CEO Insights Magazine

Envisioned to capture a complete picture of innovation, the world is dramatically marching towards increasing the graph of growth bringing about development across businesses and industries today. No wonder startups and entrepreneurship are riling up the market touching upon the important market needs innovatively. India is a rich land of startups and unicorns with dignified entrepreneurs presenting their bold and innovative ideas. They are building the capabilities by leveraging technology quite strategically. Sudipta Biswas, CoFounder of Floworks, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur is also one of the leaders from the entrepreneurial gamut. He is an entrepreneur, leader, and strategist, with a demonstrated history of working in diverse industries, mainly finance and technology.

Sudipta has overseen a tremendous trans-formation through Floworks, a generative AI SaaS company since its introduction and is focused on revolutionizing workplace productivity. He engages in a one-on-one interaction with the CEO Insights Magazine. Let’s read through the excerpts.

Tell us about your professional background and experiences. What factors influenced you to take up entrepreneurship and incept Floworks?

Having done my bachelor's in Electronics Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, I have a rich history of working in the finance industry as a Senior Risk Analyst, and in the Artificial Intelligence industry as a startup Founder and Product Developer. I started my career with Goldman Sachs as a financial risk analyst looking after financial data modeling and quantitative-based risk modeling of financial assets.

In 2016-17, the startup ecosystem of Bangalore was gaining momentum, and companies like Swiggy, Razorpay, and Zomato were growing rapidly. And, that motivated me to explore the startup world, and I decided to start my own business.

In 2018, I started my first company, which aimed to build a technology that could assist umpires and referees in officiating sports matches, including cricket and football. The technology used computer vision-based approaches to detect objects in the game, while the goal was to reduce interruptions and enhance the quality of viewership.

We worked on the product for a couple of years, published patents, and had pilots with major cricket boards. However, we realized that the market for the product was limited and not large enough to sustain a startup. As a startup founder, I learned that it's essential to target markets that have the potential to grow significantly. Therefore, we decided to shut down the company and move on to something better. It was after that I tried a few more jobs and finally cofounded Floworks in late 2021.

Since today we use a lot of different tools and software, and thus the dependency increases. In this regard, Floworks makes the work intuitively easier, enhances producti-vity, and drives revenue growth by inte-grating multiple work applications into a single, efficient interface.

Could you talk about the learnings and experiences you acquired from IIT Kharagpur? Define your leadership approach today.

Everyone has a preconceived notion of what IIT beholds, and IIT Kharagpur being one of the oldest IIT campuses has its unique benefits too. There was a huge push for entrepreneurship and leadership. Even I have many friends who started doing startup right from college and there are many success stories as well. I believe all of this helped me as well on a large scale.

To define my leadership approach, I would like to break it down into two parts. Firstly, when the company was just starting, and then, how it evolved as the company has matured. When I started as a leader, I adopted a more hands-on approach. At first, I took a hands-on

approach to every project and idea my company was working on. However, I realized that my role as a founder was to surround myself with the right people, so I could make myself redundant in the company. My leadership approach now focuses on finding the right people to build something great together.

How would you define Floworks as an organization and its position in the market? What motivates you today?

Floworks' initial idea was to create a system where people could interact with computers more intuitively and with faster turnaround times. The company is about two years old now. It is effectively supported by a team of around 14 people today with distinguished backgrounds, including advisors from companies like OPENAI. Formidably, the overall technology is going well too. Recently, we have been funded by Y Combinator. We have appeared at various publications like TECHCRUNCH, including various podcasts.

The company has been building its phase for two years. Seeing how the product is being used by customers is motivating. We are creating a new way of interacting with computers. Floworks is one of the pioneering companies in the domain of using AI for productivity, and that is quite inspiring for me going forward.

What are your aspirations for the future?

Well, we see a huge opportunity in the AI-powered productivity space, which is gaining traction lately. Our company can contribute significantly towards building value in this area, and capture a lot of the value that we help create. Precisely, there exist tens of billions of dollars in opportunities exist in this space, and we can tap into them by doing the right things.

Sudipta Biswas, Co-Founder, Floworks

Sudipta, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus with a prestigious degree in Electronics Engineering, is a keen entrepreneur, leader, and strategist, with a demonstrated history of working in finance and AI driven world.

•Hobbies: I like to play sports, but currently I don't find time
•Favorite Travel Destinations: I generally like going hiking & traveling around hilly areas over the weekend
•Favorite Cuisine: Bengali & Japanese
•Favorite Book: Zero to One by Peter Thiel