ENTREPRENEUR SPECIAL .......................How Mu Sigma's Dhiraj Rajaram, Entrepreneur of the Year, raised one of biggest global data companies

How Mu Sigma's Dhiraj Rajaram, Entrepreneur of the Year, raised one of biggest global data companies

Sciences may have little to do with Indian spirituality but Mu Sigma's founder Dhiraj Rajaram, 39, believes that creation, preservation and destruction are a prerequisite for development and should be the basis of his company's operating philosophy.
Which is why he decided to split his employees into three teams called clans — the Brahma clan dealing with creation, the Vishnu clan that concerns itself with operations and the Shiva clan for destroying or selectively abandoning the past..

He must be doing something right — the company formed by Rajaram almost a decade ago is now considered among the top global big data companies.

Added to this, the ability to create and scale up a company that is on target to cross revenue of $250 million (Rs 1500 crore) in 2015 has made Rajaram the joint winner of the Entrepreneur of the Year award at the Economic Times Awards for Corporate Excellence 2014.

It's easy to mistake Rajaram as a hardnosed corporate leader, but those who know him well say that he is a philosopher at heart with a taste for poetry, especially lines about life.

Rajaram has marked himself out as one of the top global entrepreneurs in the highly competitive field of big data analytics. Mu Sigma is a data-mining juggernaut. It helps 125 Fortune 500 customers including Microsoft, Pfizer and Dell examine large amounts of different data types in an effort to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations and other useful information. His firm, which employs 3,500 decision scientists spread across the US, the UK, India, Australia and Singapore, has been profitable since its inception.

A former consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, Rajaram was 28 when he started Mu Sigma with personal savings of $200,000 (Rs 1.2 crore). A math buff and an alumnus of Anna University in Chennai, Rajaram named his company after Greek letters used for mathematical notations. 

That Rajaram has been successful in combining head and heart to build a strong business was validated when two of private equity's most venerable names — General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital — invested $108 million (about Rs 648 crore) in 2011. Last year, Mu Sigma received $45 million (Rs 270 crore) from US-based payments network firm MasterCard and a group of financial global investors in a deal that marked Rajaram as India's newest rising star in the business of outsourcing.

ET141001