Profile of iMetrex Co-founder Rajeev Mecheri

Subroto Bagchi has published an interview with Rajeev Mecheri, Co-founder of building security technology firm iMetrex, in Forbes India magazine.

In time, they became the go-to organisation for every high-rise in town that required compliance with safety, security and energy management norms. In 2007, Siemens noticed their work. And Siemens also noticed that their building solution software was comparable and in some ways, actually ahead of what Siemens offered. It wanted to buy them out but with a condition: The brothers came with the business. Rajeev came on board as the managing director of Siemens’ Building Technology business for an agreed period of five years. This year, the business having fully integrated, Rajeev has decided to move on and brother Anand has stayed on as the chief marketing officer of the Building Technology business, located out of Switzerland. The acquisition is valued at a whopping $100 million. If you have not heard about it, it is because in Chennai, folks do not crow about such things. I wanted to know about the experience of selling his enterprise.

...“What did you learn from being part of Siemens?”
“I learnt about the power of a brand; the power of size. Only when you are large, you have the leverage, the negotiating power. Today, even as I leave, we have inked a deal to deploy a physical and logical security system involving 105,000 cards to be deployed across the world for Infosys. At iMetrex, all by ourselves, we would not have even bid for the business because we had no capacity to deploy such a solution across the world. On the flip side, in a large entity, you lose out on relationships. Employees tend to think of customers as quotations, invoices and account receivable and not as people with needs. Customer needs and not numbers are the end game and that requires empathy ahead of size.”

Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private equity, venture capital and M&A deals in India. View free samples of Venture Intelligence newsletters and reports. Email the author at arun@ventureintelligence.in

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