’t long before we realized the pressing need for data engineering in the market and built up our capabilities from within, so we could offer holistic solutions to clients. Through events like Hashtag and Enclave, we built an ecosystem that is passionate about data science and analytics and where knowledge-sharing flourishes – a network of future clients and employees. Speaking of employees, we’ve always kept the focus on getting a good mix of people on board – both seasoned professionals and young blood – so we can offer both expertise and depth of the solution. Mentorship and extensive training have been instrumental in upskilling our employees so they can guide next-gen analytical transformations. Today, we continue to heavily invest in innovation, so we can keep guiding clients in their journey towards analytical self-sufficiency with the best-in-class solutions; we believe that the end of services is not the end of the relationship – it is the beginning of a new level of trust.
TheMathCompany’s authority in the industry has been a classic story of entrepreneurialism, hard work and a team of hustlers. In just three years, we have transformed into a robustly growing organization in the AI and ML industry. Greater heights and bigger milestones await. We’ll get there.”