Interview: Pravin S Bhandarkar, Founder and CEO, RtBrick
This article appeared in Startup Terminal on 28 February, 2020 - you can read the original article here.
With more than twenty years of experience in the technology sector, Pravin S Bhandarkar founded RtBrick in 2016 to redefine cloud-infrastructure networking services. Bangalore-based startup RtBrick is a networking infrastructure software company which has built a full value delivery system for network infrastructure operators. Its offerings include an operating system for driving bare metal network switches, a multi-tenant continuous integration release platform and a fully integrated cloud-based network visibility, analytics and management system.
RtBrick has created a new way to build and run broadband access networks, using an ‘internet-native’ approach to dramatically cut complexity, time-to-deploy and slash costs. RtBrick’s routing and BNG software allows carriers to achieve ‘internet-native’ levels of agility, deploying and testing new services in weeks, not years. It is delivered as a software container with your own optimized code base containing only the features you need. It can be managed by the same Web2.0 toolset that the giant cloud companies have adopted. RtBrick’s open software allows carriers to scale using off-the-shelf hardware at a fraction of the cost of traditional switches.
In a brief interaction with Startup Terminal; Pravin S Bhandarkar, Founder and CEO, RtBrick shares more insights about his venture and future roadmap.
Excerpts:
ST: Please briefly tell us about RtBrick.
Pravin S Bhandarkar: RtBrick was launched in the year 2016 with an aim to build a full value delivery system for network infrastructure operators. Our services include an operating system for driving bare metal network switches, a multi-tenant continuous integration release platform and a fully integrated cloud-based network visibility, analytics and management system.
We built a software product which is called RTBrick Full Stack. It is a L3 networking solution which is deep in technology and resides on bare metal hardware. It allows networking companies, service providers, telcos deliver set of L3 services on top.
Present trend that is happening in the industry is called disaggregation. People are buying hardware and software separately as components; and we are one of the companies which are enabling this disruption in this space.
ST: What are your target markets?
Pravin S Bhandarkar: We have been practicing for this Technology first in Europe. And then we will be looking at US and Asian markets. At present, we have customers that we're working with in Europe.
Our development center is based out of Bangalore and we have scaled from essentially two people to thirty at present. We saw high growth of our business in 2019, and growth expected this year as well. We also have a unit for support services which is based out of Europe. We are now a team of about 15 members in Europe and 30 in India and 1 in the United States.
ST: How has been your entrepreneurial journey so far?
Pravin S Bhandarkar: Frankly, I never had a boring day in the last four years. It has been a great entrepreneurial journey so far. We started off with crowd funding and recorded very small revenues. However, the last two years have been going really great and we have started generating business with well-known brands in our target geographies. So, the business model is essentially small number of customers but much larger in scale.
ST: How has been the growth of the company in last 4 year and future targets?
Pravin S Bhandarkar: We are expanding as per our plans. We are looking to expand India unit by about 50% in this financial year and the European unit at around 30% growth from a revenue standpoint. Overall, we are growing about 30% year over year.
ST: What are your hiring plans?
Pravin S Bhandarkar: At present, we are planning to increase our team size in Bangalore by 50%.