Varchasvi Shankar and the long way home

A piece of Bangalore sits behind the bar in Troy, Michigan. At Shankar Distillers, the brass shelving was handmade in the Indian city and stretches more than thirty feet. Varchasvi Shankar has described it as one of the ways his Indian background enters an American business. It is an unusually substantial way to remember home. Most people manage with a photograph.

The shelves belong to the second industry in a career that began with engineering and enterprise software. Shankar founded V2Soft in Michigan in 1998. He later founded the distillery, where the Varchas name abbreviates his own and the bottle design carries references to Mysore. There is a family name over the enterprise and a hometown inside the branding. The journey has acquired a return route.

Shankar continues to lead V2Soft and Sanciti AI. The distillery has added another kind of work to his life: a product people can hold, taste and discuss with its maker. His story moves between the largely invisible machinery of corporate software and the deliberately visible details of a consumer brand. Both have required him to learn how an idea survives contact with customers.

The apartment before the offices

He was born in Mysore, in southern India. In 1992, he moved to the United States to continue his education at West Virginia Tech. His academic background spans instrumentation technology and control systems engineering: a bachelor’s degree from Mysore University and a master’s from West Virginia University Institute of Technology. Before the executive titles came a technical education concerned with how systems behave.

His early professional work included Covansys and the Chrysler account. He has described working as a programmer at Chrysler before establishing his own company and becoming a supplier. That sequence matters. He had experience with the work a large customer needed before he built a business to deliver it.

On V2Soft’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Shankar put a precise date on the beginning: March 13, 1998. He recalled a small apartment in Southfield, Michigan. By March 2023, he described sixteen offices, eight US cities and seven countries. These were anniversary figures, recording a particular point in the company’s growth. The apartment gives those numbers their scale.

His anniversary reflection gave customers and employees a share of the credit. He also discussed the communities around the business, naming education, technology and conservation organizations it supported. The account reaches beyond office openings. It describes a company becoming established in places where people work and live, with obligations that accumulate alongside customers.

There is a useful corrective here to the tidy version of a founder’s life. An incorporation date fits on a timeline. Twenty-five years of earning enough confidence to receive the next assignment do not. The apartment is memorable because it is easy to picture; the work that carried V2Soft beyond it happened through a much longer succession of projects and relationships.

A business grows by knowing people

One of those relationships is with the Michigan Minority Supplier Development Council. V2Soft dates its support to 2004 and says Shankar served three consecutive board terms. A February 2019 swearing-in at DTE’s Detroit headquarters placed him among the newly elected directors, with Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist officiating. His experience as a supplier had become something he could bring to a wider business community.

The company also built MatchMaker365 to connect minority business enterprises with corporate needs. That is a revealing application of its software skills: a practical tool for the same business network in which its founder participates. Board service, panels and a matching platform represent different ways of working on the question of who gets an opportunity to supply whom.

In November 2023, V2Soft announced its Category 3 Supplier of the Year recognition from the Dallas/Fort Worth Minority Supplier Development Council. The award belonged to the company. Shankar’s response emphasized its staff and partnerships, consistent with the collective account he had given at the anniversary earlier that year.

There are people close to him inside the organization, too. His wife, Nandini Varchasvi, is listed as executive vice president and a board director. Her responsibilities include process compliance, project-management practices, finances and banking. Her professional history includes RouteOne and Accenture. A founder’s story becomes more useful when there is room in it for the people doing the exacting work of making an organization function.

A new trade, with familiar paperwork

Shankar founded Shankar Distillers in 2020. Its Troy facility became operational in 2022. The distinction is worth keeping: founding a business and getting its premises to work are separate achievements. A name can be registered considerably faster than a production facility can be made ready.

His explanation of the move is disarmingly personal. He wanted a more tangible connection with the people using his product. Technology had given him a business; spirits offered a different experience of making something and hearing directly from the person who enjoyed it. He remained involved in software while learning a trade with a physical product at its center.

“What goes better together than software and whiskey?”

Varchasvi Shankar

The joke is his. The practical difficulties were less obliging. He described the search for suitable premises, equipment and renovations, followed by licensing and distribution. Experience from V2Soft helped, and he brought in people from the spirits industry. An existing business could provide resources. Expertise in the new trade still had to be acquired.

The company now presents a portfolio extending beyond bourbon and rye into other spirits. Its expansion plans have included more US markets and further distribution in India. Those are operating ambitions with an ordinary, demanding underside: getting products into places where people can buy them. The cultural story helps explain the brand. Distribution determines how far that story can travel.

A July 2025 television appearance brought the business to a local audience. Shankar discussed Michigan’s climate, corn and Great Lakes water, while colleagues demonstrated the tasting-room experience. The segment placed him beside the people explaining tours and cocktails. After years of selling services to enterprises, here was a business whose work could be introduced across a bar.

The boy in the stands, the name on the bottle

The Varchas brand connects its design to Shankar’s origins in Mysore. The Gandaberunda, the double-headed eagle associated with the city’s royal history, sits alongside an American eagle bottle stopper. Shankar has used the combination to express his experience of building businesses in the United States while retaining a connection to India.

The symbolism has a commercial destination. He wanted to bring American whiskey back to India and share it there. The business crosses the same national boundary he crossed as a student, in the other direction. That gives the packaging something specific to explain: where its founder came from, where he established himself and why both places belong in the product’s identity.

Cricket supplies another connection. Shankar Distillers has described his admiration for Sir Vivian Richards while growing up in India. Richards later became Varchas Whiskey’s global brand ambassador. In June 2024, the company shared their visit to the T20 World Cup in Antigua. A childhood interest had found a place in the grown-up business.

There is commercial logic in working with a cricketer familiar to Indian audiences. There is also an appealing personal detail in the choice. Business biographies tend to make every relationship look like strategy. This one allows room for the younger cricket follower alongside the founder developing a market.

Mysore has continued to appear in his plans. In August 2026, discussing Dasara Gin’s introduction in India, Shankar connected the brand to the city and festival of his childhood. The reference extends a pattern already visible in Varchas: products made through his American business carrying memories from India. Home remains an active part of what he chooses to make.

The old code gets another chapter

The software work has its own new chapter. V2Soft announced Sanciti AI’s global launch on May 29, 2025, describing a platform for tasks across the software development lifecycle. The intended work includes code generation, testing, documentation and modernization. It addresses the sort of complicated enterprise systems that sit naturally within Shankar’s long experience serving corporate customers.

In February 2026, Sanciti AI announced LEGMOD, focused on legacy modernization. Its proposed process begins by examining existing code and recovering requirements, then coordinates planning, migration and testing. The company’s argument starts with a familiar organizational problem: software can outlast the people who remember why it works that way. Understanding the existing system becomes part of changing it.

An October 1, 2026 SIM Detroit program brings his two businesses into the same setting. It lists Shankar and Bill Fandrich for a presentation at Shankar Distillers on agentic AI, cost, security and trust. The agenda makes room for a distillery tour before the technical discussion. Its questions include how to evaluate agents capable of writing code or running tests.

The venue offers a particularly apt picture of his working life: enterprise software discussed inside a business built around barrels and bottles. The student who left Mysore in 1992 has kept adding to his Michigan career. Along the way, he has found ways to send something home. Sometimes the connection takes the form of a product crossing an ocean. Sometimes it is thirty feet of brass behind a bar.