Foradian Technologies, The Startup Behind 'The Rupee Foradian font' - 20 Million Downloads & Counting

The Indian currency was in the news creating a furor when the new Rupee symbol was unveiled. The iconic symbol designed by Uday Kumar which was selected from 3331 entries was incorporated in the font ‘Rupee Foradian’ by Foradian Technologies. This font has been downloaded more than 20 million times which is a figure that would make any data person flutter in the air. But this is the stuff what people know about. Apart from this, this illustrious company Foradian Technologies has been doing some phenomenal work in the past few years and YourStory caught up with CEO, Unni Koroth to know the story behind the scenes.The team comprises of 8 childhood buddies who got together over a long period of time, mingling and studying in different schools and colleges in Kerala and Karnataka. The talks which started in the middle of 2008 culminated in the formation of Foradian Technologies on the 4^th of April 2009. Initially, a 3 member team started working on Fedena in a ground floor office at Kasaragod, Kerala.

Fedena is a multipurpose school/campus management software built on Ruby On Rails. The software has turned out to be a huge success and it is now used by thousands of educational institutes spanning the globe. Taking it a step further, COO - Vishwajith is travelling to Zambia, Africa this month to install and train Fedena to an institute there. With support from experts in the field, Fedena is turning out to be one of the largest open-source projects in the education sector.

Coming from high profile jobs in different MNC’s, this bunch of inspired people were working towards a goal. A relatively huge amount of initial funding of 70 Lakh INR was required which they managed to raise from family and friends. In hindsight, the risk has more than paid off. About to break even, Foradian is expecting 2 crore INR in revenue this year.

Sampoorna, the implementation program of Fedena by the government of Kerala assimilates the details of around 60 lakh students across 15,000 schools which is will be accessible to the school authorities. Sampoorna, as its name suggests has enormous scope and has managed to save a lot of time, effort and money for the government.

If Sampoorna doesn’t cover everything, Foradian also has a creative wing by the name BrandMango which takes care about the branding of a company. And on the lighter side, Foradian has given an online face to Tintumon, an iconic cartoon character for Malyalees.

Unni Koroth, Abdulla Hisham, Abdul Salam, Arvind GS, Vishwajith A, Arund Raveendran, Praveen Prabhu and Deepesh Melath

This team is a big fan of Ruby on Rails. Why so? “Ruby is developer friendly. All our technical employees are freshers. It never took more than 2 months for a fresher to start coding in our system. Since ROR is widely used nowadays, we get fantastic support online. Also there are plenty of plugins and gems available for specific requirements.” replies Unni.

Foradian technologies have set up a strong foundation and the only way ahead is up from here on in. With the wind behind their back, Unni elaborates on the expansion plans, “We are all set to conquer the education software market with our product Fedena. We are presently building a strong sales/operations channel. Our marketing campaigns of Fedena as a SaaS will start from February 2012 onwards. Fedena will create an ecosystem of service/product companies in the education sector. Our target market for the next 3 years is India, Africa and the Middle East. We already have clients in USA. But our target in USA comprises of small coaching centers and training institutes.”

Please visit: http://www.foradian.com/ to know more about Foradian Technologies. And here's the link to download Foradian Rupee Font

- Jubin Mehta