For Sunny Singh,
the long way
became the point

The sheep were audible to the customers. In the early years of Edifecs, Gurpreet “Sunny” Singh’s office occupied a former motel with animals out back. There was no air conditioning, so the windows stayed open. Telephone calls came with an agricultural accompaniment. “Where are you guys?” customers would ask. It was a reasonable question for a software company.

Singh remembered feeding the sheep leftovers and sleeping in the office on the first night because he worried about security. He had financed the venture with roughly 18 to 20 credit cards. These details have survived the subsequent corporate milestones rather well. A financing announcement can resemble any other financing announcement. Sheep are harder to confuse.

He founded Edifecs in 1996. He would lead it for 25 years. Yet the episode that gives his career its shape came when the company nearly ran out of road. Recovery took years, and the habits required to keep going now recur in an unlikely collection of projects: a football club, village learning centers, conservation storytelling, and a university center devoted to India.

A concert, some tracksuits, and a ticket out

Before software, Singh had tried the business of getting people into the right clothes. As a student in India, he supplied tracksuits for an inter-IIT sports festival. He also organized a concert featuring a popular singer to help raise money for going to the United States. An engineering education was proceeding alongside a practical education in finding something people might buy.

He completed his undergraduate studies at IIT Delhi, then pursued graduate study at Montana State University. His subjects were industrial engineering and computer science. Montana supplied a less predictable curriculum too. He later recalled taking fashion classes, having once wanted to become a fashion designer. The tracksuits, it appears, had a little more biography in them than a simple student sideline might suggest.

He remembers arriving in Montana in March wearing a T-shirt. He knew the state was somewhere in the north; he had neglected to investigate what that might mean for his wardrobe. During his student years he took campus jobs, including dishwashing, tutoring, and cleaning up after basketball games, while sending money home. In his telling, the kindness of people who helped him remained more memorable than the difficulties.

The professional route ran through Computers Unlimited in Montana, Expeditors International in Seattle, and Microsoft. Across those jobs he worked on the exchange of business information between organizations. Purchase orders and shipping documents sound like background scenery. For an engineer, the interesting question was how to make the machinery between companies work.

When the spreadsheet stopped being persuasive

Edifecs’ early product, SpecBuilder, helped people document and test the information their systems exchanged. Different businesses needed to agree on what a message meant before they could use it. Singh had found a problem close to his experience: making transactions intelligible to the organizations on either end.

There is something characteristic about that choice. Integration rewards attention to the join between things. It requires looking beyond the individual machine or department to the arrangement that lets several of them cooperate. The later collection of Roundglass projects is easier to understand with that original engineering problem in view.

Then came 2000 and 2001. Expected sales failed to materialize. Funding dried up. Singh also walked away from work with Microsoft over ownership of intellectual property. Taxes, rent, and supplier bills went unpaid. Eventually the company missed four payroll cycles. A sales pipeline, it turned out, could contain a great deal of air.

Family and friends urged him to close. He sent his wife and daughter to India for six months while he tried to keep the company alive. He has described asking himself what example he wanted to set for his family. The answer became a daily commitment to finding the next workable step.

“Let’s see what we can do today.”

Sunny Singh, recalling the Edifecs crisis

The repair involved a tighter team, more communication, and repayment of the accumulated obligations. By 2005 to 2006, he recalled, the debt was cleared. Employees who had stayed received additional stock options. The useful unit of time in this episode is five years. Persistence can sound wonderfully brisk when squeezed into a conference talk.

A founder learns to hand over the keys

In 2020, Edifecs brought in investment from TA Associates and Francisco Partners. The following year, Venkat Kavarthapu became chief executive and Singh moved to chairman. The succession matters because the familiar description of Singh as Edifecs’ founder can obscure a useful distinction: founding a company and remaining its chief executive are separate chapters.

Cotiviti completed its acquisition of Edifecs on March 31, 2025. That date belongs to the company’s subsequent history. Singh’s attention had already expanded. He had established Roundglass in 2014, while Edifecs was still part of his working life. The two stories overlapped for years; his later work did not materialize suddenly after a farewell speech.

