All along, as a young developer into IT, was fortunate to work in a more competitive landscape of building niche solutions to Treasuries of Banks across the globe, Large and SME segments of Corporates. Technology always intrigued me on the value it delivers to an Organization. Having seen World class Treasuries processing millions of transactions which need a sophisticated Product or Solution backing it with robust scalability, performance and usability.
After working more than 20 years delivering value to the businesses across the Globe with products I was heading with my teams, I had decided to embark on a more exciting journey of entrepreneurship to start 3Cortex. When I sat to think of what I want to do, I couldn’t think of anything but to be in the solutions building space which is my core strength all along.
Problem identification
The genesis for SAYA Platform to become a strong Data Player to solve niche challenges to bring the Operational Efficiency to the business is come from what I read from highly respected research firm quoting “Data generated by an Organization in next 3 years is going to be more than what it generated in past 30 years”.
This reinforced my belief on what I have seen over the past 20+ years on how the data is increased and major bottlenecks are always in processing the Operations. In the case of Treasuries or Payment systems, I could clearly understand how the Operations team grows to take care of the post transaction in each domain. The main challenges which Organisations face are:
- Huge dependency on manpower, as they scale their business volumes
- Manual interventions for ~80% of what is done, leading to mistakes which could be as severe and detrimental to businesses (Avoiding Common Mistakes in Financial Reporting | CFOShare)
- No one system which is solving the loose ends in the Operations space dealing with Operations teams
Innovation to the CORE, and not a #metoo player
When we started to research the market players, Opportunities and target market segments. Operations being a common spoke for all the businesses, what we realised as a team is not to be a #metoo player. This has set the ground rule for SAYA Platform, to bring value through the unique way we want to solve the problems. Some of our basic principles are:
- Bring our own secret sauce (which is our experience) in the domain to create the Technology innovation under our AI/ML models
- Use the latest technology to our advantage where all our competitors are more at a huge tech debt
- Operations is always looked as cost centre, so to bring the value by creating a Platform which is self servicing and zero configuration approach
Bootstrapping a Company – much harder than what I thought
While my past experience looked glorious, I started as a developer immediately after completing my masters in IIT Mumbai. I had learnt, explored the World, built teams and businesses in my tenure of 20+ years of Corporate job.
Starting the entrepreneurial journey is like starting from scratch, this time I didn’t even have the endorsement of a great college like IIT Mumbai making me even more vulnerable. What has driven me every day is to make a difference with the idea and the people who trusted me. When I was taking the baby steps, there was no option but to learn the technology all together one more time, so this drive made me a full-stack developer/ Data scientist and I am happy that the initial 2 versions of SAYA Platform are totally written by me.
While I was building the SAYA Platform as part of bootstrapping, I had done consulting projects and some high-end service projects in parallel with few customers who had believed me, even when I was a one man army during 2020. Slowly but steadily, if I see the stage where I am now, there are dedicated teams in Engineering, Architecture, UI/UX, Operations, Marketing and Sales who are focusing on the SAYA Platform growth journey. Am thankful to the team who was behind me and trusted my instincts, customers and partners who treated us with respect and accepted us purely for the value/ knowledge we bring without comparing with big players in the market.
All these experiences, made the base for SAYA Platform and 3Cortex core values:
- Product (Innovation or value we deliver to businesses SAYA Platform)
- People (One who creates #Team, accepts #Customers and #Partners the Product)
- Process (My belief is if I manage my Product and People well, deliver unique experience and value then business/ Process is generated as by-product)
Road ahead
I am in a marathon of an entrepreneurial journey, I feel optimistic on how we progressed till now and the IP we built and the customer experience we brought in. I can say we created our own fan base of our customers which is the key and we intend to stick to our basics and stay true to our mission to make SAYA Platform delivering value by #MakingBusinessEfficient.
We are running with a mission to deliver the efficiency of 200% to all our customers with ROI from Day1 using SAYA Platform. Last but not least, making the SAYA Platform adopted by 9% of World Organizations is our goal in the next 10 years.