Chetan Patil

Chetan Patil Co-Founder and CEO

A Visionary Leader with the Zeal to Transform Businesses

Inspirational business leaders are driven by positive attitude and the focus to bring change through their dedicated endeavors. They believe in working together with the team and achieving not only the organizational goals, but also each employee’s objectives. These leaders never give up in the face of adversity; rather they face each situation with confidence. They are ethical, fearless, and constantly motivate everyone to achieve their best.

One such dedicated change leader in the business arena is Chetan Patil, the Co-Founder and CEO of Aiddition Technologies. Hailing from Vijaypura situated at 600 kms from Bangalore, he was passionate about electronics since his childhood. This passion made him pursue the BE course from his home town. His desire to learn concepts of embedded

systems brought him to Bangalore, where he pursued post graduation in embedded systems and VLSI design. He is a maker, who believes in transforming fantasy into reality, through dedication and a never give up attitude.

The Beginning Chetan’s childhood dream was to make products, and coincidentally, Bangalore had started nurturing startups during that time. Initially, he joined a start-up to gain necessary exposure and learned the nitty-gritty of rapid prototyping for nearly 2 years. Then, he joined hands with his professor in PG studies, Mr. Kumaraswamy K and his friend and mentor, Mr. T R Vishwanath. After quitting his job, he established Aiddition Technologies in 2016.

Facing Challenges and Achieving Goals Under Chetan’s leadership, the first product of Aiddition was a digital signage software that was deployed on rd 3 party display players. “Since we were from electronics background the limitations of supplying Signage software didn’t satisfy our inner desire to make something big. By understanding the limitations of deploying mere software we started developing our own Interactive display with built-in processor,” he said. Like any other start-up, they also faced monetary problems at the beginning.

The company had to hire interns and freelancers from industries on per-task basis. This helped them in making their own interactive displays. Chetan said, “Believe me it took nearly one year to find suitable manufacturing partners for getting spare components as the Industry was relative new for many players. In fact we had to train many partners to get our design done”. His team worked 24/7 to ensure that the product was ready in time. These efforts resulted in the launch of Aidio All-In-One- Interactive Displays bundled with Interactive software package. This opened the doors to catering services to hospitality, retails, restaurants, educational sectors, and so on. Chetan is constantly working hard to highlight the products in the global market.

A Dedicated Front Runner Chetan states that he is a maker, who believes in disrupting the retail shopping experience technologies by adopting innovations. He focuses on providing customers and the brands same kind of experience they derive from online shopping environs. Under his ardent leadership, the company launched India’s first home grown Hardware-As-a-Service (HAAS) model on professional grade public interactive displays and its software for retailers and brands.

Opinions about the Industry Chetan believes that the digital era leads to lots of transformations in our daily life. Technology is enabling us to feel anything is possible these days.In his opinion, the lifestyle of the people is changing & everyone is looking for something new in whatever they do. Be it shopping or doing anything, everyone just wants to explore the innovation everywhere.“Even in the retail industry, it hasn’t been a different story. Retailers are behind modern solutions to give a better in-store customer experience at the stores,” he adds.

Chetan believes that, even in the Ecom boom, India has the highest number of outlets per person. With CAGR 20-25%, organized retail has an enormous opportunity to make the shopping more convenient than ever before and be neck to neck with Ecom. Retailers don’t approach this opportunity with ‘one size fits all’, rather they find solutions to make it more ‘personalized and interactive’.

About Aiddition Technologies Situated at Bangalore, Aiddition has developed an interactive software stack

We focus on making our products stand out in the global market ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ with the brand name Aidio, which is an integrated all-in-one interactive display having smart sensor interfacing, designed for interactive applications. Aidio displays are packed with in-store customer experience software suite. This enables retailers/brands to give a better customer experience at offline setup by capturing unprecedented instore customer activity data. This product brings online/ e-commerce environment in offline store helping customers to check digital catalog/ self order, which helps in increased order rate for the store.

