18 Oct 2018  |   06:30am IST

Goan start-up crushes Tata Crucible, registers a ‘Seynse-ational’ win!

The team from Seynse Technologies was crowned national champions at this year’s edition of India’s toughest and longest-running corporate quiz competition. This is the second Goan team to win the national finals in the history of the prestigious competition

 

It was a proud Sunday for Goans this weekend, as

a local start-up team went on to win the national finals of the Tata Crucible Corporate quiz contest. Tata Crucible, now in it’s 14th edition, is India’s most prestigious corporate quiz competition, and typically draws participants from some India’s most well-known corporate and tech companies. This year’s line-up included teams from TCS, Deloitte, Capgemini, Amazon, Ola, Oyo and Reliance Jio. What makes their win all the more commendable is that Team Loansingh was picked from a pool of 70-odd employees, whereas almost all their competitors had teams drawn from a pool of 5,000 - 10,000 employees at least.

With this win, Loansingh enters the Crucible Corporate annals as only the second Goan team to win the national finals. The first was Savoir Faire (noted local quizmasters Rajiv D’Silva and Harshvardhan Batkuly) back in 2010.

Loansingh is a digital lending platform operated by Seynse Technologies, a Goa-based fintech venture that has attracted some of the best talent and most experienced leaders from renown financial organisations across the country. Team-mates Siddharth Misra and Prasad Shetty also crossed paths here in Goa, after joining the Seynse team in 2015.

The hard-fought finale which took place in Mumbai yesterday evening, included all 8 regional winners: Capgemini& SAIL from the East; Deloitte & BHEL from the North; Edelweiss & TCS Pune from the West; and Loansingh& TCS Chennai from the South. The nail-biting finale was hosted by Giri Balasubramaniam, better known by his pseudonym, PickBrain and among India’s most well-known (and toughest) quizmasters, and the final clincher was a typical ‘Giri-type’ question, based on little-known nuggets of trivia connected through 3 or 4 unrelated events or personalities.

Talking about the achievement, Siddharth Misra said, “We’re super excited by the victory, especially after we came so close to it last year. We just knew we could win the finals, and we prepared more rigorously this time, which has clearly paid dividend”

In the 2017 edition, the duo had won the Goa round of the pan-India competition, but lost out to the team from Kotak Bank in the regional finals in Mumbai.

“Quizzing has always been a passion for us, and it’s so great that I’m able to pursue it with such exceptional team-mates here in Goa as well. I’m glad we got this opportunity, and very proud of our team for this achievement”, adds Prasad Shetty, the other half of Team Loansingh. This win marks his third national victory at Crucibles, as he had previously won the competition in 2014 and 2015 as part of the IAME Bangalore team.

As the team returns from Mumbai after the finals, their colleagues are gearing up to felicitate them at a unique all-hands meeting which is organized bi-annually by Private Unlimited & Prototyze, and attended by 250+ employees across all the ventures which are part of this entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Seynse was born at Prototyze, the Goa-based venture-builder. Prototyze has already five ventures that have collectively raised over $12 million in investment. These include mfitness company Mobiefit, IoT plus SaaS transportation technology company TempoGO and the mTraining SaaS platform HandyTrain.