Our CEO, Sreeram Srinivasan, shares his thoughts on product development partnerships with an underserved market segment: India’s electronics startups. We’ve observed how most hardware startups never seem to have an easy time taking their initial product concepts from the prototype stage to full-scale production. This is especially true in India, where top-quality contract manufacturing partners, receptive to the unique needs of early-stage startups, are just too few and far between. We’ve been a noteworthy exception, actually seeking and encouraging new business from among India’s ambitious startups.

We’ve already successfully brought 9 India startups to market and are currently in the early development stages with 5 more. Most of these relationships have begun as independent angel investments from our co-founder and Managing Director, Sandeep Tandon. When additional engineering or manufacturing expertise may be necessary, he’s guided them directly to the resources here.

Challenges for Startups

An early lesson we learned from our partnerships with startups is a new set of proactive soft skills is required, adapting the structured environment of an established ISO-certified manufacturing company to the creative minds of the typical startup to define the requirements of an emerging new product. This often means experimenting with small quantities of new parts during the prototyping phase, stepping away from our standard policy of sourcing materials only from our network of trusted suppliers. This flexibility has been essential to our success with startups as we work together to bring their products to scalable production.

Why Startups Should Select Syrma

• A dedicated team of over 50 in-house engineers refines product ideas and initial prototypes, optimizing design footprint while comprehensively testing for quality and reliability.
• Dynamic manufacturing capabilities enable scalable turnkey production of any electromechanical product, from board-build through full box-build.
• A trusted supply chain ecosystem provides materials at significantly lower BOM costs than most startups could negotiate independently.
• We give our global OEM clients the same respect: complete non-disclosure/non-compete agreements to ensure full protection of their intellectual property.
• Strategic location within the Chennai Special Economic Zone (SEZ) eliminates cumbersome logistics roadblocks, savings we pass directly to clients, large and small.

Is your electronics startup struggling to advance your product from the idea stage to the factory floor, then directly to market? We’d enjoy discussing your objectives and how we can help craft your ultimate design and manufacturing solutions.

Backed by 40 Years of Expertise

We contribute our 40 years of design and manufacturing expertise spanning multiple diverse markets. We look forward to discussing how we can deliver world-class products for OEMs across the globe. We understand our home Indian market, familiar with its vast regulatory and selling environments. We foster growth opportunities within India through our strong technology incubation ecosystem. We also assist global OEMs in entering the Indian market by leveraging the local supply chain and favorable operating environments for cost reductions.

Our flagship Chennai location opened in 2006 and lies within a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) for electronics manufacturing, offering economic incentives for imports and exports. This primary facility is within 90 minutes of the Chennai seaport and 20 minutes to the international airport. Additional road and rail connectivity links to the rest of India and beyond and infrastructure advantages with faster import and export clearances. We also have labor force flexibility, both technical and manual, to scale to demand rapidly.

To learn more about this topic, please contact us.