Made in India, Built for the World

I spent years watching Indian engineering talent build products for other people's companies. The best backend systems at major Silicon Valley firms? Built by Indian engineers. The infrastructure that keeps Wall Street's trading platforms running through market panics? Indian engineers. The recommendation engines at streaming companies, the fraud detection at fintech startups, the core search ranking at companies everyone uses daily — Indian engineers built enormous chunks of all of it.

But the products themselves — the brands, the platforms, the things users actually see and pay for — those were always someone else's.

That bothered me more than it probably should have.

Why Bengaluru, why now

The obvious answer is talent. India produces roughly 1.5 million engineering graduates every year, and Bengaluru specifically has a concentration of enterprise software experience that's hard to match anywhere. People who've spent a decade inside SAP, Oracle, Infosys, Wipro — they understand the ugly reality of enterprise systems in a way that founders in San Francisco often don't. They've seen the actual ERP implementations, the messy data migrations, the workarounds that become permanent. That knowledge is invaluable when you're trying to build something better.

But talent isn't the only reason. Cost structure matters too, and I won't pretend otherwise. Building from India means we can take our time. We don't need to raise a $40 million Series A to survive long enough to find product-market fit. We can build carefully, talk to customers, iterate, and not panic about runway every quarter. That patience changes the kind of software you end up making. It's less "ship fast, fix later" and more "get it right, then scale."

There's also proximity to manufacturing. India's manufacturing sector is growing fast, and these companies need modern enterprise software desperately. They're running on spreadsheets, or on SAP implementations from 2012 that nobody wants to touch, or on homegrown systems held together with prayers and VBA macros. We can sit across the table from these customers. We can visit their factories. We can see the problems firsthand instead of guessing from 8,000 miles away.

The perception problem

I'm not going to dance around this. When enterprise buyers outside India hear "Indian software company," many of them think outsourcing. They think body shops. They think cheap labor doing someone else's specification work.

That perception isn't entirely unfair — the Indian IT services industry built its reputation on exactly that model. But it's increasingly outdated. Zoho built a genuine SaaS empire from Chennai. Freshworks went public. Postman became the standard tool for API development worldwide. Zerodha changed how an entire country trades stocks. The product companies are here. They've been here. The world is catching up to that reality, slowly.

We still run into it, though. A prospect in Germany asked us last year if we could "customize SAP" for them. We're not an SAP consulting firm. We're building our own platform. The confusion was genuine, not malicious — it just reflected how deeply the "India equals services" mental model is embedded.

Changing that takes time and good work. There's no shortcut.

What "built for the world" actually means

It's easy to say "global product." It's harder to mean it. Here's what it means for us in practice:

Multi-currency from day one. Not an afterthought. Not a plugin. Our data models handle currency conversion, exchange rate fluctuation tracking, and multi-currency reporting natively. Because if you're a manufacturer in Gujarat selling to buyers in Germany, Brazil, and Japan, currency isn't a nice-to-have — it's the difference between knowing your margins and guessing.

Multi-language, but not just translation. Running the UI through a translation API is the easy part. The hard part is date formats, number formats, reading direction, cultural expectations around data density. A dashboard that works for an American user who wants four big numbers and a chart might frustrate a Japanese user who expects granular detail. We think about this constantly. We don't always get it right.

Multi-regulatory from the start. GST in India, VAT in Europe, sales tax that varies by state in the US. Data residency requirements that differ by country. GDPR, India's DPDP Act, California's CCPA. If you bolt compliance on after the fact, it's always fragile. We build the compliance layer into the data architecture.

None of this is glamorous. Nobody writes breathless blog posts about date format handling. But it's the difference between software that works in one market and software that works everywhere.

The thing I actually believe

Enterprise software doesn't have to be ugly. It doesn't have to make you dread Monday mornings. It doesn't have to feel like it was designed by a committee in 2005 and hasn't been touched since — even though, in most cases, that's exactly what happened.

Indian companies can build world-class products. Not just world-class services. Not just world-class engineering teams that make other people's products better. The whole thing. The product, the design, the brand, the experience.

I know that sounds like a pitch. Maybe it is. But I've spent enough time inside enterprise software — the good and the catastrophically bad — to know that the bar is lower than people think. Not because the problems are easy. They're genuinely hard. But because so much existing enterprise software is so deeply mediocre that doing even moderately better feels transformative to the people who have to use it eight hours a day.

We're building from Bengaluru because this is where our team is, where our first customers are, and where we can build something durable without someone else's timeline. Whether it'll work — honestly, I don't know yet. Ask me in two years. But the attempt feels worth making.