From a cable shop in Delhi to one of India's most respected brands
Kunwer Sachdev was born in Delhi in November 1962, the son of a railway employee in Punjabi Bagh. He studied statistics at Hindu College and went on to a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Delhi. By the late 1980s he was running a cable-television installation and equipment business in Delhi alongside his elder brother — a profitable, hands-on operation that taught him retail, distribution and after-sales the hard way.
The pivot to power began with a frustration anyone in 1990s India will recognise: chronic outages. Sachdev started experimenting with backup units inside the cable business and saw a category that was technically primitive, brand-less and hugely under-served. On 14 October 1998 the team formally incorporated Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd in Delhi. The starting capital was reportedly ₹10,000. The destination was a national brand.
The cable-TV years are easy to underrate. They gave Sachdev three things he later spent at Su-Kam without having to learn them: a feel for which technical fixes Indian customers will actually pay for, a network of small dealers who understood retail margins, and a personal habit of running the business from the workshop rather than the boardroom. The pen-selling years before that — he and his elder brother went door-to-door on bicycles — are part of the public profile because Sachdev keeps telling them. They explain the operating temperament: a founder who has done sales calls in person never quite believes the brand sells itself.
The products that built the brand
The early Su-Kam product line moved fast. The first Indian inverters were standard transformer-and-board designs in heavy metal cases. The team's first real breakthrough was electronics: India's first MOSFET-based inverter, then India's first microcontroller-based inverter, and then — the one that mattered — India's first DSP sine-wave inverter, which removed the buzzing in fans and tube lights that square-wave units had inflicted on every backup-powered home.
The second breakthrough was the cabinet itself. In 2003, Su-Kam launched Chic, the first plastic-body inverter in India and, by several accounts, the world. Sachdev convinced GE Plastics to develop a custom flame-retardant compound for the unit. India Today went on to name the plastic-body inverter one of the country's top-ten innovations of the decade. Chic stayed in the market — and in customers' homes — for the better part of twenty years.
By the late 2000s and into the 2010s the catalogue widened in three directions at once. Residential: tubular and SMF batteries paired with home UPS, the Brainy and Brainy Eco solar hybrid home UPS lines. Solar: PWM and MPPT charge controllers and the Solarcon family of solar PCUs. Industrial: online and line-interactive UPS up to 500 kVA. In one launch Su-Kam introduced India's first touchscreen solar PCU with built-in Wi-Fi monitoring — at the time, a configuration nobody else in the country was shipping.
Behind that catalogue sat an unusually heavy R&D programme. Su-Kam filed more than seventy technology patents and several hundred design patents, copyrights and trademarks across India, the United States and other markets — roughly two technology patents a month at its peak. The patent strategy was deliberate: lock in the technical territory the brand had opened.
The category Kunwer Sachdev created
Before Su-Kam, "inverter" in India meant a heavy, square-wave box bought from an unbranded local assembler, kept under the stairs and replaced when it failed. There was no category leader, no consumer brand, no national service network. Su-Kam built one. By the mid-2000s the company was the country's largest organised inverter manufacturer, capturing a market share that contemporary trade coverage placed at over thirty-five per cent at peak.
The home-UPS / inverter category as Indian buyers understand it today — sine-wave output, plastic body, named brand, dealer warranty, retail packaging — is, in large measure, the category Sachdev's team designed. That category leadership attracted institutional capital. On 31 March 2006 the Reliance India Power Fund — a private-equity vehicle jointly sponsored by the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group and Singapore's Temasek Holdings — signed an agreement to acquire a twenty per cent stake in Su-Kam for ₹45 crore. It was the brand's first major external investment.
A factory of firsts
The operational base was Plot 54, Udyog Vihar Phase VI, Gurugram — Su-Kam's headquarters and primary inverter plant — supported at scale by a battery factory in Himachal Pradesh staffed by trained engineers and equipped for in-house testing. Vertical integration was the deliberate strategy: design, electronics, plastics, batteries and software under one company umbrella. At its peak the company employed in the high hundreds and ran a pan-India service network.
From India to ninety countries
Su-Kam's international expansion ran parallel with its domestic growth. Export reach at more than ninety countries at peak across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, supported by a dealer network of more than twenty-five thousand partners. Concrete African deployments include thirty-five schools in Rwanda powered by Su-Kam solar systems and approximately two thousand solar street lights installed across Gabonese villages — many communities that had not previously been electrified. Su-Kam set what was at the time the highest export-sales record by an Indian manufacturer in the power-backup sector.
Pioneering solar in India
Su-Kam moved into solar earlier than every other Indian power-electronics company. By the early 2010s the catalogue already covered solar inverters, off-grid systems, grid-tie inverters, the Solarcon solar PCU family and solar lighting — aligned with the launch of the National Solar Mission. Two products mattered most: India's first hybrid solar PCU, and India's first touchscreen Wi-Fi-enabled solar PCU. At the time of launch nobody else in the country was shipping either.
Su-Kam's solar push was not gentle. The products were engineered and priced to beat Chinese and American competitors head-on — not on dumping, but on India-designed engineering with a service network behind it. In Bangladesh, Nepal, Bahrain, Kuwait, Nigeria and Rwanda — markets Chinese solar manufacturers expected to walk into — buyers picked Su-Kam instead. The trade press at the time described Sachdev as a "pain" for Chinese players trying to enter India and its neighbouring markets.
Recognition arrived. The press began calling him the Solar Man of India alongside his older title. Discovery Channel built a documentary — Sun Fuel: Powering India — around Su-Kam's solar work and what it meant for villages still without electricity. In a 2018 pv magazine India interview, Sachdev argued that Su-Kam was "four to five years ahead of competitors" on inverter and solar technology.
The recognitions
- Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year — 2011
- Bharat Shiromani Award — Government-of-India-affiliated honour for entrepreneurship and innovation
- Entrepreneur of the Year, Entrepreneur India Awards — 2011
- Superbrands India — the first Indian power-solutions company so recognised
- India Today — Innovation of the Decade for the plastic-body inverter (Chic)
- Profiled in Connect the Dots by Rashmi Bansal — one of twenty entrepreneurs-without-an-MBA the book is built around
What the brand meant — and what it still means
Su-Kam was never only an inverter company. It was, for the better part of two decades, evidence that an Indian electronics brand could be designed, engineered, manufactured and marketed in India to a global standard, and sold from Delhi to Dakar without apology.
"Each step of this branding journey has contributed to what I believe will be a lasting legacy for Su-Kam — a brand that stands the test of time."
— Kunwer Sachdev, founder, Su-Kam Power Systems
The end, when it came, was abrupt. By 2017–2018 the company was carrying debt it could not service; insolvency proceedings followed at the National Company Law Tribunal, and Sachdev's formal association with Su-Kam ended in 2018. Sachdev has since settled his personal bank guarantees with the lenders. None of it changes the part of the story this page is about: the brand Su-Kam was, and the firsts it shipped.
Beyond Su-Kam
Sachdev's current operating focus is Kunwwer.ai, an AI company he founded that builds multipurpose AI-based software for Indian businesses — practical AI products across HR, operations, healthcare, customer engagement and other workflows. Alongside Kunwwer.ai he has started a new role as an investor and mentor to Indian founders, with a particular focus on early-stage AI and deep-tech ventures.
He also remains a mentor and advisor to Su-Vastika Systems, the storage and lithium-UPS company. The arc isn't broken. It's continuing — under new vehicles, with the same operator and a sharper focus on AI, capital and the next generation of Indian founders.