Pankaj Ratra’s relationship with Path Infotech, a software solutions and services firm, is as good as a marriage: he founded it with his friends in 1991, and it’s the only one he’s worked for. Ratra admits the marriage gets stronger every day—the Rs75-crore, Noida-based firm has clarity as to where it needs to be to continue the 25 per cent CAGR climb. With the credo he’s learnt—staying strong and having a diverse customer base—the firm is on track to meet new milestones.

It wasn’t easy being a young team—people didn’t know if we would stick around long enough.

Path Infotech was founded by four of us, all friends from college, the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad. As MCA students, we’d talk about our own company. We officially launched in 1991 with a seed fund of Rs70,000 that we managed to cobble together. We used it to buy a computer, a UPS and a printer. 

When we started, we didn’t want to provide just technology maintenance. We thought about the solutions we came up with as an answer to the question—what business problem are we trying to solve? How will it impact a company, and will it lead to higher transactions? Computing power, to us, was a tool to achieve these objectives. The software solutions deployed dictated the hardware a company uses. When we entered the market, we found the opposite held true—people didn’t value the software as much as they valued the hardware. Changing that perception was our biggest challenge. We persevered because we knew there was a market there waiting to be automated, though people themselves were not aware of the proper definition of automation.

Many of our lessons came early. It wasn’t easy being a young team—people didn’t know if we would stick around long enough. However, our biggest blow came in 1994 when one of the founding directors decided to quit. Our revenues were insufficient and we were vulnerable. Looking back, his exit brought in that extra bit of resolve. It pushed us to strive harder, and it became even more important to succeed. I believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. There have been many challenges—losing critical resources and clients. But staying positive and strong is critical. It’s equally important to live your own journey, and not copy what others are doing. Today, we have a solid presence and market equity because when we began, we concentrated for the first decade on India. We branched out to Singapore in 2000, and opened a subsidiary in the US two years ago. We took the leap when the time was right and when we were equipped to fund our expansion. 

That’s not to say we’ve always got everything figured out. Client relations have been our strength, and firms like Maruti and Citigroup have worked with us for more than 15 years. Still, we’ve been jolted by clients sometimes. Seven years ago, a US-based client decided to disengage with us. Of course, our business was hit but we learnt a valuable lesson that day: we had let ourselves become vulnerable as a large percentage of our revenue came from too few customers—a lot was riding on a handful of people. Since then, every three years, we try to bring on a big customer on board.