Shellkode, scaling big dreams from small towns

Startup founders are typically laser-focused on go-to-market (GTM) strategies, raising capital, growing revenue, reducing losses, becoming profitable, building scale and more. That’s the entrepreneur's playbook! Arun Kumar, on the other hand, was thinking beyond the balance sheet, when he started his venture. Business metrics were important, but Kumar set a larger goal for himself - to create new opportunities in smaller towns and help talent from cities like Coimbatore, Trichy, Surat and Nagpur access jobs in IT with ease.

“Why should everyone head to big cities like Bengaluru, Delhi or Mumbai for work? I have seen more hunger to succeed from people in small cities,” says Kumar, an MCA graduate from the Coimbatore Institute of Technology (CIT). He believes that bringing jobs to where talent is will do a lot of good for the economies of smaller towns. Kumar’s goals are lofty - aside from creating IT jobs in small towns, he also wanted to empower women with IT skills. Finally, he was determined to bring newer technologies like AI to tier II and III cities in India.

The AI wave, says Arun, is currently sweeping across the business and technology landscape, creating shifts in 4 essential ways. The first is the optimization of resources and costs, allowing companies to do more with less. Second, AI will improve the user experience. Third, it will help companies speed up GTM initiatives. And fourth, AI will increase the company’s ability to cross sell and upsell. Arun sees AWS playing a key role in the AI journey. “AWS has a whole suite of LLMs (Large Language Models) which helps us create use cases in healthcare, financial services and other areas,” says Kumar.

Starting Shellkode

After completing a masters of computer application (MCA) from CIT, Kumar, who wanted to be an entrepreneur in college, was placed at Wipro. However, the growth in cloud adoption prompted him to shift to the Bengaluru-based startup, Powerupcloud Technologies, a cloud consulting company. He was the seventh employee there. This is where he met like-minded colleagues who wanted to start their own venture. Powerupcloud was later acquired by Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI).

Kumar learnt the nuances of cloud and applications across retail, media, healthcare and other verticals. “We gained a lot of understanding of companies that hosted or deployed their applications in the cloud; with Amazon cloud. We saw a wave of cloud adoption coming on,” recalls Kumar.

Soon enough, in June 2021, he co-founded Shellkode, a `born in the cloud’ startup. The Coimbatore-based venture helps customers transform their legacy IT environment to the cloud and offers a host of services including the migration and modernization of IT resources, data solutions and AI and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities. In many projects Shellkode works closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS), implementing their solutions for clients.

“We are both customer obsessed companies. For us, if the customer is winning we are winning,” says Kumar. Today Shellkode boasts of more than 200 customers including DTDC, Zepto,, Narayana Netralaya and KreditBee.

Small towns, big dreams

From early on, Kumar had a curiosity to learn and do new things. Growing up in small towns in Trichy and Coimbatore it was often hard to stay updated on how big tech was changing the world. “My inspiration was my brother,” says Kumar. His elder sibling, the first graduate in the family, got a job with Scope International, the Chennai-based back office of Standard Chartered Bank. Scope nominated him for higher studies in the US. This in turn inspired Kumar to work hard, kicking off a decade of studying, working and entrepreneurship that Kumar has hailed as a “transformational” period in his life.

His other inspiration is billionaire Sridhar Vembu, founder & CEO of Zoho Corporation. Vembu is known for his passion for rural India and has repeatedly shared his belief that billion-dollar companies can be run from small towns. “In about 10 to 12 years we want to ensure that a graduate does not have to leave his or her home town to go to a big metro city to get a job. For guys like us getting an opportunity was difficult, so we know the struggle and want to change it,” says Kumar.

Interestingly, another of Shellkode co-founder’s, Bhuvanesh R, from Palladam in the Tiruppur district of Tamil Nadu, didn’t complete high school. He worked in the garments industry in Coimbatore and with the salary he received, supported his family and also took up online coding classes. Bhuvanesh went on to master databases and cloud technologies. “Given the right opportunity you can achieve big things,” says Kumar.

