Kunwer Sachdev

I did not begin with capital or contacts. I began with pens, selling them door to door from 1979 to 1985, learning the only lessons that ever mattered — how to face a stranger, how to take “no” and keep walking. After a short job, in 1988 I started Su-Kam Cable TV, wiring hotels and high-rises and then manufacturing the amplifiers, modulators and couplers the new cable industry needed. That is where my real entrepreneurship began.

I was obsessed with technology even then. When I had to choose between comfort and a better instrument, I chose the instrument — once spending over ₹20 lakh on a spectrum analyzer, money that could have bought a house. Then, in 1998, an inverter in my home failed. The technician repairing it told me, “You would not understand this technology.” It hit my ego. I opened the box, saw a jungle of wires on a cheap single-sided board, and knew I could do far better.

I didn't copy the local designs. I looked at the inverters inside Western recreational vehicles — a double-sided PCB, MOSFET technology, a single battery — while India was still building crude transistor units that needed two. It took nearly two years of trial and error. The MOSFETs kept exploding on the bench; the noise was terrifying. But we got there.

I sold the first 500 units myself, door to door, opening the case in front of customers to show the protections inside — overload, short circuit, deep discharge, reverse polarity. By 2000 I shut the cable business completely. Su-Kam was now my life. In 2001, The Times of India called our ₹9,400 digital inverter a “Digital Wonder” — early proof that we were setting a new standard.

Innovation was never a department at Su-Kam — it was the whole company. When a customer's daughter got a shock wiping the metal body of an inverter, we partnered with GE Plastics and in 2003 built the CHIC, India's first plastic-body inverter, in a PC-ABS that could take 120°C. India Today called it the “Innovation of the Decade,” and many customers used it for over twenty years.

Not everything worked. The Fairy Queen — an inverter shaped like a heritage toy locomotive — failed because the packaging couldn't protect it. The lesson stayed with me: trust your team, but never take your eyes off the details that matter. We pushed on — India's first DSP sine-wave inverter in 2002, the first 5 KVA and 10 KVA inverters that took on the diesel-generator industry, the first Solar Online UPS, and the first grid-feed hybrid inverter. And we created a whole category: in 2005 we named the “Home UPS” — within a year the entire industry was using our term.

Products are only half the story. The other half is where they went — to the places the grid had forgotten. We built India's first mega-scale 1 MW rooftop solar plant at Punjab Engineering College in 2014, powered IFFCO's corporate campus, and replaced diesel with off-grid solar at eighteen Assam Rifles outposts and at Border Security Force posts along the Indo-Pak border. We kept a Tripura medical facility running where the grid never could, and delivered a 105-site turnkey solar project in Rwanda. These were not showroom installations; they were power where it genuinely changed lives.

A competitor copied the CHIC in inferior plastic, and their units caught fire in the market. We sued — and lost, because we had filed the design protection after launch instead of before. That defeat changed me. From then on, we filed first and filed relentlessly — more than seventy patents, at times close to two a month, with the Su-Kam trademark registered in over seventy countries.

That record made me, by many accounts, the largest patent holder in India's power-backup industry — and it took me to Geneva, where WIPO, the UN's intellectual-property body, invited me to share India's innovation story on their official platform. My message there was simple: jugaad does not scale; original, protected technology does.

The thing I am proudest of is not a product. It is the people. I built Su-Kam mostly with freshers and with people who had never worked in this field, and I trained them myself, in batches. They became engineers, patentees and plant heads. One who joined as a fresher went on to hold patents in his own name.

Before me, power backup in India was a completely unorganised trade — local assemblers, no standards, no trust. I turned it into an organised industry: proper R&D, certified factories, branded and protected products, a trained workforce. Su-Kam became an unofficial training ground for the entire power-electronics sector.

Quality and cost can't live at the mercy of suppliers, so we built our own — six factories in all. Two units plus R&D and the corporate headquarters in Gurgaon; four units in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh; and a six-acre sealed-battery plant at Katha. In 2005 the Reliance-Temasek power fund took twenty per cent of Su-Kam for about ₹45 crore — then the largest private investment in India's power-backup sector.

