Euprime

Euprime is a company that originated in Manipal, having been incubated by the MUTBI and has been progressively climbing up the corporate ladder ever since. I had the privilege of interviewing the founder of Euprime, Akash Murthy to learn more about Euprime and pick his brain on business in general.

What is Euprime all about?

Euprime is a data analytics and Statistical consulting company. We take a lot of data which we analyze and integrate in order to solve real world problems. We work mainly in four domains: Market Research, Financial Services, Health Sciences, Cell Biology and a few other stuff that comes along with it.

Do you have specialists to help you analyze data in those particular domains? Or is that done internally?

I’ve worked at a bank before, so I myself have experience in few of the domains. For the others, we have people working for us who are subject experts in those fields, like Cell Biology, for example.

How did the idea of Euprime come about?

It’s been active since April 2015. We’ve been incubated since October 2015. We needed to have a brand name that’s seasoned enough to garner data. We realized that we have to make a product of our own that’ll put us out there. We spent the majority of August to October in making this a reality.

We started out as a services company, but we soon realized that we won’t get enough data for our product. Back then, our product was basically a web-based platform for doing analytics. There isn’t a tool that exists right now in which the analytics engine was directed to the browser. One particular issue we were working on was the Housing Problem.

The Housing Problem?

Well, I call it the Housing Problem; you could probably call it something else. The basic idea is to find the price of a house with respect to the data available to you. We thought we’d use a toolbox to analyze given data in order to achieve this. But then we figured since it’s a customer based product, we’d just provide them with the toolkit so they could play around with it. That’s actually active right now: www.right-house.in It’s in the alpha stage.

That’s really cool. Euprime has expanded to Bangalore as well, is that correct?

Yes, there’s a much bigger office space out there and we’ve got four others working with us in that office. We current employ a total of 16 people in different capacities. Saicharan (a graduate from IIT Madras) and I currently look after the work in both the offices.

And you accept students for internship as well?

Yep. This year has been one of the biggest we’ve had so far. In December, there were 12 people working simultaneously in the Manipal campus. This included the people who were experts in algorithms and various other fields. There were a couple of people working for us from IIT Kharagpur, couple of guys from ISI, Kolkata, and a few others from SRM University who helped us out with infrastructure, back end, that kind of thing. The primary selling point of Euprime is that it’s able to attract the right people because we offer them the chance to solve problems that they wouldn’t get to work with otherwise. There’s also a French national from ENSAE ParisTech, currently working for us, whose previous stint included one at the Cambridge University, England.

What’s next for Euprime? Any plans for the foreseeable future?

We have big plans with the US right now. That’s on the service side of the business. On a product side, we’d like to work more on the web toolkit we spoke about and the www.right-house.in.

So, suppose I wanted to join Euprime. How would I go about it?

For the students in Manipal, there’s a written test, following which there’s an interview. The first time we recruited people, there were only two interns who got selected. Incidentally, both of them got placed in Microsoft later on. In their Microsoft interview, they were asked a lot of questions about their work in Euprime.

That’s amazing!

Yes. That’s one of unique aspects about working here: the work experience. Like I said, interns and employees get to work with really interesting problems they wouldn’t normally come across in their usual course work, and that really makes a lot of difference.

Any advice for Entrepreneurs and startups?

You see, I actually hold a contrarian perspective on the idea of ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘startups’. These two words are just scattered all around and thrown in everywhere. Everyone calls themselves an entrepreneur, these days, the ‘Perils of Youth’, I suppose. I think if you have an idea, focus on it and get the domain expertise to solve a series of problems one after another to have to make it come true instead of labelling yourself or your brand.

Well said, indeed. What’s been your motto behind Euprime?

We are trying to build a traditional company here. A good company’s value, financially speaking, is the present value of cash you can take out of it for the next 30 odd years. What really makes a sustainable company or business are the following:

• Business with significant barriers to entry
• Business that is simple and has predictable growth trajectory
• Business that has a moat around it
• Business that operates in an environment of Closed Monopoly and is geared towards an Open monopoly, if the need be

When you start out, we try to convert our situation in such a way as to make the points mentioned above the necessary conditions of a mathematical proof. These aren’t sufficient conditions, but are necessary conditions to sustain a company.

I’m a traditionalist in the sense that, you add differentiated value to society and find a way to monetize the value to sustain inside a corporate structure of a company.

Some very wise words right there. Anything else about Euprime that you’d like to tell us about?

‘Euprime’ is a prime number. We wanted the name Euprime to symbolize numbers. We’re basically a quantitative analysis based company. We wanted our brand name to convey that and I wanted the name to signify something. Prime numbers are the building blocks of numbers. Now, one of the prime numbers was named Good prime. A play on the word “Good Prime” would give you Euprime (Eu being “good” in Latin).

That’s really interesting! The logo looks fascinating too. Could you tell us about it?

Have you heard of String Theory or the work of Ed Witten? The most basic 10 dimensional particle looks like that. What we’re trying to convey is that we take the fundamentals of anything and we build it up, and through that we give business insights. The symbol represents that, the name represents that, and so does the tagline, ‘engineer insights’.

Sir, you should be a poet. I’m not even kidding.

(Chuckles) That’s actually a 10 dimensional object you’re looking at in the logo. But I think getting a complete idea of the very notion would probably require another interview.

Quite right. Thank you so much for your time and your immensely valuable insights. MTTN wishes you all the very best in your future endeavors.

Cheers!

Head over to their website for more information about Euprime.

You can also follow Euprime on their Facebook page.

– Rahul Basu for MTTN