$100M In 4 Years! IoT Startup Happiest Minds Aiming To Break Records In India

Very seldom you come across stories when a 60 year old entrepreneur establishes a start-up, which is aiming for $100 million revenues within 4 years!

Happiest Technologies, which was founded in 2011 by 60 year old Ashok Soota is well on it’s way to create some new records. Last year, they reported annual revenues of $50 million and achieved break-even last quarter. As of now, they are clocking revenues of Rs 26 crore every month, with 100+ clients and a team of 1450 specialists.

Last year, this company was ranked # 2 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India 2014 and ranked #13 as Asia’s fastest growing technology firm in the Deloitte Annual ranking.

Ashok Soota, founder of Happiest Minds Technologies is a veteran entrepreneur. He co-founded MindTree in 1999, which rose to become a 9000 employee behemoth with annual revenues of $350 million. He left MindTree in 2001 to launch Happiest Technologies in an entirely new niche: Internet of Things & Cloud technology.

By selling his stake in MindTree, Ashok was able to raise $52.5 million as Series A capital.

Happiest Minds use technology to offer a comprehensive IT services platform for businesses, which includes business intelligence, Unified communication, Mobility solutions, Cloud based technological innovations, Social Media and Big Data. Ashok Soota has been able to form a solid team which comprises of Sashi Kumar, CEO (who was earlier CSC India Head) & Narayanan Venkatraman who was the CFO of Sonata Software and more.

As of now, 64% of its revenues comes from USA and they have operations in United Kingdom, Singapore, Canada and Australia. Interestingly, they have plans to clock 25% of their revenues from Intellectual Property solutions, which means that they are not completely into services but focusing on their own customized products as well.

Happiest Technologies has plans to go public within 2 years.

Fastest $100 Million Startups In India

Flipkart was probably the first Indian startup from eCommerce niche which crossed fastest $100 million revenue mark. They breached this milestone within 5 years of their birth.

• Redbus was founded in 2006, and they crossed $100 million revenues during 2012-13 financial year
• Snapdeal clocked $100 million revenues somewhere between 2012 and 2013
• Myntra was founded in 2007, and they crossed $100 million revenues in 2013
• Ola Cabs was founded in 2010, and they crossed $100 million revenues in 2014
• Mu Sigma breached $100 million annual revenue mark in 2012

This success story of a technology based startup, once again proves the fact that Indian startup is right now at an exciting stage of growth. Already declared as third fastest growing startup eco-system in the world, around 800 startups are founded every year in India, and in the last three years, more than $1 billion worth of mergers and acquisitions have taken place.

It is estimated that by 2020, more than 2.5 lakh people would be hired by startups.