We Didn't Start Incrix to Build Another Software Company
India has no shortage of companies that take requirements and write code. We wanted to build something different: a technology company that owns problems, builds products and still does client work the product way.
There's a well-worn path for a young technology company in India.
Collect requirements. Estimate hours. Write the code. Deliver. Invoice. Repeat. It's honest work, it pays salaries, and India has built one of the world's great technology industries on it, the industry that NASSCOM represents today.
We didn't start Incrix to walk that path again. We wanted to be a technology startup in India that owns problems, not just tickets: a company that builds products, ships hardware and still treats every client project as if we'd have to live with it for years.
This is the thesis behind almost every decision we make.
The kind of technology startup in India we wanted to be
The difference isn't the code. Plenty of services companies write excellent code. The difference is what you're responsible for.
When a company's job ends at "delivered to spec", its incentives quietly shape everything. Requirements get taken at face value. Architecture gets chosen for how quickly it can be built rather than how cheaply it can be run. Maintenance becomes somebody else's problem, often the client's, and sometimes a new contract.
We describe our own position simply. Traditional companies take requirements and write code, which is costlier to build and maintain. We'd rather do this:
We understand the problem, architect an engineering solution, and design the application on cost-effective, maintenance-friendly serverless architecture.
It sounds like a small change of wording. In practice it changes who does the thinking, and when.
Product company vs software company: the actual difference
"Product company vs software company" gets argued as if it were a label. It's really a set of habits. Here's how we see the two side by side.
A company can do client work with a product mindset, and plenty of "product" companies behave like agencies inside. The label on the website matters far less than which column the decisions come from.
From services to products
Moving from services to products isn't one leap. It's a sequence of disciplines, and each one makes the next possible.
That last step is where companies like ours earn the word "product". We cover the idea in depth in Why We Build Products, Not Just Projects. Here's what it looks like for us in practice.
Classory: a product, not a project
Classory is our own AI learning platform, a multi-tenant, white-label LMS where academies, institutions and educators each run their own branded workspace. It covers courses and batches, classrooms, exams with 18 question types, the Clay AI assistant, secure signed and watermarked video, CodeLoop in-browser coding with autograding, learning paths, gamification and monetisation. Educators who use their own payment gateway pay 0% commission.
It's designed on serverless architecture for 2M+ concurrent users. No client specified that number. It's the kind of commitment you only make when you own the product and have to live with it. The engineering is in How We Built Classory.
Hardware: products you can hold
The product mindset isn't limited to software. Incrix Automation designs and ships its own boards: Horizon Gen 1, Twinedge Dev V2, Horizon Dev-2 C6 and Hexon Atom C6, along with education kits for schools and universities. You can see the full hardware lineup. That's deep tech in the literal sense, from schematic and PCB to firmware, on-device AI and the cloud behind it, and it's why we describe ourselves as a deep tech company in India rather than a software vendor. We explain the craft in From PCB to Product and the direction in Why Intelligence Is Moving to the Edge.
Why startups should build products
We aren't against services. We still build software for clients, and we're proud of it. But we believe every technology startup should be building towards something it owns. Here's why.
- Products compound; hours don'tA project ends. A product carries every lesson you've learned into the next release, for every user at once.
- Owning the outcome improves the engineeringWhen you pay the hosting bill and answer the support tickets, you design differently. You design for maintainability, efficiency and resilience.
- Products make you better at client workRunning Classory in production teaches us things no spec could. Our clients get the benefit of those lessons.
- Products build something a team can be proud ofPeople do their best work when they can point at something that exists because of them and is still running.
- Products are how a small company punches above its weightA team of fifteen can't out-hire a large agency. It can out-think one on a specific problem, and then scale that thinking through software and hardware.
Why the streams matter to the thesis
People sometimes ask why a product company also runs branding, studio and education streams. The honest answer is that products don't live in isolation. A product needs to be designed, explained, branded and taught. Its users need skills. Its hardware needs firmware, and its firmware needs a cloud. Building across software, hardware and design is how we keep the whole product in one room. We've written about that in Why Incrix Builds Across Software, Hardware and Design.
Building technology products in India
For a technology startup in India, there's a particular reason this matters. India's customers are price-sensitive, its infrastructure is varied, and its connectivity is uneven. A product that ignores those conditions either costs too much to run or breaks where it's needed most.
That's why we design on serverless infrastructure, which we explain in why we build serverless, and why our hardware puts intelligence on the device. Frugal isn't a compromise. For products built in India, it's a design requirement.
The environment is also more supportive than it used to be. Recognition from Startup India and DPIIT, which Incrix holds, reflects a national push to back innovative, product-led businesses. We intend to be a useful part of that shift.
Avinash, our Director & CEO, writes about building a company young in his founder notes.
What Building a Company at 22 Taught Me →What this means if you work with us
If you come to Incrix with a specification, we'll read it carefully. Then we'll ask about the problem behind it. Sometimes the answer is exactly what you wrote. Sometimes the better answer is simpler, cheaper to run or more useful than what you imagined. Either way, you get a partner who thinks like an owner, because building our own products has taught us what ownership costs.
That's the whole point. We didn't start Incrix to build another software company. We started it to build technology that holds up in the real world, and we're doing that one product and one client at a time. The bigger picture is in What Are We Actually Building at Incrix?, and our software stream is where to go if you have a problem worth solving.