Meet IIM couple who built Rs 8,300 crore firm from upper floor of IAS officer's home, created history by...

Maintaining friendships and relationships can be hard. But building a business worth thousands of crores of rupees with friends and partners is something not just anyone can do. However, husband-wife duo Venkat Viswanathan and Pramad Jandhyala, who met at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM)-Calcutta, managed to do exactly that and how.

Blockbuster IPO
The couple came into the limelight when their company, LatentView Analytics, received record bids worth Rs 1.13 lakh crore – the highest-ever in the history of the Indian stock market – during its initial public offering (IPO) of Rs 600 crore in November 2021. It was demanded more than five times India’s largest-ever IPO till then – from Paytm. The issue, which was priced at Rs 190-197 per share, was oversubscribed 338 times.
Post listing, the valuation of the company was over Rs 10,000 crore.

Beginnings
LatentView, founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chennai, provides services such as data analytics, consulting, and data engineering to clients across sectors including banking, technology, industrial, and retail. Its major focus is the US market, which contributes to more than 90% of its revenue, and its clients include the likes of Adobe, Uber, and 7 Eleven.

Viswanathan, the son of an accountant and a housewife, studied civil engineering at IIT Madras and went on to study at IIM Calcutta. He has previously worked at Cognizant.
Jandhyala, who did her graduation from the Birla Institute of Technology And Science (BITS) - Pilani, has had stints at Ford and Moody's ICRA.

They, along with a friend – Ramesh Hariharan – started LatentView in 2006 from the upper floor of an IAS officer’s home in Chennai’s Besant Nagar. Despite worldwide market turmoil, the company steadily continued to grow and diversify its client base.

Currently, Rajan Sethuraman is the chief executive officer (CEO) at LatentView, according to the company website.

‘Friends before anything else’
“The ambition from Day One was to sell internationally; the market was clearly global,” Viswanathan said in an earlier interview. 

It’s also interesting how the couple navigated their relationship through their amazing entrepreneurial journey. “The early demarcation of responsibilities helped and we’ve not stepped on each other’s toes,” said Jandhyala. 

“We were friends before anything else, that helped,” Viswanathan said.