A football club with a longer clock

Sport was a family inheritance before it became an organizational project. Singh’s father, Sarpal Singh, was a hockey coach. In Sunny’s account, his father’s friends told him about the achievements; his father himself rarely advertised them. The lesson he remembers is compact: “Play for pride, not just points.”

Roundglass completed its acquisition of Punjab FC in 2020. The club won the 2022-23 I-League and became the first to earn promotion from that competition to the Indian Super League. A place in the higher division is an unusually legible result. You can put it in a table. The work of developing players is more awkward to summarize.

Singh has described an ambition for India to play in the FIFA World Cup by 2038. It is a stated ambition, with a distant date attached. The practical work around it includes youth academies and a route from grassroots participation toward more demanding competition. Football makes the difference between aspiration and preparation visible every weekend.

The village programs reach children who may never sign a professional contract. Roundglass Punjab’s sports centers offer football and volleyball, local coaching, and tournaments. Its 1 Girl 1 Football initiative creates opportunities for girls to play and occupy public spaces. A national team and a village playing field belong to different scales of ambition, but both require someone to make participation possible.

There is a family resemblance between these choices and the way Singh talks about his parents. His mother’s instruction, which he has repeated, was to be honest and do the right thing. His father put the children’s education ahead of accumulating savings. Opportunity was something the adults around him had worked to provide.

What happens after the planting photograph?

The Roundglass Foundation’s work in Punjab includes reforestation, waste management, learning, and women’s livelihoods. Its tree initiative has a very large stated goal: a billion trees. The less photogenic part of the plan is the commitment to native species, watering, monitoring, and continued care. A sapling has no interest in the ceremony that introduced it.

The same concern with continuing arrangements appears elsewhere. Village waste programs involve collection and composting systems. Learn Labs use digitally equipped after-school spaces, with local people trained to lead them. Women’s livelihood programs organize self-help groups and support small enterprises, including tailoring and vegetable stalls. The recurring question is who will keep the work going when the visitors leave.

These projects give his connection to Punjab an everyday form. Identity can be expressed through a speech or a celebration. Here it also shows up in the arrangements for an after-school session, a practice, a small business, or a tree that needs another season of attention. Those are less convenient subjects for a grand unveiling. They are better suited to repeated visits.

Two countries, more room for conversation

Back in Seattle, a gift from Singh helped establish Seattle University’s Roundglass India Center in 2023. The idea grew out of conversations with law professor Sital Kalantry, its founding director, about the need for more informed understanding of contemporary India and greater engagement among Indian Americans.

The center combines public programming, research, and community partnerships. Its subject includes the Indian American diaspora, placing the experience of migration and belonging alongside the study of India itself. Singh now chairs its advisory council. For someone whose own education crossed those two countries, supporting a place for sustained conversation has a particular biographical logic.

He also serves as a distinguished trustee of Plaksha University in India. The educational thread runs from his parents’ spending priorities through his own graduate studies to the institutions he now supports. It gives the story a continuity that the variety of his ventures might otherwise disguise.

The return visit

In September 2026, Singh wrote about conservation photography and the years a person may spend returning to a place before getting the image they hoped for. He argued for supporting photographers and filmmakers early enough, and long enough, for that work to develop. It is an argument about funding, but also about how to recognize work before it becomes easy to applaud.

“We only pay for the part we can see.”

Sunny Singh, writing about conservation, September 2026

His interest in photography is longstanding; golf and travel feature among his other pursuits. The photograph, like the football result, is an outcome a stranger can understand at a glance. Behind it are all the days when there was little to show. Singh’s account of Edifecs supplies a business version of those days, with unpaid bills in place of an elusive subject.

The old motel office makes a useful starting point because it preserves the ungainly parts. Open windows. Customers hearing sheep. A founder sleeping beside his new enterprise. Years later, his projects ask people to stay with things whose rewards arrive unevenly. The scene has changed considerably. The need to come back tomorrow remains.