I have always believed that a company is only as strong as the people inside it. Machines can be bought. Technology can be licensed. But the right person — someone who thinks, who creates, who pushes the boundaries of what is possible — that is not something you find in a catalogue.
This is a series about the people who walked through the doors of Su-Kam and shaped what it became. Some of them were young and hungry. Some were already accomplished. All of them were given their first real chance in the inverter industry — by me, by Su-Kam, by the belief that India's power story was only just beginning. Venkat Rajaraman is one of those people. And his story is one I am proud to tell.
A Phone Call from Hyderabad
It was around 2007. Su-Kam was moving fast — faster than most people expected, including perhaps me. We had built a strong business in inverters and UPS systems, and I knew the next chapter had to be built on serious research and development. We were not just selling boxes anymore. We were trying to solve India's power problem, and that required world-class engineering at the core.
A friend of mine in Hyderabad called me one day. He said — Kunwer, I know someone you should meet. He is in the United States, working with Nvidia. He is brilliant, he is grounded, and I think he might be exactly what you are looking for.
That man was Venkat Rajaraman.
From Silicon Valley to Su-Kam
Venkat was not just casually associated with Nvidia. He was Vice President of Engineering at PortalPlayer — a semiconductor company that had been acquired by Nvidia in early 2007. Before that, he had worked at Sun Microsystems in the United States. He was the kind of engineer who had built things at global scale and who understood what serious R&D infrastructure looked like.
I flew to Hyderabad to meet him. We spoke for a long time. He was not looking for a job — he was thinking about what to do next, and India was part of that thinking. What he had not expected, I think, was to find someone building a power-electronics company at the scale we were building, with the ambition we had, right here in India.
I offered him the role of Chief Technology Officer. He accepted.
What He Built
Venkat joined Su-Kam and built our R&D function in a way it had never been built before. He brought rigour — not just technical, but organisational. He understood that patents were not just intellectual property; they were competitive moats. Under his tenure, Su-Kam's patenting activity accelerated. He helped us think about the inverter not as an appliance but as a power-management system.
He later co-founded Cygni Energy, a Chennai-based energy storage company building lithium-ion battery packs for commercial and industrial applications. It is, in a real sense, a Su-Kam lineage company — built by someone who learned to think about India's power problem inside our walls.
The man who left Nvidia for a dream did not waste the detour.