The Smart Techie Smartron happens to be an Indian company with an aim to build a global brand.

The founding passion is always driven by an idea and it can never be replaced by any other feeling. Same happened with Mahesh Lingareddy. Lingareddy had started thinking about Smartron in 2013 and launched it in 2014. For a couple of years it remained less visible as
they were busy building the team and other capabilities quietly in Hyderabad and Bangalore. It presented itself in the public domain in March 2015. Talking about his IoT start-up, Lingareddy says, "Under this platform, we have tried to incorporate the best services for our customers from personalised health to smart homes to enterprise, infrastructure, farming, etc." In March 2017, it reported a revenue of $ 10 million, which is not a bad start for a product start-up. Smartron happens to be an Indian company with an aim to build a global brand. Since inception, it has raised close to Rs 100 crore in capital.

So far, it has launched three products with its own backend platform including tphone and tbook. They have also been shipping its tablets to Saudi government exclusively. Apart from Middle East, its other markets include South-East Asia and Korea. The company claims to sell more phones overseas than in India because of its quality and an attractive price point. On what makes Smartron stand out, Lingareddy says, "We focus at the backend more to provide a hassle-free experience to our customer base." Smartron happens to be the second entrepreneurial venture of Lingareddy, the first was Soft Machines Inc which got acquired by Intel for close to Rs 2000 crore in September 2016. He says, "I basically wanted to flip the US story and see that why can't we have such companies."

(This article was first published in the May issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here)