A furniture photograph can be an excellent advertisement for a sofa and a dreadful advertisement for an app. It all depends on whether the photograph arrives. For Shyamal Mehta, co-founder of TechJini, the image-heavy Pepperfry app presented precisely that sort of practical difficulty: attractive screens had to work under poor network conditions. A customer waiting for a chair to appear on a phone is unlikely to applaud the architecture behind the delay.
Mehta described working with Google’s developer advocates and support team to tackle the app’s performance roadblocks. It is a useful place to begin his story. The problem has a customer, a constraint and a visible consequence. The solution requires people who understand both the picture and the machinery carrying it. Across TechJini’s development, those two kinds of expertise increasingly belonged in the same room.
His career offers a view of entrepreneurship conducted through other people’s products. The company he co-founded in 2005 built applications for clients, expanded its design capabilities and eventually became part of Datamatics. Behind that sequence sits an absorbing business question: how does a software company grow while keeping its attention on the person using the software?
A business before the app became compulsory
TechJini began in 2005, with Mehta and fellow founder Amit Rana. Its work would span mobile product engineering, custom applications and maintenance, serving businesses with different ambitions and different tolerances for complexity. Mehta became its CEO; Rana was identified as CTO in the company’s 2014 merger announcement. The partnership put commercial leadership and technical leadership alongside one another.
By 2011, Mehta was talking about reading on tablets. TechJini had developed a books application with curated material, including Indian comics, and was working on personalised content and smoother navigation. The detail has charm. Among the many things a new screen might promise, here was an old pleasure: finding something worth reading, then turning the page without a quarrel with the device.
The work also shows how early mobile development involved questions of habit. A tablet could carry a library, but someone still had to decide how that library should feel in a reader’s hands. Navigation and content selection were part of the product. The screen’s novelty could attract attention; the experience had to earn the next visit.
When mobility acquired a budget
By 2012, Mehta was describing a change in enterprise spending. Mobility projects that had previously carried budgets of $50,000 to $100,000 were now appearing in the $250,000 to $1.5 million range. These were the project ranges he reported at the time, a snapshot of demand rather than a statement of TechJini’s revenue.
He saw companies treating mobile technology as part of their strategy and looking to it for productivity. TechJini’s applications included consumer experiences and tools for businesses. The potential audience extended beyond a shopper browsing a catalogue to people doing their daily work through a device. In that setting, an app’s usefulness could be measured in tasks completed.
The distinction matters to Mehta’s story. Selling development services means entering someone else’s business problem. A client may want a mobile presence, but a working product requires decisions about what people need to do, which information they need and how easily they can get it. The budgets were growing around an increasingly consequential set of decisions.
A hackathon, then a seat for design
In 2014, a TechJini team won at the NASSCOM 10K Startup Hackathon with an application called Thirukkural. It offered a voice interface for asking questions about personal finances, such as spending on a particular card on a particular day. Mehta publicly congratulated the team. The attraction was straightforward: a question spoken aloud could replace a search through financial information.
There is something pleasingly economical about that idea. Software often arrives with instructions, menus and the quiet expectation that its owner will become a part-time administrator. This prototype started with a sentence someone might actually say. It was a team achievement, and a small example of the company experimenting with how people could get an answer.
That September, TechJini announced a full merger with CodeConclave, a two-year-old business focused on mobile design and strategy. CodeConclave founder Siddhartha Banerjee became Creative Director and took charge of TechJini’s UI/UX studio. Mehta framed the move around deeper creative capabilities and greater scale. Design gained an explicit place in the company’s organisation.
The merger gives the career story a concrete turning point. TechJini was widening the work it could undertake, bringing design leadership into a business already delivering software. For a client, that combination could put the appearance, behaviour and engineering of an application within one working relationship. A handsome interface still needed a dependable system behind it; the organisation was making room for both.
The sofa has to load
The Pepperfry example brings that combination down to earth. Furniture shopping asks images to do substantial work: the customer needs to see what is being offered. Mehta’s account identified the difficulty of a visually heavy application operating under weak network conditions. Here, visual ambition met a limit that could not be wished away in a design presentation.
Google’s Developer Agency Program gave TechJini access to technical support and collaboration. In describing the Pepperfry work in 2017, Mehta explained that the relationship helped the team identify and address performance obstacles. The episode connects the company’s design ambitions with the less decorative business of making a product usable in the conditions its customers actually encounter.
In March 2018, TechJini was recognised as a Google-certified agency for the third consecutive year. Mehta was still identified as CEO. He described the program’s value in terms of customer outcomes. Certification brought opportunities for training, access to technology and expert assistance. Its practical appeal lay in what developers could do with that access once a real application became difficult.
“The Google Developer Agency program enables us to deliver better outcomes for our customers.”
Shyamal Mehta, March 2018
The handshake, and what followed
On July 3, 2017, Datamatics announced a definitive agreement to acquire a controlling stake in TechJini. At that point, TechJini had 250 employees and served more than 35 companies. Datamatics wanted to strengthen its mobility offering. For Mehta and Rana, the stated opportunity included reaching larger customers in the United States and Europe.
The photograph records the ceremonial part: suits, a handshake, documents and the TechJini name on the wall. The business behind it was a team large enough to make integration a substantial undertaking. The founders’ joint statement emphasised client benefits, broader capabilities and access to the buyer’s resources. Their explanation of the deal remained close to the services the company could deliver.
Ownership changed in stages. Datamatics’ 2018-19 annual report recorded a further 10 percent purchase in March 2019 and acquisition of the remaining 18.9 percent in May. The business, renamed Datamatics Digital, became wholly owned. The tidy phrase “an acquisition” therefore contains a sequence of transactions, stretching beyond the day everyone stood for the photograph.
- 2005TechJini begins
- 2014CodeConclave merger
- 2017Controlling-stake agreement
- 2019Full Datamatics ownership
Who belongs inside “people first”?
Mehta’s public comments also offer a glimpse of how he thinks about organisations. Discussing the phrase “People First” on LinkedIn, he argued for decisions that take account of everyone affected: customers, employees, product users and shareholders. It is a broad definition, with rather more obligations than the slogan usually manages to advertise.
That view sits naturally beside a services business. The buyer commissions the application, employees build it, users live with it and shareholders have expectations of their own. Their interests do not automatically arrive in agreement. Mehta’s formulation asks an organisation to keep all those people visible when it decides what to do.
There is a quieter glimpse of him outside corporate announcements, too. In 2011, he joined Rana and Mayank Kinger for a restaurant-review dinner at NH8 in Bengaluru’s Indiranagar. The meal followed a menu inspired by the highway’s route. It is a welcome change of scene: the same founders who discussed digital products also appeared around an ordinary dinner table.
It also gives the profile a human scale that transaction dates cannot supply. A founder’s name can become inseparable from a company’s chronology, with every appearance arranged around the next milestone. Here the setting is a meal shared with colleagues, in the same city where the company was building its business. The restaurant visit needs no larger claim attached to it. Its value is the glimpse of people spending an evening together, away from the demands of an announcement.
Experience moves into the advisory chair
NetBramha now lists Mehta as an advisor, alongside Rana. His biography describes guidance on studio growth, customer success and people management. Those responsibilities carry familiar concerns into a different setting. A design studio has to win work, deliver it and organise the people doing it; experience building a client-serving technology company has an evident relevance there.
His story is most revealing at that working scale. A books app needed better navigation. A hackathon team tried a spoken question. A design merger changed the company’s capabilities. A furniture app had to contend with the network. Each episode puts a person trying to accomplish something at the other end of the software. For Mehta, the business grew around the work of making that encounter go better.