A chessboard is an unusually honest management tool. Every move changes the problem. Every shortcut leaves something exposed. Kishan Srivastava plays chess, and his colleague Anuj Yadav has a three-word description of him: “Silent. Strategic. Chessboard.” It is a useful introduction to a software entrepreneur whose recurring concern is what happens several moves after the sale.
Srivastava is the co-founder and CEO of SDLC Corp, based in Noida. His business involves software, enterprise systems and artificial intelligence. His preoccupations are often less glamorous: whether a client understands a decision, whether a team has accepted responsibility, whether the thing being built will remain useful after the presentation ends. A finished demo can look marvellous. Monday morning tends to have additional requirements.
That tension runs through his career. There is the promise that gets someone interested, and then there is the patient work of keeping it. Srivastava has operated in consumer services, software delivery and, increasingly, enterprise AI. Across those settings, he returns to the mechanics of trust: clear expectations, visible progress and people who answer the difficult question while there is still time to act on it.
A marketplace before the software company
His formal training was in engineering. He studied for a Bachelor of Technology at Bundelkhand Institute of Engineering and Technology in Jhansi from 2010 to 2014. His education also included participation in the cultural sub-council. The combination is a small but pleasing detail in a career that would eventually require technical understanding and a considerable amount of dealing with people.
SDLC was his second venture. Before it, he helped found an online marketplace for services on demand. In his own account of that business, it reached more than 100,000 retail customers across Delhi NCR and served business customers including OYO, Air India and Vistara. These are his reported figures, and they belong to the earlier marketplace, rather than to SDLC's current customer base.
A marketplace gives the word “delivery” a rather literal edge. Customers expect an actual service, at an actual time, with someone responsible when the arrangement goes wrong. Software introduces different tools and a longer vocabulary, but the practical question survives: who owns the outcome? Seen alongside his subsequent work, that earlier venture offers a useful way to understand why Srivastava talks so much about execution.
Retail customers in Delhi NCR, according to Srivastava's account of his earlier services marketplace.
He now offers mentoring, career guidance and interview preparation through Topmate. That makes the earlier entrepreneurial experience part of his public-facing work as well. The available sessions range from a short conversation to a mock interview. They provide a practical route for someone who wants to ask him about a business idea or the next step in a career.
Three developers, and an unanswered question
SDLC's founding account places its beginnings in 2015, with Srivastava and Yadav starting from a small workspace and a three-person development team. Yadav brought a concern about technical execution. Srivastava brought a concern about client relationships. He had watched communication failures and weak accountability damage projects even when the underlying technical ability was there.
The distinction matters because software can fail socially before it fails technically. Two people can approve the same document while expecting different products. An optimistic delivery date can quietly become a contractual argument. A team can be busy every day and still be building something its customer did not mean to request. Srivastava's early remit addressed the people and processes around the code.
He recalls combining account management, delivery leadership and escalations in his first year. One remembered trip took him to Dubai to meet a client who doubted whether the young company could manage a project twice its size. He describes that engagement as an eventual success. The interesting part is the objection itself: the client needed confidence that the organisation could carry the commitment.
Today, SDLC describes a broader engineering business covering custom software, web and mobile products, enterprise platforms, cloud systems and automation. Its explanation for that breadth is rooted in client needs: a web project can lead to an ERP requirement, which can lead to integration and automation work. For a CEO, every additional capability brings another coordination problem to solve.
The work before the work
Srivastava describes his current job as keeping company growth, delivery capability and technology investment aligned with market needs. That means working across engineering, finance, leadership and client teams. The responsibilities sit in different departments on an organisation chart. In a live project, they tend to arrive in the same meeting.
His delivery method begins with the business objective, the intended users, the risks and an agreed definition of completion. Technical and research teams join early enough to assess feasibility. Progress then becomes visible through updates and milestone reviews. There is an ordinary discipline to this sequence: write down what success means before everyone becomes too invested in their own version of it.
- 01Define the outcomeBusiness objective and users
- 02Test the assumptionsFeasibility, architecture and risk
- 03Make progress visibleMilestones, reviews and feedback
He also expects engineers to question assumptions and identify risks. That changes the relationship between a brief and a team. A specification becomes something people have to understand and examine. It is easy to applaud that idea in the abstract. It becomes more demanding when the useful question delays a decision that everyone hoped to settle before lunch.
When the invoice becomes the test
The move towards enterprise AI gives these habits a concrete setting. SDLC's products include DAN, also called Data Geometry AI, for document processing; Pulastya AI for voice automation; and Praxis AI for institutional operations. Their subject matter is the administrative work that keeps organisations functioning. The glamour, if any, is in the time recovered.
One example Srivastava describes is a document-processing engagement for Transworld Logistics. The challenge was invoices arriving in varied formats, with manual handling and delays. The team's approach included confidence scores for extracted information and human review of uncertain fields before validated records entered the client's enterprise system.
That review step is revealing. A useful business system needs a way to handle uncertainty as well as a way to produce an answer. The person responsible for a record needs to know when to intervene. An invoice is a modest-looking document with an impressive ability to become somebody else's problem. Building the handoff properly is part of building the product.
“Success is largely decided before development starts.”
Kishan Srivastava, on project delivery
His expansion ambitions follow the same enterprise direction. In October 2025, he discussed plans to strengthen SDLC's presence in the UK and Europe, connecting product development with jobs in engineering and delivery. Those plans frame growth as an organisational task: extending the business while developing the people and systems required to support it.
New tools, familiar obligations
In May 2026, SDLC announced its approval as an Odoo Ready Partner. Odoo's business applications cover functions such as sales, inventory, finance and manufacturing. The announcement put another piece beside the company's AI work: connecting departments whose information has a habit of living in separate places.
The appeal is easy to understand. An automated conversation or a document extraction tool becomes more useful when its output reaches the systems where people make decisions. Integration carries the result into everyday operations. For Srivastava's company, that creates work across consulting, implementation, customisation and continuing support. The sale begins a relationship with a business process that will keep changing.
His public interests have also extended beyond engineering. In a May 2022 marketing interview, he anticipated greater attention to content and influencer marketing. He argued that an outside media buyer could bring experience gained across different projects. The point fits a services entrepreneur's perspective: lessons become more useful when they travel between engagements.
By 2026, his public writing was addressing the economics of technical debt and the implications of AI coding tools. His argument about debt is practical: expedient decisions can accumulate costs in slower releases and difficult maintenance. His argument about AI places more weight on engineering judgment as code becomes easier to generate. Both concerns ask what a decision will cost later.
The reader and the chessboard
There is a quieter side to this professional vocabulary. Srivastava enjoys reading business books, psychology and biographies. He values the perspective they provide and the opportunity to slow down. Chess gives him another setting for deliberate decisions. Yadav's three-word description therefore lands somewhere between a joke and a recognisable portrait.
The friendship supplies its own comedy. The two founders describe trying to spend time together without discussing the company, then drifting back into it. Srivastava's description of Yadav is “Ideas. Energy. Espresso.” Between the chessboard and the coffee, there is a compact account of how the partnership feels to its participants.
His retrospective wish is suitably practical: invest earlier in internal automation, documentation and governance. His aspiration is that SDLC becomes a place where clients and employees develop. These ambitions connect the outward business to the organisation behind it. A company advising other people on better systems has its own systems to keep improving.
The chess analogy has its limits; customers rarely agree to move one at a time. Still, it captures something useful about Srivastava's approach. He keeps returning to the consequences beyond the immediate move: the maintenance after launch, the working relationship after a difficult conversation, the careers taking shape inside a growing firm. The board changes. He wants the next decision to hold up.