Tejas aims at trebled income this fiscal

Tejas Networks, which makes boxes used by telecom companies to transmit optical signals, will make its first profits by the end of this year, if the company meets the target of trebling its revenues, a senior company executive said.

Funded by a clutch of venture funds, including Battery Ventures, Tejas' biggest and the latest backer to date, Tejas had found two overseas original equipment makers who will ship its boxes under their brands, CEO, Sanjay Nayak said. "One of them is among the 'top three' such OEMs," Nayak said.

Tejas already supplies its boxes under its own brand to telecom customers in India, including the Tata group, and public sector carrier Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, which accounts for between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of Tejas' revenues.

Last year "on sales (orders booked) of Rs 100 crore, Tejas made revenues (shipped equipment) of Rs 49 crore," B N Satyesh, group director for sales and product approvals said. "This year, we aim to double our sales and treble the revenues. At the end of last fiscal, we had an order book of Rs 40 crore," Satyesh said.

The startup firm opened its new corporate office and research labs facility here on Friday, which was inaugurated by the Union communications and IT minister, Dayanidhi Maran. The new facility's, 70,000 sq ft of space houses all the R&D groups, optical networking labs, advanced customer training centre and doubles as Tejas' corporate headquarters.

In January, Tejas announced, it won a third round funding of $15 million from a US-based venture firm Battery Ventures.

The Battery funding took money invested in Tejas by various venture funds to nearly $30 million. Battery Ventures, which provided the funding will have one of its partners, Carl Stjernfeldt, on Tejas' board of directors. "There is a shift in the business models of large telecom companies in the US," Stjernfeldt had said, "part of which is a recognition that a lot of work can be done in India."

Tejas' 150 engineers, of a total staff of 240, take off-the-shelf chips and build software to get those chips functioning together as the optical signal transmission boxes they sell.

The software is very sophisticated and helps a telecom company route signals to specific destinations on complex networks that could be nationwide.

These boxes would comply with advanced standards that will soon proliferate the western markets.

Gururaj Deshpande, a Canadian entrepreneur who seed-funded Tejas and is also its chairman had said, "We will be suppliers to global players to the tune of say $50 million for every billion dollar contract they win to set up optical networks."