Building one of the leading multi-modal supply chain visibility companies – Interview with Intugine co-founder and COO Mrinal Rai.
Intugine Technologies is a Bengaluru-based fast-growing logistics technology company that provides real-time visibility solutions for logistics movement. Today, with more than 180 happy customers and an expanding team, we had the opportunity to sit with Mrinal Rai, co-founder, and COO of Intugine technologies to talk about its growth journey since its inception, plans, and how they channeled its capabilities during the pandemic, by assisting the government in monitoring the quarantined individuals. We also got Mrinal’s perspectives on the entrepreneurial wave going on in the country. Here are a few excerpts from our interaction:
Innovative Zone: Please walk us through your company profile and services.
Mrinal Rai: Founded in 2013, Intugine Technologies is one of the leading supply chain visibility enablers in the world. We leverage our expertise in IoT Technology to help businesses optimize & digitize their supply chain & logistics operations.
Intugine is one of the very few companies with multi-modal visibility capabilities. This means we can provide the world’s largest enterprises visibility over their assets across modalities, be it air, land, or ocean, on a single platform. Helping them build resilience within their supply chain operations. Intugine offers real-time vehicle tracking, yard management, control tower, digital indenting, ocean freight tracking, PTL(parcel) tracking, and e-POD among other products.
Some of India’s renowned brands use our platform to negotiate volatility and uncertainties in their supply chain. Our clientele includes GE Healthcare, Titan, Xiaomi, Myntra, Flipkart, Diageo, Arvind Fashion, Duroflex, PI Industries, GMMCO, HIL, Swiggy Instamart, Ultratech Cements, Kuehne+Nagel, and Mahindra Logistics among others.
We believe technology is a major driver of change. And we’re bringing it to India’s logistics and supply chain ecosystem.
Innovative Zone: Kindly comment on your exclusive vision as well as the mission behind this venture.
Mrinal Rai: Intugine wishes to revolutionize the way logistics and supply chain operations run in India. We aim to leverage technology to help Indian brands delight their customers, reduce costs and grow their business.
The logistics sector in India is highly fragmented. The planning and execution of most logistics operations are overly reliant on manual methods. Important logistics data gets siloed-and supply chain networks to get increasingly opaque. All of which drive inefficiencies across the supply chain network.
We aim to solve this with our real-time logistics visibility platform that brings together disjoint systems and helps businesses optimize their logistics operation.
Innovative Zone: What has been the most satisfying aspect of commencing this venture?
Mrinal Rai: The whole journey!
I would say that my journey has been unpredictable yet rewarding. From a kid who would bunk classes to stay on the playing ground to the COO of one of India’s leading technology names, it has been quite a journey. It has, of course, had a lot of ups and downs.
Sometimes it has been upsetting and sometimes totally blissful. I didn’t know where life would take me; all I knew was that I had a passion for doing something big, and I won’t say that I’ve reached where I wanted to, but yeah, I am happy with the progress.
Innovative Zone: How do you maintain the faith of your customers in your service portfolio?
Mrinal Rai: Before customers make a purchase, they need to trust you first. They need to have faith in the product’s capabilities and the competence and availability of support and assistance. We demonstrate all of this within the pilot we run with our customers before the beginning of the engagement.
And being a digital solution provider, our customers always have some visibility into the value we create for them. However, we further measure and share with them the impact we’ve been able to drive periodically. I believe honesty, transparency, and agility in communication help foster trust. When a customer reaches out to us, our team is always available to respond promptly.
Innovative Zone: What strategies have been helping you to sustain this unprecedented pandemic? Also, add the strategies to make a difference in people’s lives most effectively amid reigning chaos.
Mrinal Rai: The pandemic disrupted most businesses globally-and our industry, of logistics and supply chain, was one of the worst-hit. But Intugine not only survived but thrived during the pandemic. When our cash flows were severely affected by the national lockdown, we pivoted towards assisting the government manages the healthcare crisis.
We repurposed our SIM-based vehicle tracking product to track quarantined individuals, which 10+ states in the country used to ensure social distancing of quarantined individuals. Another thing that still has been a challenge for us, being a growing startup, is the remote work scenario. WFH(Work From Home) sometimes hinders the ideal collaborative process of product development, interaction, and value creation. Companies have to tackle this problem by building processes and a culture of taking initiative among employees.
