Soota launches new business venture

BANGALORE, INDIA:  Ashok Soota, who recently stepped down as the chairman of MindTree Ltd, has launched his new venture on Tuesday. The new information technology services company, named Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd, will start operations in five months, and will provide a slew of IT services to global firms.

Though the venture is adequately funded, Soota is in talks with a couple of venture capital firms to meet the company's funding requirements in future. To begin with he would be investing his personal funds as seed capital. Soota, who would be the chairman and managing director of this new business venture, said he could look at VC funding or partial stake dilution in the next three month.

“The new IT services firm will have six areas of business including IT services, research and development, software product engineering, remote infra, testing and consulting,” said Soota. "Happiest Minds will focus on new emerging technologies like cloud, social CRM (customer relationship management), unified communications, mobility, business intelligence and analytics."

Soota, a former Wipro vice-chairman, resigned from MindTree, a Bangalore-based leading IT solutions and product engineering services firm, March 31 on personal grounds.

"We are setting a revenue target of $100 million over the next five years with a global presence as a full IT services firm," Soota added.

He said the new company will have marketing offices in Delhi and Mumbai, apart from Bangalore. The modalities of the firm will be worked out by a  Chennai-based marketing agency.

Following Soota's resignation MindTree appointed on April 1, 2011, Albert Hieronimus as its new chairman.

Two weeks back Soota and MindTree had clarified that Soota does not have any immediate plans for divesting his stake in the company. However, he said, “I will, in due course of time, divest my stake in a manner which will not jeopardize MindTree.”

However, Soota also made it clear that he doesn't have a non-compete or non-solicit agreement with MindTree.

"I will raise funds by partially divesting my stake (11.1 per cent) in MindTree, valued at Rs.1,600 crore (Rs.16 billion), in due course to partially fund the new venture," Soota said.