Not every bet paid off. Our sealed maintenance-free batteries suited six-month export warranties but struggled under India's long warranties and deep-cycle home use. It cost us dearly — and taught me that hiring for a domain you don't yet understand is the most expensive mistake of all.

The product wins in the lab; the company wins in the last mile. I built distribution from door-to-door selling into a network of thousands of dealers — electricians and electronics shops I trained personally — reaching from metros to the smallest towns, and on to places like Burkina Faso.

When Bharti–Wal-Mart's Easyday stores were losing their tills to an unreliable grid and diesel theft, we engineered a layered system — a 25 KVA three-phase inverter, a large battery bank, a deliberately small generator on auto-mains-failure, and a voltage-based load-shedding “ladder” — with remote monitoring years before the phrase was fashionable.

I marketed Su-Kam the way nobody in my industry dared to. We launched our YouTube channel in August 2009 — the first inverter and solar company in India to do so. Luminous followed in 2010, V-Guard in 2011, Microtek only in 2019. A ten-year gap. One of my earliest films, which I scripted myself in Hindi, simply argued that a 10 KVA inverter could replace a noisy, fuel-thirsty diesel generator. Discovery Channel later filmed part of its solar documentary at our plant.

The same month, I started our Facebook page — it grew to over 143,000 followers with no paid advertising. And I picked up the pen myself, writing columns for The Times of India on patenting, electric vehicles and renewable energy.

To sell in Europe you need the CE mark, and Su-Kam was the first Indian inverter company to earn it, certified by DNV. We began exporting to Sri Lanka in 2003 and grew to more than 90 countries — Nigeria, Kenya, the Gulf, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso and beyond. We even engineered our hybrid inverter to lock onto the weak voltages of those grids; if it worked in Nigeria, it would work almost anywhere.

My boldest export story is the e-rickshaw motor. I partnered with Deepak Singh, who built high-power DC motors in America, and within six months he set up an R&D unit and plant inside Su-Kam's premises. We made high-power motors in India and exported them back to the United States.

At its height around 2013, Su-Kam reached roughly ₹1,200 crore in revenue, with six factories, more than 5,000 employees and a presence in over 90 countries. The recognition followed — the awards, a cover on Forbes India, and chapters in two bestselling books, Rashmi Bansal's Connect the Dots and Porus Munshi's Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen. Somewhere along the way a magazine gave me the title that has stayed ever since: the Solar Man of India. I never thought of myself that way. I just thought of myself as someone who refused to quit.

Then it came apart. Despite everything we had built, the company was pulled into insolvency in 2018, and on 3 April 2019 the tribunal ordered its liquidation. Around 2,000 people lost their jobs in a single day. My own salary had stopped six months earlier; my wife sold her jewellery; suppliers who depended entirely on us closed for good.

The numbers still haunt me. The company was fairly valued near ₹300 crore. I offered ₹250 crore, with bank backing, to save it. Instead it was sold during the pandemic for ₹49.5 crore — the banks recovered only about ₹8 crore. As a personal guarantor I then faced a liability that swelled from around ₹270 crore to ₹650 crore, mostly interest; I paid roughly ₹65 crore, selling my properties, including the home I had lived in for twelve years. I will not dress it up — it was the lowest point of my life.

Written off by many, I started again — this time with my wife, Khushboo. Together we built Su-vastika, making lithium battery energy-storage systems, solar hybrid power units, lift and elevator backups and EV chargers. Khushboo runs it independently today; my role is simply technical support. In 2025 Rotomag Enertec, led by Umesh Balani, made a strategic investment to help it scale faster across India and global markets.

Starting again at the bottom taught me what success never could. It proved something I needed to know: the engine was never the company. It was the builder.

The journey of technology continues — now into AI. I started kunwwer.ai to help companies, and especially MSMEs, actually adopt artificial intelligence: building AI-based software that lifts productivity, training business owners to use AI in their daily operations, and developing sales and marketing software any company can deploy into its own systems. It is the Su-Kam playbook, rebuilt for a new age.

I started with pens. Today I build with AI. My focus now is learning this technology deeply, investing in AI startups, and mentoring the founders building what comes next. The tools change every decade. The urge to build never does.