For Joy Sebastian, Tony Thomas and their company based in Kerala, a decade of work has finally paid off. Until Thursday, not many outside the industry knew about 10-year old Techgentsia, based out of an infopark in a small village Pallippuram near Alappuzha, that has been working on research and development in video-conferencing solutions.
That changed on August 20, when Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Electronics and IT announced the results of the challenge to develop a video conferencing solution. The jury declared Vconsol, a product developed by Techgentsia, as the winner.
This Kerala-based startup, which has been providing video-conferencing solutions to clients in the US and in Europe will now be provided with financial support of Rs 1 crore with an additional Rs 10 lakh towards operations and maintenance for next three years. Vconsol will also be adopted for use by the government through a contract.
“We have been here and doing video conferencing research for the last 10 years, but no one knew us in India but now, this is the best thing that has happened to us,” Joy, who is the CEO of the company told TNM.
Joy Sebastian, who has been in the space since the time he completed his post-graduation in 2000, said that this win was a big appreciation for a company from Alappuzha. Techgentsia was founded in 2009.
With this financial muscle and recognition from the government, Vconsol is set to take on massive players such as Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex and JioMeet, especially at a time when video-conferencing has become an essential tool for work as well as personal life.
For the challenge, the government received 1,983 applications, of which 12 were shortlisted and given Rs 10 lakh to develop the product. Techgentsia’s product, Vconsol, beat out 11 other shortlisted applicants.
A team of 20 worked on Vconsol for four months to finetune the product for India and the challenge.
Vconsol can support upto 80 active participants and upto 300 passive participants. This product, Joy says, has all the features that Zoom’s enterprise solutions does.
“The engine of the video conferencing was there, we fine-tuned it for India and we made customisations,” Joy says.
The app now supports eight Indian languages apart from English as requested by the challenge, but going forward, the company is looking at expanding that to add more languages.
With this win in hand, Joy says that they are now looking at taking this product to the B2B (business to business) market first.
“We are looking for B2B market because it is an enterprise premium grade solution. We would like to go with the enterprise market with video conferencing solutions customised for them. Maybe, we will go to the public market with another solution that could be used by them by downloading it,” Joy says.
He adds that they are looking at customising the product for other verticals such as edtech and telemedicine.
Three other applicants also won Rs 25 lakh each and will be given a developmental contract as potential products to mature their products in the next three months.
“These three products will be further analysed by a technical committee and subsequently, the Ministry of Electronics and IT will recommend to onboard all selected four products on GeM,” a release by the MeitY said. These are Sarv Webs from Jaipur, PeopleLink Unified Communications (Insta VC) from Hyderabad and InstriveSoftlabsPvt Ltd (HydraMeet) from Chennai.