Girish Saraph has a knack for winning entrepreneurship challenges — these are typically structured as business plan contests where venture capitalists or successful entrepreneurs test the commercial viability of your idea or business plan. Saraph’s two-year old networking startup Vegayan Systems has won three such contests so far. It started with the DFJ TiE ‘India Venture Challenge‘ in February 2006 — got $75,000 seed funding from there. This January it won the TiE Canaan Entrepreneurship Challenge — the win got it to pitch its business plan to an angel investor in India and spend time with Professor Philip Anderson at the INSEAD campus in Singapore. In between it was also second runner up at the India Innovation Pioneers Challenge last year (organized by the government of India and Intel Corp). Whew!

So what has all this winning added up to? Well, Saraph — I call him Professor Speed — wrote in a couple of days ago to say that Vegayan is about to release its beta product and has a large telecom service provider lined up for testing. He’s promised a demonstration at the IIT campus in Mumbai’s Powai suburb (where Vegayan is located) over a cup of canteen chai. I’m going to take him up on that offer because I really like the chai.

A bit about Vegayan: It is developing a set of networking software tools that will help telecom service operators optimize the efficiency of their networks. Essentially, make things work faster (Vegayan comes from ‘veg’, the Sanskrit word for speed. The second part, could you help me out please Prof?). It has got over a dozen people on its rolls right now and is still more of an on-campus incubation project than a full-fledged corporate setup. Which to my mind, is the best way to be.

Team Speed (Saraph is in the light blue shirt in the centre)

team speed

And a little bit on Prof. Speed: After a 14-year stint in the US in the defence communications space, Saraph came back to teach at IIT. Vegayan was born after three years of research. He also mans a day job as associate professor at the IIT’s Electrical Engineering department.

My next stop, IIT canteen.

Also catch a PodTech interview with Saraph by Kamla Bhatt

Photo courtesy: Vegayan Systems

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