Built to Endure - The Invendis Way

A story of resilience, trust, and real leadership in a world chasing shortcuts.

(Pic: Invendis Founder and CEO - Satish Kulkarni)

It was supposed to be a brief meeting—just another exchange of thoughts to explore Industrial IoT.

But what unfolded over coffee with Satish Kulkarni, Founder and CEO of Invendis Technologies, felt like uncovering a story buried beneath the noise of India’s startup frenzy. A story not of hype, but of heart. Not of exits, but of endurance.

Because Satish didn’t just build a company.
He rebuilt it from the rubble—twice.

And he didn’t do it alone.
Rangarajan, co-founder and COO of Invendis, has been there since day one—holding the operational core steady through every peak and every storm.

As Satish puts it, “Ranga is the nuts and bolts guy—the one who hunkers down and makes sure the windmills of Invendis keep running.”

The rise before the fall

In 2007, Invendis was born with a singular mission: to bring real-time monitoring to telecom towers through custom-built hardware. Back then, “IoT” wasn’t yet a buzzword. Satish and his team called it what it was—a telecom tower remote monitoring system. Designed in India. Built for India.

Early success came fast.
The team landed a multi-million dollar deal with a leading tower company in Bangalore. Satish thought, "This is it. The rest of the industry will follow."

And they almost did.

But then came the 2G spectrum scam.

A visit to the deepest valley becomes inevitable

“In our line of business,” Satish told me,
“there are peaks—and then there are valleys.
And when it’s a valley, it’s a deep, deep valley.”

This was one of them.

Satish had hired talent. He had built for demand.
Invendis had just shipped a multi-million-dollar product to one of India’s leading tower companies. Momentum was on their side.

When the 2G spectrum scam broke around 2009–2010, it wasn’t just a regulatory scandal. It was a nuclear winter for telecom infrastructure. The Supreme Court canceled 122 telecom licenses. CapEx froze. Tower companies halted expansion. Mergers tangled up decision-making.

“It was like an elevator drop from 100 to 0,” Satish said.
“We were too young to have reserves. Too hardware-focused to attract SaaS-hungry investors. And too far from Product-Market-Fit to reassure anyone.”

“We had built an organization for peak demand,” he added.
“And overnight—it all went to zero.”

Yes, let that sink in—
From millions… to ZERO.

People had to be let go. Offices were shut.
And worse than all of that—the market stopped believing.

But there was one belief that didn’t fade.

“Our investors told me, Satish said ‘We won’t let the lights go off in your office.’ And they meant it.”

They funded the company—not for control or equity.
But out of belief. And that belief kept Invendis alive.

As Satish said this, it made me pause.

Because with the right investor mindset, a founder doesn’t just get capital—they get oxygen.
A cushion to operate without constant anxiety, to make decisions that aren't driven by desperation.
To retain people. To rebuild. To think long-term.

It reminded me of the best cricket coaches—the ones who back their players through form slumps and dropped catches.
Because when you're not worried about your spot in the team, you play fearlessly.

“I remain indebted to my investors,” Satish said.

Powerful sentiment.

The valley before the payoff - a familiar pattern

Satish’s story reminded me of something I’d once read in Mastery by Robert Greene—about Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator.

After selling his first startup for about $50 million, Graham disappeared into years of silence.
He wrote essays. Explored ideas no one wanted to hear. Invested in his thoughts—while the world moved on.

He stayed in his own valley—ploughing hard, quietly, while no one was watching.

Then one day, Y Combinator launched.
And years of obscurity became the foundation for startup history.

“The terrain will rise—if you’re brave enough to stay in the valley long enough,” Satish said, after a long silence.

And that’s what he did.
He didn’t pivot. He stayed. He rebuilt.
And when the market came calling again—he was already ready.

In the middle of the crash, came a boarding pass. Destination: South Africa.

In the midst of this deep valley in his journey, a small thread of hope came from an unlikely place—South Africa.

American Tower Corporation (ATC), a client that had bought systems in India, was expanding into South Africa and Ghana. They nudged Satish: “Why don’t you speak to the teams there?”

And so he did.

What followed was nothing short of a resurrection.

By 2011, Invendis got its first international order to deploy in Ghana.
Soon after, tower companies across Africa began to follow.

“We came from a country where power cuts were routine,” Satish said.
“So we had already engineered for chaos. For theft. For heat. For broken infrastructure.”

American and Israeli competitors entered with polished solutions built for rule-based systems. But they didn’t know how to survive a 10-hour power cut or prevent on-site tampering.

Invendis did.

“Our designs aimed for precision—but were grounded in the realities we knew all too well,” he said.

(Pic: Invendis Facility in Bengaluru)

Fast forward a few years—and uncertainty returned

By 2020, the remote tower monitoring business was losing steam.
The model was solid—but the technology curve had moved on.

