HERALD: Do you think Goa is a good place to do business?
KUNAL KERKAR: Yes, I truly feel so. Having started offices in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune, I believe Goa gives you the best work-life balance one can aim for. For Tech companies, Goa is like a blue ocean that gives entrepreneurs an added advantage to capture a market that is yet to be explored. Even in terms of talent acquisition as the competition in not that fierce with lower density of companies compared to larger cities, the average CTC’s are comparatively lower and attrition rates also tend to be low. Goa also has a competitive edge over the many so called IT hubs of India in terms of cost of living, day-to-day city issues in terms of traffic congestion etc. As with the rise of many prominent technology institutions that have come up in recent years in the State, it should only add to the boom of tech start-ups in Goa with the supply chain for talent being handled year in and year out. Goa for businesses lives by the “spend less and live more” mantra.
HERALD: What is your field of specialty?
KK: We are an IT services company that focuses on mobility as its core offering. We are a mobile first company providing end-to-end solutions from App strategy, design, development, including app marketing, analytics all the way up to app lifecycle and management. We also have our flagship solutions Helix SWIFT that helps build mobile products for bootstrapped entrepreneurs, funded start-ups and enterprises through our programmes swift LAUNCH, swift GROW and swift SCALE respectively. Having worked with such a large number of start-ups we have developed a core solution “HT for START-UPS” that focuses primarily on start-ups that are looking to partner with us from early concept to MVP stage. Although we are domain agnostic, we have work primarily in the healthcare, transport and logistics space on the B2B front and hospitality, travel, social and technology verticals in the B2C space.
HERALD: Any clientele in Goa?
KK: We are working with a couple of interesting Goan start-ups one is matrimonial services company that will be focused only on the Goan market and another start-up in stealth mode on the Ed Tech space that is working very closely with the State and Central government on building a platform for the K 12 students segment. Along with this we have out HT for students programme under which we have our annual summer internships wherein which we hand pick around 10-15 students across various engineering colleges in Goa and have them over to our HQ and train them on the end-to-end process off app development.
HERALD: Who are your major customers?
KK: We actually been fortunate to work with some of the most innovative and promising start-ups from around the world that include CNN & Tech Crunch disrupt featured New York based TimeLooper (a travel tech start-up), one Turkey’s oldest and biggest fleet management solutions provider Filoturk, Istanbul’s biggest mobile bus booking platform Govego & Start-up Turkey 2015 finalist CHALL (a social game app) to name a few. We usually work with a lot of start-ups across the globe that partner with us a tech co-founder to their business without the equity. We have a network of partner companies in Istanbul, Hanover and Warsaw that help us connect and deliver world class apps across borders with a seamless experience.
HERALD: What issues did you face when you thought of launching this company?
KK: Being from a non-business family and having studied in an engineering college there were problems galore. Right from setting up the company to finding office space and all the way to marketing our services and eventually doing business. I personally feel the awareness levels a student/young aspiring entrepreneur has in terms of starting a business is way lower than compared to say doing an MBA or going abroad to study, although that is now changing as entrepreneurship is becoming more mainstream. CIBA did not only help us but actually played an instrumental role in helping us start Helix Tech specially Mr Prashant and Raghuvir Mahale, CIBA does a lot of handholding for young entrepreneurs and companies by way of their interactive mentoring sessions with industry experts that truly benefited us. Along with the connections and affiliations that CIBA has it only helps start-ups to grow and learn from this rich network. Very few actually do know that our first office space was at CIBA, Verna for almost a year.
HERALD: What made you work as an entrepreneur in Goa?
KK: Being a Goan and having completed my education from Goa I always wanted to start something associated with my roots. Incidentally, very early into my company we started an office in Hyderabad and had it shut even faster as the operations was not as efficient as I envisioned it to be. Many do believe that metro’s give you that extra edge over Tier II or Tier III cities with regard to ease-of-availability of tech talent and better infra, which is true but that also brings with along with it a fair share of problems. I feel the current startup scene in Goa is very promising and only improving by the day.
HERALD: Where do you see yourself in next five years?
KK: I visualise myself as someone who would have a great team of leaders to steer the ship ahead and a company that can withstand the currents built on strong moral and ethical grounds. Would like to see Helix tech well positioned in the mobility space and expand into wearables, iOT and machine learning. We also intend to diversify into platforms and products from our existing services. We plan to spin off Helix Tech labs a product division of the company having its focus on the Internet for the next billion in growing markets of SouthEast Asia.
