Mitul Bid built Rs 120 cr Coditas after overcoming poor IIT grades, failing ventures

Mitul Bid started a software business after overcoming low grades at IIT and trying several ventures. His company, Coditas, now clocks a Rs. 120 crore turnover.

Mitul Bid was born in Kenya to Indian parents and moved to India at the age of 19 to pursue his B. Tech at IIT Bombay, where he struggled to keep up with the curriculum despite being a topper at his school in Kenya.

His battle began during those years, when he fought back to improve his grades at IIT, then worked in different IT organisations for approximately ten years – during which time he also tried some side businesses without much success – until launching Coditas, a software company, with Rs 1 lakh in 2014.

Today, the Pune-based company's clientele include household brands like JP Morgan, Konica Minolta, and Larsen & Toubro, and its revenue has surpassed Rs 120 crore (FY 2020-21).

The organisation has worked with around 150 clients over the last seven years.

"Since its inception, Mitul has placed a premium on clean code when building Coditas software, which he argues is the company's unique selling point. Coditas creates software with clean code and is known for its high quality."

Before launching Coditas, Mitul had tried his hand at a few other enterprises with little success.

Mitul, 40, was born and raised in Kenya.

Dr. Devchand Bid, an MBBS doctor, is a Gujarati who moved to Kenya and settled.

"I'd always been interested in science, and my brother-in-law (my sister's husband, who works as an engineer in the UK) informed me about IIT.

The other choice was to travel to the United States, but it would have been more expensive,", Mitul says while explaining why he decided on IIT Bombay.

The education systems in Kenya and India were vastly different, and he was at a disadvantage when compared to classmates who had completed their schooling in India."

In Kenya, I went from being the top student in my state to being the bottom student, almost failing the first year.

Coditas has more than doubled its employment in the last year and now employs over 600 individuals.

"However, I took use of the opportunity to transform myself." Gradually, his grades began to improve and he was the only one in IIT with a reversal graph.

Mitul started working as a Business Analyst which was his first job that he got through campus placement at Synygy Inc. Enterprise Incentive Management in 2004, for a salary of Rs 2, 80,000 per year. Mitul explains, because he loathed computers, he took a profession that didn't involve coding, but, he started liking his job after the corporation recognised his talent and assigned him to a coding project.

He joined Talentica, a startup started by an IITian, after six months, but was sacked as a result of the company's severe recession in 2009.

The sales team, on the other hand, was the first to be laid off."

Mitul left Omniscent in 2014 to devote his entire attention to his startup, Coditas.

He subsequently went to work for Risesmart for roughly a year before moving on to Omniscent.

He was employed by Omniscent for four years until leaving in October 2014 to launch Coditas.

Between 2004 and 2014, while working in various software organisations, he tried his hand at a few businesses, but with no success.

In fact, he founded his first company while still a student at IIT.

Many of his family members on his mother's side in Kenya were traders, and they pushed him to start his own business.

"During my time at IIT, I became aware of the market potential for refurbished second-hand laptops in India.

I had to pay a fine for bringing in the first batch of five laptops, which also happened to be the last batch."

Later, he opened Zaika, a Gujarati thali restaurant in Pune, with a partner, and ran it for around two years.

In 2009, he partnered with Janak Porwal, an IITian, to start Mobilicia, a QR code company that was perhaps a little ahead of its time.

Both endeavours were short-lived.

Priti is in charge of human resources and controls the company's operations.

It used to be a sofa manufacturing.

"After I closed the restaurant, the employees wanted to start a couch manufacturing, and I put roughly Rs 10 lakh in the venture."

Mitul finally founded Coditas in 2014 with Rs 1 lakh, but this time, unlike his prior projects, he was fully committed to it.

He left Omniscent to start the company, which has been profitable since the first month.

His wife Priti, whom he married in 2005, is a co-founder of Coditas and controls the company's human resources and operations.

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