Telecom operators were consolidating their infrastructure, and many began embedding monitoring features directly into OEM equipment.
At the same time, energy efficiency and operational visibility had become table stakes—not differentiators.

“I realized we had to pivot before we became obsolete,” Satish said.

They still had steady revenue coming in from tower monitoring, but Satish wasn’t going to wait around for disruption to hit.

“It was a classic Kodak moment,” he reflected—the kind where you either pivot, or become irrelevant.

At that point, Invendis acquired a router and systems design engineering firm founded by former professionals from Wipro, Cypress Semiconductor, and GE.

The shift made sense—connectivity was no longer just about uptime, but also about intelligence, security, and edge computing.
Industries now needed routers that weren’t just conduits of data, but smart, programmable, and secure gateways.

But no acquisition comes easy. There’s technology to align, people to retain, cultures to absorb, and numbers that rarely tell the whole story.

“The products weren’t ready for the market,” he said. “It took us two years to make them commercially viable. But now—we’re doing really well in this space.”

And as he said that, it made me reflect.

Maybe this is what true leadership looks like—not reacting when things break, but sensing the shift before others see it.
To pivot before decline. To invest before certainty.
To prepare your company not for the now, but for what’s next.

Invendis, under Satish’s leadership, did exactly that.

The heart and culture behind the hardware

Today, Invendis operates in over 32 countries across Africa, Europe, and Asia, and monitors over 150,000 remote sites.

When I asked Satish what he’s proudest of, he didn’t talk about scale.
Not revenue. Not reach.

He talked about his people.

“I don’t run the day-to-day,” he said. “I trust my people. If something’s broken, I’ll know. But that rarely happens.”

This wasn’t hands-off leadership. It was trust—in people, and in process.

He sets the frame.
The team paints the canvas.

And when I asked about growth, he didn’t mention strategy decks or funding rounds.
He offered this:

“Sometimes, it takes you years to get to growth.
And sometimes, in a single week, you grow what you hadn’t in years.”

Then he paused. Shifted tone. And shared something personal.

“My former driver—he once dropped my son to school.
Today, he runs our factory operations in Bengaluru,” he said, with quiet pride.

It wasn’t a one-off story.

Satish had built a place where people didn’t just punch in hours—they grew.
With the company. Alongside it. Because of it.

“Anyone can fire experienced workers and cut costs,” he said.
“But what happens to their families? Their dignity?”

Even when spreadsheets told him otherwise, Satish chose loyalty.
Year after year.

“At the start of every financial year, this thought crosses my mind—do I retain, or do I cut?”
“I always retained,” he said.

He didn’t build culture with a playbook.
He built it with decisions—quiet ones, repeated often.

And when I walked through his electronics assembly unit near Silk Board, I saw something you can’t fabricate.

Pride.
Clarity.
Ownership.

“These aren’t workers,” he said. “They’re the soul of what we build.”

(Pic: Invendis staff at the Bengaluru Facility)

The discipline behind the scenes

As we wrapped up our chat, Satish dropped a line that didn’t sound profound—until I processed it later.

“Even when I’m out of the country, I start work at 9 a.m.
I’ve done that every day since we started.”

No excuses. Just rhythm. Ritual. A founder’s way of showing up.

And I remembered something I once read:

“How you do one thing is how you do everything.”

Satish’s calm consistency was more powerful than any motivational reel.

What I carried with me after this conversation

1/ Grit isn’t loud. It’s what’s left when everything else gives up.
Satish didn’t just survive the 2G crash—he rebuilt from zero.
No safety net. No guarantees. Just belief that it was still worth building.

2/ Resilience is a quiet habit.
The world moved on. Competitors pivoted. Capital dried up.
But he showed up. Again and again.
Sometimes that’s the real work—not vision, but staying power.

3/ Leadership isn’t always visible. But you feel it in the way a team shows up.
He doesn’t micromanage. He trusts.
And because of that, people don’t just do their jobs—they protect what they build.

4/ Taking care of people when it doesn’t make sense on paper—that’s the real culture.
I’ve worked in places where values were framed on walls.
Satish lives his. In who he keeps. In how he speaks about his team.
It’s not performative. It’s personal.

5/ Domain depth matters. But so does knowing what the domain overlooks.
He didn’t just build tech for towers. He built for theft, for blackouts, for systems that fail.
That’s not just engineering—that’s awareness.
It’s what happens when you’re not building for a pitch deck, but for the real world.

I walked into Invendis thinking about tech.
I walked out thinking about life.

I met a founder who built something very different:

A company.
A culture.
And a story that doesn’t need a spotlight—because it runs on something stronger.

Conviction.

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