Shellkode today has 120+ employees, with around 65% drawn from towns like Coimbatore, Trichy, Madurai, Tiruppur and others. Most of them are based in Coimbatore, the head office of Shellkode, while some are in Bengaluru. The company is also in the process of opening offices in Pune and Hyderabad. A majority of its customers are in India with a few in Singapore and the US.

Betting on 3C’s

“We were hungry for success, but getting the first customer was easier said than done. It was in fact very frustrating. We were not getting any projects,” recalls Kumar. Customers, at the time, were obsessed with marquee titles like `graduates from IITs, IIMs’. Big-city ventures, backed by Silicon Valley funds, weren’t ready to back a Coimbatore-based venture, started by founders from Tier II and III towns.

However, Kumar believed that `three C’s’ are essential to success—credibility, capability and costs. The founding team had the capability. Credibility was something that they could demonstrate, provided they got business. And when it came to costs, the founders were willing, initially, to work for free in order to demonstrate their capabilities and build credibility. However, they desperately needed some logos or brands to get started. Unsurprisingly, the startup had to do a few initial projects for free or as little as Rs 10,000.

Shellkode’s first customer was LifeSignals, a provider of cardiac patch devices (a.k.a wireless patient monitoring systems) to hospitals. The patch allows doctors to monitor a patient’s heart post-surgery. Given the nature of work involved, both Shellkode and LifeSignals understood the importance of the project. For the former it was about demonstrating its 3C’s, and for LifeSignals the goal was to create trust with hospitals by demonstrating the reliability of its product.

“If something went wrong, you couldn’t tell the hospital that some cloud guys sitting in Coimbatore made a mistake,” says Kumar. The LifeSignals team asked for customer references and Shellkode had none to give. However, after a long conversation at Café Coffee Day outlet in Bengaluru, the companies came to an understanding and Shellkode walked away with its first client.

“There’s been no looking back since then,” says Kumar.

Generating new avenues of growth with AI

With more than 200 clients, Shellkode has now evolved into a trusted partner in the span of three years. For example, Shellkode helped the hospital migrate to the cloud and optimize its cloud workloads. For a leading loan provider, Shellkode has automated customer support using generative AI.

Kumar has seen AI evolve over the last decade with the rise of chatbots and believes that with GenAI it will be able to make better decisions and understand human emotions.

Kumar compares the rise of GenAI to the era of home computers. “With computers, new businesses and new opportunities came in. I see GenAI having a similar impact. This is not temporary or a buzzword. GenAI is here to stay and will evolve. It will be key to the human ecosystem,” says Kumar. Shellkode is currently working with around 100 customers in GenAI alone.

Kumar also envisions various sub-layers of AI for different applications, like content generation, automation or the creation of an intelligent knowledge base for businesses.

The company plans to double its resources in the next 12 months, investing in building GenAI and data capabilities. Shellkode is also using GenAI inhouse to automate processes and increase productivity. Not only has it improved internal processes, it has also built confidence in clients that Shellkode has the capability to deliver strong AI-powered solutions.

Even as AI is disrupting businesses, Kumar remains focused on his goals - keeping Shellkode clients future ready, as well as contributing to the growth of Tier II and III towns.

Helping bridge the gaps

In 2017-18 there were very few technology startups in Coimbatore. The city was known more as a textile town. Today, Kumar spends his free time taking part in mentorship programs in the city, helping to bridge the skills gap and solving the problems of students in remote areas. “It’s about enabling change. That will happen once these students get the right attention and access,” he says.

Early in May, Shellkode also launched “EmpowerHer” in collaboration with AWS, to train and empower 1 lakh women developers with GenAI technology. The program is empowering a generation of aspiring developers, particularly women, by offering cutting-edge tools and knowledge of AI to transform India’s innovation landscape. The initiative underscores Shellkode’s aim to foster diversity and inclusion in the tech sector. Such programs help all stakeholders, including the local communities and companies looking for talent. In three short years, Shellkode has demonstrated that passion and relentless focus on vision can be a catalyst for change. And it's just getting started.