Alagan Mahalingam is the founder of Rootcode Labs, a five-year-old company that engineers digital and AIbased products for businesses across Europe and the US. The company has built tech solutions for over 400 companies across 27 countries and used by over 78 million people. In 2019, Rootcode Labs opened its first office in Europe and more than doubled the company’s revenue that year. Even COVID-19 led to one of many major breakthroughs! Mahalingam tells us how he did it and discusses his expansion plans amidst a crisis.
How did you conceive Rootcode Labs and grow the business into one that serves a global client base?
Mahalingam: I developed an AI-based karaoke app when I was still a tech student, which was probably the inception of Rootcode Labs and my journey as an entrepreneur. The app was a success and nominated for the Asia Pacific ICT awards and was later acquired by a UK-based company. This helped me invest in building my company that focuses on product engineering or building software for other customers. I realised early that a successful tech company has to be outward-looking to build a scalable business, and to do this, we had to be prepared to solve complex problems that more advanced economies were contending with. Essentially, Rootcode Labs helps companies, from multinational enterprises to startups, build better tech-based products and services. Our clients are almost entirely based in Europe and North America, served by a permanent team of 25 people in Sri Lanka. In 2019, we opened our first office in Europe and rebranded the company as RootCode Labs. Founding a startup is never easy but you need to persist, try new things, test, fail, and reset fast until you make a breakthrough. I did just that and realised phenomenal growth. Our product engineering revenue grew 35% year-on-year in 2016, 48% in 2017, and increased to 55% in 2018. We saw a 160% surge in revenue with the opening of our European office: it was a transformative year for us where we more than doubled the size of the company in terms of revenue.
Can you tell us what Rootcode Labs does?
Mahalingam: We help companies build digital products from mobile apps to complex web applications and AI products for clients across 30 industries from consumer apps, banking, to healthcare and telecommunications, and more. One of our biggest clients is an analytics firm in the US for whom we developed a complete Business Analytics Framework that competes with big names such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.
Rootcode Labs built a digital charging network for one of the largest energy firms in Portugal. We also developed an intelligent credit assessment mechanism for an exciting fintech startup based in the US. In Dubai, we are working on a project that will revolutionise healthcare, and in Thailand, Rootcode Labs is working with a leading geoinformatics research organisation to build next-generation remote sensing and GIS applications. While product engineering is our core area of business, we do have a suite of research solutions and intellectual property which will eventually become a significant revenue generator going forward. For instance, we developed an AI-based resume parser called Aphelia which can extract unstructured data from resumes and present in a more structured format. According to research, a job offer can attract several hundreds of applicants, and finding the right candidate can be a time-consuming challenge that requires the attention of several people. Also, most products in the market use rulebased techniques to extract and identify particular words, but these are not flexible enough to cover all possible resume formats. There was also a data security requirement we had to solve because CVs contain sensitive personal information which must be protected. Not only did we solve these problems, but we also developed Aphelia to be compatible and integratable with most HRM systems. It can also categorise and rank prospective candidates and significantly speeds up the recruitment process. Morpheus is another exciting AI-based solution that we developed, enabling gamers to control first-person games through body real-time physical actions.
This concept, at its core, is not entirely new, but most products require many external devices and sensors which elevate the price tags. Also, most devices in the market can only be used with a specific product or brand and struggle to gain mass-scale adoption. After extensive research into the psychology of gamers, we set out to build an AI-based motion-controller for personal computers which required only a computer’s camera. Similar to Tesla’s self-driving AI which uses cameras instead of LIDAR sensors, we tracked body movements of users with high precision and map even the most nuanced of movements into virtual key-pressed commands so that users can play the game with natural body movements.
Think global, and solve complex problems: the ingredients that propelled Rootcode Labs into the global arena
How has the global pandemic impacted the business, and how do you plan to grow the business post-COVID?
Mahalingam: At Rootcode Labs, we stayed true to ourselves and persevered despite the uncertainties during the lockdown earlier in the year. We never wavered but worked harder to achieve our goals. What drives us is the hunger to solve complex problems and this helped us reach a major breakthrough during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic when we developed and launched a platform called Expert Republic, where professionals from various fields of expertise can be reached for consultation and get paid for their work. We made the development of Expert Republic a priority often working around the clock. We presented this at the Global Hack 2020, sponsored by the European Commission, which drew over 10,500 contestants. Expert Republic won the hackathon, and we got a lot of great people from the government of Estonia and the Estonian tech ecosystem supporting our mission and extending support.
That was a transformative break, but it only came because we kept pushing our boundaries. Now, some of the largest corporations in Europe and the US are Expert Republic users. We had plans to expand our global presence which is delayed due to COVID. For instance, we will soon open an office in Silicon Valley so we can be closer to our clients and be at the heart of global innovation. We do have consultants working for us in Silicon Valley and other places across the US and Europe, but now we want to build a permanent global presence in these markets. Right now, Rootcode Labs comprises 25 people in the permanent cadre which we will grow to about 500 over the next two years. We will also continue to invest in our businesses having recently rolled out a separate unit called RootCode AI that specialises in cutting edge Artificial Intelligence research and development, helping companies build AI-based products and solutions. We plan to launch several business verticals going forward which will expand Rootcode’s product and solutions offerings considerably.