It is the mover Uma Rajan, the founder of Autoplant

Uma Rajan, the founder of Autoplant, knows the key to making timely deliveries is to keep going, no matter what the circumstances may be. At the deep end of a pool, a person can either swim or sink. Every time life tried to keep Uma Rajan down, she swam hard. Take for instance her stint with J Walter Thompson (JWT) in Bengaluru.

Autoplant founder Uma Rajan knows the secret of making timely deliveries is to keep going, however the road winds. It helped me get over my fear of managing a business,” recalls Uma, as she settles down for a chat at her office in Navi Mumbai.

Today, she is the co-founder and senior partner of Mumbai-based Autoplant India, an IOT-enabled logistics firm that has offices in Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Mumbai. Uma comes from a family of academicians – her father was a scientist working with the government’s atomic energy division and was closely involved with India’s first nuclear test, codenamed Smiling Buddha, while her mother holds a PhD in plasma physics and computer science.

Sure enough, she did take up the job at JWT as soon as she returned to India in 1992, and continued working there for three years. Here, Naren had started a real estate firm called Tristar Group of Companies, and she decided to help him scale it up.

But Uma, after seeing the execution of over 200 apartments, just learned something new about herself: “I did not want to join a company that was doing well and become a cog in the wheel. What I wanted was to join a start-up or a company that is not been doing well, and turn it around.

” Alongside Tristar, she began working as a part-time professor of finance at PSG College of Management and as a volunteer for Round Table India. When her daughter began her studies in the US, Uma began shuttling between two countries, and that is when she joined a non-profit firm called AidMatrix Foundation, set up under the i2 Technologies — a leading supply-chain company.

The company partnered with non-profits across the world, including Counterpart International and Women for Women, and Uma helped strategize and execute the projects. After five years here, Uma moved to the New York-based PE firm Seven Hills Partners in 2007.

She was to make investment decisions for entertainment, real estate, and technology companies based out of India. During this time, she came across a logistics start-up Novire, which was simply putting GPS trackers on trucks, and realised that there is more that this company could do. 

“Despite good supply chains, corporates do not know when their raw material will come or when the finished product will be delivered. Uma bought out Novire for Rs. 5 million and that was the starting point for what is today Autoplant.

The founders collectively invested about Rs. 6 million in starting the company and developing a strong tech-backed platform using GPS, RFID, IoT, and ML, to bring down cost and improve efficiency of transportation. Founded in 2011, their Mumbai-based company is an IoT-enabled logistics management firm, which allows a company to track the movement of its materials and products end-to-end.

That is, a company can see raw material coming in and leaving as a finished product and also follow it until it is delivered to the customer. We were offering to integrate the entire logistic process with their ERP, Tally, and their other internal software,” recalls Uma. L&T’s senior management came onboard immediately, and the project began two months later.

Like any business, Autoplant too has seen its highs and lows, but Uma has never stopped being excited about her job. “The very idea of running a business, managing a team, and helping corporations save millions of dollars keeps me pumped,” she says.

With a strong product and client base, Autoplant has continued to grow at an impressive pace. Uma has her hands full, dividing time between her business and family commitments.

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