Saidutt Redkar, winner of the GSEA (EO), Goa finals, speaks of his company, Sygence and striking a balance between study and work
Saidutt Redkar was shortlisted for the Global Student Entrepreneur Award (GSEA) instituted by the Entrepreneur’s Organisation (EO), earlier this year. The GSEA is instituted by the Entrepreneur’s Organisation (EO), a peer to peer support network of 14000+ likeminded leaders across 61 countries. This competition is open to students enrolled in a university / college at the time of the application while being an owner, founder or controlling stakeholder of a company and principally responsible for its operation
A resident of Panaji, Saidutt studied at Sharada Mandir School and completed his 12th from Mushtifund Aaryan Higher Secondary School. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in engineering from Goa College of Engineering and went on to do an internship with Rosenberger (India) Pvt. Ltd, where he designed and developed software solutions for their Operations, Quality, HR, Administration and After Sales Service teams. Later he joined Ceralabs for 4 months where he worked on applications involving Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing.
Currently Saidutt is pursuing a degree in Computer Science (MS) at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and is reading in the 2nd (final) year of the program which he will complete in May, with a specialisation in Database Application Development, Computer Vision and Cybersecurity in IoT.
As part of his extracurricular activities, Saidutt has represented his school and University in athletics and basketball. Saidutt founded his company Sygence in May last year, amidst the lockdown in India. Sygence is in the business of developing digital technology platforms that support all economic sectors with the convenience to register, access, transact, predict and track demand – supply for products and services seamlessly on a single platform thereby eliminating the distortions, disconnect, inefficiencies, wasteful costs and delays embedded in the current practices of siloed demand – supply management resulting from the use of fragmented technology databases prevalent across most sectors. They achieve these functionalities on their platforms using the best in class of Data Science, IOT, Cloud, Web and Mobile technologies.
The design of their platforms is conceived with the following objectives in mind:
Improve global access for products and services across sectors and the agility of the supply chain response by innovating demand projection and delivery models.
Achieve the above in a way that improves consumer/customer experience in terms of quality, cost, reliability, trust and delivery of products and services while adequately rewarding the supply chain.
Facilitate mitigation of some of the key challenges in the UN Sustainable Goals Charter i.e. good health and wellbeing, responsible consumption and production, reduced inequalities, climate action etc. As of now, they are a well diversified, growing team of 11 with key responsibilities in platform architecture, software architecture, programming, beta testing, project management, HR & Marketing. Saidutt elaborates on winning the EO Goa finals. “I am thrilled at Sygence being recognized by EO for the GSEA award for the Goa finals and awarded the 1st place. The challenge and motivation with this award is now to take Sygence past the South Asia Regional Final into the Global Finals and make a mark on the global startup stage”
With regards to his current work and future plans, Saidutt states that the Sygence team is spread across the e-invoicing industry 4.0 and Smart Agritech IOT platform which are in different stages of completion. “We are also in advanced stages of discussions with a US based company with specialisation in quantum computing, to collaborate and partner in development and marketing of their AI driven Super Forecasting Model in India. This tool when integrated with all Sygence platforms will predict unfolding trends of the variables under consideration with high levels of accuracy, develop ‘what if’ scenarios and support data driven decisions for all partners on the platform. Recruitment and hiring to support the above development projects is expected to commence in Q1 2021.”
As a young student and entrepreneur Saidutt has managed to strike a balance between his work and studies. “Entrepreneurship has always excited me, the intricate challenges which I have experienced first hand during the course of the last 6 months since I founded the company.” During this short period he has developed knowledge of the legal aspects involved in starting and running a company, regulatory compliances and filings, human resource recruitment and management, sales and marketing, operations management, finance management – all of which are extremely important to understand and improve the technology work that he is involved in for the success of the company .
Further Saidutt says, “2020 will go down as a ubiquitous year for me both personally and professionally. Managing work while studying had its own challenges compounded by the time zone difference which practically meant that I had to work the day in India while attending online classes in the early hours of the morning 3 days a week during the fall semester. The incredible support from my colleagues at work as well as the strong determination to succeed with my venture is what has allowed me to deal with the twin challenges.”
Saidutt concludes with a message for young entrepreneurs. “You can only become an entrepreneur by getting your skin in the game and not by remaining on the periphery. There will always be situations that are going to be different from what you expect, despite your best efforts. The key is not to get upset, overwhelmed or frustrated, to always try and maintain a state of mind from which you can think clearly about the choices to deal with situations as they unfold, take the required action, monitor the progress of actions, make course corrections if necessary and in the end take ownership for the decision whether the outcome is good or bad. There is no failure for a committed entrepreneur, you fall down a 100 times, you rise again, you have learned 100 lessons”
