Happiest Minds bags nine clients in first five months
In just less than five months since its inception, Happiest Minds Technologies, the IT services start-up promoted by Ashok Soota, the co-founder and former chairman of MindTree, has added nine clients including two Fortune 100 companies. The company says the portfolio of clients is distributed across the US, UK and India even though the deal sizes are not larger in size.
"We are in existence now for about four and half months. Today, we have about 170 people in our rolls. Most of the leadership positions—in sales, practice, delivery, industry group and senior management levels—have been filled. We have now about nine clients including few banks and large technologies companies of which two are Fortune 100 companies," said Vikram Gulati, CEO & MD of the Bangalore-based company in an exclusive interview to Business Standard.
Gulati, who was earlier heading Intelligroup as the CEO & president joined Hapiest Minds in September last year along with some other core team members.
The interesting thing about Happiest Minds is that despite being a start-up, it has started focusing on India from the day one. The company has three clients in India now. Besides, it is looking at establishing presence in some of the European countries outside UK, Australia and Singapore.
Gulati says that now that the building blocks are in place, the company is looking at how to quickly ramp up the accounts (client engagements). While its existing employees are mostly lateral (people with experience) hires, the company is planning to go for campus hiring starting from the next campus season.
"We are hiring and going after new accounts. Now, it becomes a game of execution. Our model has been validated. People are wanting to talk to us. Now the game is how quickly we can get the maximum number of customers in the shortest period of time," said Gulati.
Happiest Minds has taken an office space at Electronic City area which houses leading technology companies. The 55,000 square feet of space can accommodate about 550 people.
On the company’s goal of achieving $100 million in five years, he says all the company had earlier stated is to become the fastest growing IT services company. "We also wants to go public in 6 to 7 years. We have decided to work on a three-year cycle, and anything beyond that is an aspirational goal," he added.
Is the company size posing as a deterrent on pitching of bigger clients or larger size deals? He says the Happiest Minds was not looking for larger deals of $100 million or plus. "The kinds of deals we are looking for, we are able to get them. The clients we are talking to work with multiple vendors and they want to work with us also." he added.
On being a small company is not a limitation for pitching of deals," he added.