Qualcomm buys Mango's products ! Congrats! SUNIL MAHESHWARI & Team

The Bangalore Start-Up Had Built Tools To Create Mid- And Low-Tier Mobile Sets

THE MANGO LEAD TEAM: (Clockwise from top left) Aniruddha Apte, director-engineering, Sunil Maheshwari, co-founder & CEO, Lekh Joshi, co-founder & CTO, Sourabh Banerjee, technical lead, and Sandip Pal, senior technical lead. Manohar Bangera is another senior team member, but was not available for this photo taken in December 2008.

Sujit John | TNN

Bangalore: Many of you may remember this group of youngsters in the picture. We featured them in December 2008, as part of a series that this newspaper has been running on India's innovative technology companies. They had founded a company called Mango Technologies in July 2006. On Wednesday, Mango announced that it had sold two of its software products to Qualcomm, the world's largest wireless semiconductor company. As part of this transaction, Qualcomm received a mobile handset user interface (UI) software and a PC-based UI customization toolkit from Mango.

Sunil Maheshwari, the 35-year-old CEO and founder of the company, declined to specify the value of the deal, restricting himself to saying it was a multi-million dollar deal. Software products made in India are beginning to find their way into global endproducts through licensing arrangements, but this is a rare instance of a company being able to sell its products to a global giant.

Maheshwari compared it to Google buying the Android operating system from a start-up. "Mango would have found it difficult to scale the product's usage. On the other hand, Qualcomm, with its enormous reach among handset makers and operators around the world, would be able to scale it quickly," Maheshwari said. And given Qualcomm's desire to scale the product, it would have been a risk for it to have a licensing arrangement with Mango.

Mango had developed an application framework for lowand mid-tier mobile handsets that not only enables more cost-effective devices, but also enables developers to more quickly create customized mobile applications and user experiences. Steve Sprigg, senior VP of engineering for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, said Qualcomm offered solutions for all tiers of mobile devices, and "our solutions for entry-level markets have been one of the most quickly growing segments of our product portfolio". He said the software products from Mango would "further expand our ability to offer more turnkey solutions to our customers, enabling them to more quickly bring cost-effective and innovative devices to emerging markets".

Along with this sale, Ojas Ventures, the early stage venture fund floated by Infosys cofounder N S Raghavan, which had a stake in Mango, has made an exit from the company. It has been reported that Ojas may have got an IRR of about 70% on this investment in less than two years.

Maheshwari said Mango is buying back the stake from Ojas. So what does Mango do now? Maheshwari said the company sees enormous opportunity in 3G phones and other 3G connected devices for rural markets. "We are trying to make these affordable enough and attractive enough to be used in areas like agriculture, healthcare, education and e-governance, " he said.

Excerpts from TOI, Bangalore .

Mr Sunil Maheshwari is MCA passedout from MBM Engineering College.