Vignani gets $4 million funding

Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: Value engineering services provider Vignani Technologies Pvt Ltd, will receive venture funding to the tune of $4 million from a group of VCs including Intel Capital, JAFCO and KT Venture group. Speaking exclusively to CyberMedia News, Kumar Ramachandran, MD, Vignani Technologies, said that the funding would fuel the company’s infrastructure expansion, ramp up its sales force and resources and also help in attracting scientific talent to the company.

Started a year ago, the company takes up projects like offshore product development, design and analysis services and high-end value engineering projects such as redesigning products. At present, Vignani has ten customers including the likes of Teradyne, Varian, GSI and Electroglas. Explaining the company’s pure-play focus on engineering services, Ramachandran said, “We are building competencies in segments like semi-conductor, medical equipment, instrumentation and renewable energy. In the high-end space we are involved in providing expertise from concept to prototype stage.”

He cited the company’s recent engagement with Teradyne where Vignani was involved in re-designing medical electronics device to improve the throughput and reduce the cost. The engineers at Vignani came up with a prototype, which was 30 per cent cost-effective, and 35 per cent smaller by shrinking the electronics component of the older product. The product prototype will be ready by October this year, “Customers are looking not at low cost of labor but reducing the cost of their existing products,” he said.

Ramachandran said that in projects like these, Vignani shares the royalties with the customer-a deviation from the dollar per hour model of most Indian IT service providers.

According to him, many manufacturers are looking at increasing their business productivity on new product development rather than support older products. Pricing pressures and increased competition from emerging economies is also forcing these companies to reduce the cost of products by redesigning older products and identify low-cost suppliers.

Vignani has 65 engineers at its facility in Bangalore, which is also incidentally the company’s only facility. The team strength will be upped to a hundred by the year-end.

He company has tie-ups with a contract manufacturer Sanmina and IT services provider iGate Global Solutions.

While Ramachandran did not reveal the company’s revenues, he said that Vignani was growing 70 per cent quarter over quarter.

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