Approaching towards a Bright Future Chetan states that he wants Aiddition to be recognized as a pioneer/ leader in interactive display and in-store experience technology market. He aims to assist brands/ retailers to create virtual shopping store to reach every corner of the country and in creating leading in-store customer experience solutions.

Words for the Future Generation Chetan advises budding entrepreneurs not to be afraid of failure. He asks them to work with their full potential and to give the best of their efforts in achieving their goals. He concludes by advising them to chase their dreams and transform them into realities.

nvestments are a vital process in any business. I However, there are very few people who have gained expertise in this niche. Advising people to invest in the right business is indeed a challenging task and Maple Capital Advisors has aced it. Pankaj Karna, Founder & Managing Directoris an experienced investment banker with over 22 year’s experience. He has worked in institutions like BNP Paribas, Rabobank and Grant Thornton prior to establishing Maple Capital Advisors. He has advised over 100 M&A, private equity and structured finance transactions in his career. Maple Capital Advisors completes 10 years in 2020 with a successful track record and has engaged with some of the best names in the industry.

With an interview with Insights Success, Pankaj and his team provide us with an overview of the challenges and success story of Maple Capital Advisors.

1. Being a successful business leader, what difficulties and challenges do you face? What keeps you motivated?

In our journey, we have faced challenges ranging from

Pankaj Karna Amplifying your Business through Thoughtful Investment Guidance

Pankaj Karna Founder & Managing Director

ENGAGING T O CREA TE VALUE

business slowdown and consequent stretch/delay on our deal outcomes to having faced stiff competition from a potential acquirer to significant staff churn at one point. We kept our heads down, continued to persevere and eventually recovered successfully and mitigated these risks today in terms of client diversity, market presence, staff mix and overall standing. Our Highest motivation is proven success in our engagements and adding value to our clients.

2. Brief about Maple Capital Advisors and its services and your vision for your company

Our vision is to establish as a premier pan India mid-market investment bank and early-stage investment firm highly focused non-new age entrepreneurs and new-age businesses especially in the consumer, financial services and technology domain.

Maple Capital Advisors is a premier mid-market investment bank focused on mergers & acquisitions, private equityadvising on mid-market private equity capital raise, accelerator-backing promising early-stage startups and leverage capital-advising on structured debt and corporate finance.

3. How do you motivate your team to be innovative and productive at work?

Our business is very goal and performance-orientated and hence outcomes define motivation very directly. This is the case in investment banking, successful mandate closures are directly related to motivation as all in team benefit from such outcomes, careerwise and monetarily.

4. What is your opinion regarding the current landscape of the market your company caters to?

In the current landscape, we are well-positioned as the go-to investment bank in mid-market in North India and we mostly compete with much larger players especially the Big 5 Nationally there are similar players as us in Mumbai Bangalore and Chennai. So we think we are regionally strong and emerging at the national level.

5. Please tell us about your achievements and accomplishments

We have consistently delivered successful mandates over

the last 10 years and with our focus of engaging to create value we have had numerous repeat relationships that attest our ethos and track record. From the largest consolidation in the ceramic tiles industry(Bell Ceramics) in India to the largest M&A in Fitness(Fitness First) to the largest capital raise in coworking business(Awfis) in India are testimony to our track record and ability to deliver beyond our size.

We have featured multiple times in the league tables of top investment bankers in India by VC Circle. Was profiled by IBEF in its book ‘Ordinary Indians and Extraordinary st Enterprise’, a book profiling 25 - 1 generation entrepreneurs in India.

6. Where do you envision yourself and your company in the near future?

We see us emerging at the national level across multiple cities as a leading mid-market investment bank. We also plan to develop the early-stage investment thesis through a larger portfolio of proprietary investments and potentially managing a larger fund pool in this space in years to come.

7. What is your advice to the budding and aspiring entrepreneurs?

High perseverance and conviction coupled with pragmatism and being grounded pay well in the long term and success of the business. Working with the brightest and most motivated talent is important for successful scale-up. Being open to change and criticism is equally important.