1 000 000 000 IN 10 YEARS

He may not be on your regular list of billionaires or even anywhere near such names as Bill Gates, Manu Chandaria or Chris Kirubi, but 35-year-old Kamal Budhabatti is high on the roll of your up-and-coming success icons.

With a rare determination and I-can-do-it zeal, the young man has managed to build a software company from scratch, in 10 short years, to a high flying brand.

With an annual revenue of more than Sh500 million the company, Craft Silicon, is now worth between Sh1.6 to Sh1.7 billion; and is still rising.

Going for an interview at the company’s Riverside Drive offices, we waited for about 10 minutes before this unassuming, medium-sized man with a boyish look emerged wearing a pair of simple black shoes, a faded black trouser and a Craft Silicon customised shirt — his daily office uniform.

He led us through an office hall with casually dressed employees in their late 20’s, sitting as close as they could to their computers. They did not seem to notice him and if they did, they did not show it.

His office too, betrayed nothing of it owner’s worth and instead sowed seeds of doubt in our minds: It was pretty ragged with simple but creaking seats for visitors and a desk full of papers, an old Business Daily newspaper, a Harvard Review publication, some ground nuts in a packet with a Sh10 price tag and an old IBM laptop.

Who really did own this company? was the question that quickly pricked my mind and came out of my lips.

Looking uncomfortable and unsure of how we might take his response, perhaps because most of the time he is not taken seriously even by his workers or colleagues high on the corporate ladder, he uttered only two words, “I do.”

Recently, Mr Budthabatti donated Sh9 million towards the just concluded Africa and Middle-East Microfinance Conference held at KICC, but never sat at the negotiation table.

“I send my employees who look mature and have the corporate glitz in them. This helps me avoid embarrassment every time when I am asked to send my boss to meetings,” he says.

Inspirational

But this demeanor does him an injustice — Mr Budthabatti’s story is nothing short of inspirational.

He is to software development what Macdonald Mariga is to local football, only that his business flourishes in an environment infinitely unattractive to the media and public glare, compared to the multi-billion football business.

Today, his firm is a global software company providing solutions across Africa, Asia, Europe and America, in different languages like English, French, Arabic and Spanish.

Bankers Realm developed in 2000 was the first software he developed. It helps retail banks deliver retail and corporate, as well as back office transaction processing, multi-channel delivery, card management and payments.

Other financial solutions the firm offers include a Sharia compliant Islamic banking, micro-finance banking BR Core microfinance solution (BRmfs) and Bankers Realm.Net, a new high-end version of Bankers Realm and runs on any standard browser.

Craft Silicon also offers payment solutions that include EFT Switch Solution that can be used by any core financial application, regardless of the database host, M-banking solutions and E-banking solutions.

It has permanent offices in New York, India, West Africa and Kenya. Its clientele include Equatorial Bank, Southern Credit Bank, Bank of India, Paramount Bank, First Bank of Nigeria and Afribank. Prime Bank, Equity Bank and Barclays Bank use some of its software.

Born in the West Coast of India, from the same state of the father of India, Mahatma Gandhi, in a small town of entrepreneurs known as Jamnagar, Mr Budhabatti was not a bright student and to avoid his demeaning trend of failing to beat the minimum grade, he sometimes stole a glance at what other students were filling in their score sheets.

His father, a newspaper vendor, could not afford to pay extra money for personal coaching for his ‘below-average’ son.

As he grew, he put more and more effort into his education and managed to join university for a Bachelor of Science in Physics degree.

His family had no royal status or godfathers in high places to secure him a job in a country polarised on social status. So when a friend told him of a data entry job opportunity in Kenya, the physicist jumped into the next flight.

His aim — to make money as fast as a tornado and swirl around the world gathering desire and pleasure.

But this was not as easy as he thought it would be. His job was simple yet difficult: to sit behind a computer in a small room with volumes of files and no air conditioning and key in data.

“There is nothing more boring than that,” he says.

In 2000, he was tipped by a friend that a certain bank required ‘clearing house” software.

“I sat down and developed software for the bank, since I had learnt programming from my university education,” he says.

This side job did not please his boss who fired him immediately for “using office hours to do his own work.”

His work permit was withdrawn and the young man found himself in a plane back to India. That was the worst day of his life.

He had spent sleepless nights trying to fill data and eke out a living, but nothing would compare with his childhood friends taunting him back at home for being a loser.

Ticket

However, he never left the airport once in India; he bought a ticket and found his way back to Kenya, vowing to pursue his dream no matter what.

The young man came face to face with the poverty that made him run away from his home country in the first place — no food, shelter or bus fare.

Having exhausted his last savings, Sh20,000, he became a master of odd jobs, taking one meal a day, trekking from Westlands to the City Centre and paying money to another tenant to house him.

With a borrowed computer, no phone and no money, he set down to creating software for financial institutions.

“I had to make use of the knowledge I had to make a living or I would have ended up starving and with nowhere to turn to,” he says. And so began his journey to success.

“And then the money from the bank I had made software for came through and paid pretty well. Soon, I sold the software to other financial institutions,” he recalls.

“There is a disregard for Kenyan firms by Kenyans,” he says. “It’s so much to overcome and something needs to be done about it.”

Craft Silicon only earns 15 per cent from the country and efforts to market itself in Kenya as a worthy competitor to big companies who import software to the country have not been fruitful.

The high flier remains skeptical of financial institutions that are slowly adapting to technology.

“They refuse to recognise the potential of technology deciding to remain in the old way of doing business. Some will discover when it is too late.”

Craft Silicon has done extremely well in the 10 years after it was started and ever since, its strategy has been clear — to be among the leading software companies in the world.

The company’s principle has always been to constantly innovate technological applications in the fast changing economic scenario, to keep it at the top of its game.

Mr Budhabatti, now a citizen, believes Kenya has a lot of potential and he wants to do everything to market the country as a business hub.

“I possessed nothing when I came to Kenya and I believe that I have a moral duty of giving back to this society,” he says.

Already he has a mobile computer lab for slum children. The six months old project is composed of a bus mounted with computers connected to the internet that rotates around Nairobi slums offering computer and basic information technology training for free.

“We have already trained 400 slum children and our current class has 500 of them,” the project manager, Mr Alex Chege says.

This is a pilot project but the company hopes to have bought 50 buses and equipped them with computers with each lab costing Sh6 million in the next two years.

Mr Budhabatti is not only a visionary but also an ambitious dreamer. He is confident in his beliefs, but does not come across as man with a high opinion of himself.

He plans to work for the next seven years without a proper vacation and then will retire and let his money work for him.

The only time he doesn’t think about his firm, he takes his wife and only child to Giraffe Centre and sometimes walks around Westlands, just to remember how he footed to fortune.

Very soon, he will be moving his firm’s offices to a Sh500 million office he has built on Waiyaki Way.

The new office, Craft Silicon Campus, boasts of wireless internet connectivity, swimming pools, basket court, gym, bars, and pool tables with a capacity for 600 people and will be open 24-hours.

“The need for some luxury in the working environment is to make work fun and appealing to my young work force,” he says distancing himself from such luxury, stating that his only luxury is a Range Rover sports car he drives.

engisesa@yahoo.com