This garage startup from Nashik has grown to 250 plus employees riding on the mobile wave: the Winjit Technologies story

This article is a part of CloudSparks Series sponsored by Microsoft Azure.

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform: a growing collection of integrated services—compute, storage, data, networking, and app—that help you move faster, do more, and save money. This powerful combination of managed and unmanaged services lets you build, deploy, and manage applications any way you like for unmatched productivity. Its enterprise-proven hybrid cloud solutions give you the best of both worlds and can quickly scale up or down to match demand. It’s also easier to build applications that span both on-premises and the cloud. With Azure, data storage, backup, and recovery become more efficient and economical. 

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Ashwin Kandoi and Abhijit Junagade have a story which began more than a decade back. Ashwin, a chartered accountant by profession and a tech evangelist by heart, and Abhijit, an engineer and MBA, got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug almost out of the blue. Working at their respective companies, the duo landed on a project on building a flash animation. The challenge interested them and they took it up, working from the garage of their houses. On completion of the project, they realized they didn’t have a company bank account to take in the payment!

And thus was born Winjit Technologies.

The growth was steady for a few years and the company ran as a typical IT services company till the wave of excitement in the form of mobility hit them. “It was 2009, and BlackBerry was a rage. Smartphones were picking up and we decided to enter the segment,” recollects Abhijit. They got a small team to work on a consumer facing app - ‘Hanuman Chalisa’ for BlackBerry phones and in today’s terms, what happened next truly blew their minds. The spiritualism based app got more than 50,000 downloads in a fortnight from across 65 countries without any marketing.

“This was the beginning of our focus towards mobility,” says Abhijit. Since then, the company has built a lot of consumer facing apps and many of them have successes. Coming from Nashik and having spent a lot of time in the technology domain, the team at Winjit knows what works in an upcoming market like India. Their big break came in when they started building apps for music companies.

Times Music is one of their big clients for whom they built an app. And the model is different -- Winjit doesn’t charge these companies to build apps, it’s a revenue split model. A win-win situation for both since Winjit will be fully committed towards building the apps and the label comes in with its marketing clout.

Till now, Winjit has built a lot of consumer facing apps and have more than 60 million downloads. Apart from these, Winjit has been working in other sectors as well. Enterprise mobility is a key area of expertise. Working with companies like Phillips, 3M, and Levi’s etc., Winjit has solutions and products which help enterprise organizations transition to mobile. For instance, Winjit developed EBS iNotify, an app that helps business to speed up the document approval process for Oracle. The app is now available on Google Play and iOS as well and helps improving the overall process efficiency and productivity by facilitating Workflow Notifications approvals using smartphones.

The mobility push came in from 2009 and since then, Winjit has been scaling up. The company employs more than 250 people right now and all this from Nashik. The company has an international presence and has worked with clients in over 45 countries. One of the employees writes, “I did not have a passport when I joined Winjit and within four years, I had to reprint a new passport which shows the scale of exposure I have got at Winjit. I have had more than 30 international travels spread across eight different countries on multiple assignments. It has always been a great learning experience.”

To handle the growth, the company has upgraded its backend as well. In 2013, Winjit actively started looking for a hosting provider and finally moved to Microsoft Azure. “We weighed our options and looking at the flexibility and pricing decided to go ahead with Microsoft Azure. The team has helped us with all our requirements to transition smoothly,” says Abhijit. Earlier, Winjit was based on GoDaddy, and other servers spread across the globe but once they hit a certain scale, they needed to have their entire infrastructure in one place. Hence the cloud. A big chunk of their bandwidth goes in supporting the B2C apps since on the B2B front the clients have their own infrastructure as well.

Going forward, Winjit has its eyes set on more growth and is working hard to build a strong foundation for the next phase of Growth. “IoT (Internet of Things) and cloud technologies are a key focus area right now,” says Abhijit. Having built a competency with enterprise mobility, Winjit can build up a lot of products and solutions on top of it now. “The technology space is in a very interesting phase right now and we’re buckled up for the road ahead,” says Abhijit.

Website: Winjit Technologies