Sramana: Let’s talk about customers. Who did you receive product validation from? Krish Kupathil: Currently we received validation from operators like Vodafone Spain and Vodafone Group in Europe. From the handset vendors we have received validation from Samsung who is distributing it in their store and on their latest secure platform. The validation is from
Sramana: When you decided to get into the enterprise mobility space, what is the first area you decided to focus on? Krish Kupathil: After a lot of brainstorming and a couple of enterprise customer inquiries, we found an area of interest. Several of our enterprise customers came to us asking how they could access their
Sramana: Was that engagement what you used to get a product developed and launched? Krish Kupathil: That was just one example. We did other engagements as well. We did an engagement for Samsung and have customized devices for operators across the world such as Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. Orange mobile had made a conscious
Sramana: Given the market flux that you observed, how did you start AgreeYa Mobility, and what was the premise of creating that company? Krish Kupathil: There were 18 of us, of whom 13 were in India and four in Korea. I was the only person here in the U.S. We felt that since mobility markets
Sramana: What is the future of the fat startup situation. Of course the market is skewed towards lean startups. Good angels now want to invest in deals that have traction. Ash Ashutosh: If you get back to the essence of business and the ability to articulate return versus risk, there is a lot of money
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Krish Kupathil is the founder and CEO of AgreeYa Mobility, an enterprise mobility and mobile system integration company. AgreeYa Mobility provides solutions for collaboration and communication products for mobile platforms, and has a flagship product lknown as Onvelop. Prior to AgreeYa Mobility, Krish was the vice
Sramana: What did you position Actifio to be when it emerged as a company? Ash Ashutosh: There is a lot of data storage sold because people love to protect, share and analyze their data. People spend more data making copies of data and managing data than they do producing data. They spend 5 to 13
Sramana: The financing market has gone away from fat startups. Everybody wants deals with traction. If you have a company that requires significant amounts of money to prove validation, how do you get that to market? Ash Ashutosh: This is a pivotal issue to this day. It is the core of culture. I am a