NIT alumnus inspires budding entrepreneurs

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, November 9

An engineering pass-out from Dr BR Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, who is now a multi-crore business tycoon in Bengaluru, recently returned to his campus and narrated his success story to students.

A Keralite, Ajith Mohan Karimpana, who passed out from the campus in 2000, is the founder and CEO of Furlenco, India’s first online home furniture rental company. He did his masters in Computer and Information Science from Temple University, Philadelphia, besides a fellowship programme on entrepreneurship from Startup Leadership Programme. Prior to founding Furlenco, Ajith donned numerous hats; as Software Engineer with Infosys Technologies, Senior Consultant with Morgan Stanley, Senior Analyst with Goldman Sachs and went on to become the Vice President in the same organisation.

Having developed an expertise in Business Strategy, Analytics, and team management during his professional stint of 11 years, Ajith came up with his own enterprise, Rent Ur Duniya in 2011, witnessing tremendous opportunity in the home rental furniture market. It was later re-branded as Furlenco in 2013. He wishes to make a social impact by using only plantation wood for its furniture and creating an eco-friendly brand through Furlenco. Ajith also won The Smart CEO-Startup50 Awards 2015.

Now with a strong team of 280 members in just six years of inception, Ajith said he was not getting complete satisfaction in work and planned to return home having stayed in the US for 10 years. “I began disposing off my furniture and realised that I was not getting any value for it. When I returned, a friend had come to Bengaluru and consulted me for buying furniture. I suggested him to go for rented furniture and that I would supply to him. He agreed. I placed an order with a furniture manufacturer which got delayed by over a week. I myself went to his house and did all the fitting. That was my first order.”

Preparing students to be an entrepreneur, he went to share more stories, “I was working from home and soon realised the need to have my own set up. I invested Rs 50 lakh. But it got exhausted soon and I was left with very little funds at my disposal. A friend whom I contacted on FB agreed to lend me Rs 25 lakh for business, which I slowly persuaded him to enhance to Rs 1 crore. He is now a shareholder and a partner in my Rs 500 crore company.

Ajith’s professor Dr Arvind Bhardwaj shared, “Ajith was a very shy student, a complete mismatch of his personality today. He grew up at a time when there were no start-up facilities today. He is from the same batch as of that Upasana Taku, co-founder of MobiKwik.”