A R&D Company That Is Doing Tech Startups Proud
MMRFIC is a fabless semiconductor startup with a focus on mm-wave products for a wide range of markets, including next-gen radars for drone surveillance, advanced communication technology targeting (5G and 6G) and wireless connectivity solutions for healthcare. The bootstrapped startup has been a profit-making venture for more than seven years and has been granted six patents globally.
Running An R&D Startup
Saravana Kumar Ganeshan, Founder and CEO, MMRFIC Technology believes that businesses in India mostly tend to get into services and aggregation, and there are very few companies that do research in deep technology, and invest critical money and time to develop products. MMRFIC Technology is one of the leading research and development (R&D) companies in India, and it is currently using its products for strategic use case and working on deploying for civilian use case, mainly in locomotives. “Working as a team is critical for technology startups. Find the right founders/ co-founders to lead the company along. The foundation of the company should be built on strong mutual trust,” says Kumar by way of advice to budding entrepreneurs.
Challenges And Milestones
A major challenges faced by the startup is the availability of skilled labour in the technology they are working with. Additionally, shortage of semiconductor components had caused some challenges in ramping up products. For the latter, MMRFIC was able to overcome the shortage by working with multiple partners to obtain necessary equipment.
As a R&D company, says Kumar, “We are either at par or ahead in terms of the advancement of the technology we are developing. In most of the cases, our products have been ahead of competition and have a USP (unique selling proposition) as well.” The venture spent nearly four years doing research on the technology they are using today.
For a tech company, during research phase, Kumar believes that being bootstrapped is one of the best financial models to run the company. “Funding should be sought when products are ramping to production. In other words, funding is to be used to scale up.” Right now, they have crossed that critical milestone in MMRFIC, where products are in production.
Short- And Long-Term Goals
In the next four years the outlook for the venture is more than Rs 2,000 crore in revenues. MMRFIC is actively looking at building a factory (integration facility) to mass produce current products and address their sizeable market. Having expanded the current facility through an investment of nearly Rs 1 crore, they have met their short-term goals. For the long term, they are looking at facilities that cover more than 4,000 sq. meters.