Innovative Zone: Define your differentiating factor.
Mrinal Rai: Intugine is the only IoT-enabled global multi-modal visibility platform, which essentially means that we can track freights across all 4 major means of transportation rail, air, road, and ocean. Our ability to track end to end with predictive ETAs and analytics to enable optimization and benchmarking is something not many can match.
Innovative Zone: How did you build your team?
Answer: I am a big believer in the saying ‘If you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together.’ Getting your startup team right is of crucial importance. At Intugine, we made the first 10 hirings from within our network. And when it was time to scale, we put together a set of guidelines based on our success with the early hires.
We value creators who have a high degree of ownership over mere operators. Conventional markers of competence like college degrees hold little significance for us. Quite a few of my teammates at Intugine are college dropouts. We look for problem solvers with the desire to make an impact.
Innovative Zone: What are your views on innovation?
Mrinal Rai: Innovation is a facilitator of entrepreneurship. Creating something innovative that makes a difference requires time and effort. Innovation doesn’t occur overnight. And while western nations brought much of the innovation in the past century. With an entrepreneurial boom over the past decade or so, India is emerging as a new fertile ground for entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is an avenue open to anyone with strong conviction in their ideas. And therefore acts as a catalyst for sustained innovation.
Innovative Zone: Kindly shine some light on your views about R&D and tech advancements thriving across the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Mrinal Rai: Innovation-driven entrepreneurship and Industry 4.0 is a perfect marriage of the 21st century. The consistent influx of venture-backed capital in India’s startup ecosystem, over the past decade, has increased focus on things like IoT(Internet of things), cloud computing, cognitive computing, and the creation of a smart factory.
We’ve already seen many groundbreaking innovations emerge from India’s startup space, and I expect more of the same in the coming years.
Innovative Zone: How has your work culture impacted your growth thus far?
Mrinal Rai: At Intugine, we have an open work culture with a flat hierarchy. Although we never sat down and decided that this is what we should follow, it just happened organically. Our team is a young bunch of energetic people who share our core belief of customer-centricity. From the CEO to an intern, everyone’s mind is occupied with an important consideration – how to make the lives of our customers easier. This has fostered a culture of teamwork and collaboration across the team.
Innovative Zone: Please highlight the achievements and accolades attained by your company so far.
Mrinal Rai: For any business, the biggest win or achievement is client happiness. This is why despite exceeding multiple revenue growth and company valuation goals, what I hold most dear is the dozens of testimonials from India’s top supply chain executives. India’s best supply chain minds from 180+ brands swear by our product. To receive such praise is truly heartwarming.
Outside our ecosystem, Intugine has received plenty of awards from leading Industry bodies and media houses. We have also received letters of appreciation from several state governments for the technical assistance we provided them during the covid pandemic.
Innovative Zone: Where do you envision your company in the next 10 years?
Mrinal Rai: I wish I could envision or plan for the next 10 years, but that is quite impossible and impractical. Though for the next two years, our focus is to become the most reliable visibility platform for manufacturers and shippers and in the next five years to benchmark all visibility-based supply chain KPIs.
Innovative Zone: Share some words of wisdom that you would like to convey to the aspiring entrepreneurs and the readers of our Magazine.
Mrinal Rai: The hardest part of starting a business is scaling it. To navigate through these tough times you need perseverance and self-belief. The greatest fuel for which is a connection to what you’re doing. Perhaps you have experience working in a certain industry and understand its limitations.
Or maybe you’re part of an underserved consumer segment. Or maybe you’re simply met with a specific frustration every day, which you feel, others will surely share. There’s no motivation like waking up in the morning and knowing that you’re solving a problem faced by many.
Another thing to note is that the startup landscape has become very competitive. In a period as short as a month, you can expect to see three startups that are identical to yours emerge in the market. Nevertheless, you shouldn’t give up and shouldn’t rush into the market before you’re ready. It’s not a race to be first, it’s a race to be the best, and the best these days is the business that delivers the greatest value to the consumer.
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