CHENNAI: Chennai has always been a market that entrepreneurs state as “having room for improvement”. It is seen as one city that is not glamorous enough to compete with other matured and saturated markets in the country. However, Zifo RnD Solutions’ CEO and co-founder Raj Prakash says that Chennai has almost everything that a good business needs. The alumni of College of Engineering, Guindy, says that the state capital caters to businesses that are not necessarily glamorous, but instead fall under the category of ‘silent majority’.
Chennai sentiment
Speaking to TNIE, Prakash says, “Chennai is a very interesting city. If you want to look at infrastructure, access, liveability, market, etc., the city ranks in the top category. In the Business-to-Business (B2B) space, both in terms of capability and mindset, Chennai has its place. This is a focussed environment for businesses that’s not flashy.”Zifo RnD is a data-driven science company that began its operations in 2008, bang in the middle of a global recession. Prakash said that it was a good time to start a new company. “When you start at tough times, it brings out your best. We saw an opportunity to deliver something that would be highly valuable in the market, rather than be a generic provider. From 2010, we are operationally profitable. The Chennai mindset has led to disciplined growth,” he says.
Steady growth
So, has it helped his firm beat the economic slowdown that has affected the nation? Prakash said, “Ninety-eight per cent of our revenue is export-driven. We are reasonably immune to it (slowdown).” True to his words, the firm has had very good growth in the past two years. “We had a CAGR of over 40 per cent consistently for the last five years. We are looking at growing by five times to USD 100 million by 2023 (at present the firm stands at USD 20 million) and establish a larger presence globally,” he says.
Bound to fail
Running a bootstrapped firm successfully is not something all entrepreneurs do. Prakash explains why most start-ups are bound to fail. “It is a fact that a lot of start-ups are destined to be failures. That is how the funnel works. If your business fundamentals are clear, money is always available in the market. A lot of people who lack the fundamentals try starting a business. It is fine to do that, provided there is a culture where people can have a failure and pick up from there. I don’t think we appreciate value failures so much. We are trying to adopt to a western model without accepting the culture that comes as part of it,” he says.
Foreign presence
Zifo has offices in the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Singapore, Japan and China. Ask him about the firm’s approach to a foreign market, Prakash says, “As an organisation, we are not dependent on a few customers or geography or a specific line of business. The idea is that unless we are closer to the market, we cannot make an impact. If you look at top 50 bio-pharma companies, 43 operate from the US, Europe and Japan. So, wherever there is R&D, we wanted to exist.” But the firm is now done with expansion and has set its focus primarily towards on strengthening its operations and localisation.
About major disruptions that are on their way into the industry, he says, “A lot of new things are coming in with respect to bio-pharma R&D. Many data-driven research and a lot of things are simulated and modelled before analysis to reduce cycle time and increase output. We also have new scientific technologies coming in, gene editing being one among those. We are also looking at genomics.”