Mitul Bid and his wife, Priti Bid built Coditas on two core principles; to write clean code when developing software, and to build a people-first company. Today, despite the challenges it faced during the pandemic, the company has built a global presence across India, the U.S. and Dubai. 

Mitul Bid is a serial entrepreneur with a number of valuable entrepreneurship lessons in his stride. An IIT graduate, Bid founded several ventures before co-founding his current business, Coditas. After graduation, he imported refurbished laptops into India and sold them on bazee.com. Then, he started a restaurant in Pune, called Zaika, which ran for a couple of years. He then partnered with his IIT classmate, Janak Porwal, and started a QR code company (which later shutdown because it was ahead of its time). Finally, it was a sofa factory which shutdown a year later. From learning what it is to run a clean business, to understanding the need for timing when starting a venture, it’s safe to say that Bid took experiences from his earlier ventures when he founded Coditas, a UI & digital engineering company, with his wife, Priti Bid, in 2014.

With Coditas, he was sure of two principles he wanted to follow; to write a clean code when developing software (which means, to develop using code which is simple and easy to understand and change), and to build a people-first company. For instance, in March 2020, when the pandemic hit, despite the massive setback because of the global shutdown, Coditas ensured that no salaries were cut and no employees were laid off. In a year, this strategy paid off, and the company even expanded its team from 250 in March 2020 to 600 in late 2021. “Aside from ensuring no layoffs or salary cuts, we put our employee safety as top priority. Our HR team, for instance, introduced many initiatives to keep the teams engaged and motivated. For team members who had unreliable electricity at their homes, we sponsored 50% of their inverter costs and financed the other 50%. For team members who couldn’t perform up to the mark because of the pandemic, we had support from our clients and team members to enable them.” recalls Bid. 

Today, Coditas is a global UI & digital engineering company, offering a host of services such as web and mobile development, UX design, DevOps and testing services, data engineering and data science, and big data and ML. Coditas has offices across India, the U.S. and Dubai, and it serves clients like JP Morgan, Konica Minolta and Larsen & Turbo. In FY20-21, the company recorded a turnover of INR 120 crore. Over the last two years, the company has continued to grow at breakneck pack, though revenue numbers were not disclosed. 

In this interview with Smart CEO, the Coditas CEO and co-founder, Mitul Bid talks to us about his top priorities for the company today, emerging technologies the company plans to capitalize on, and the future outlook for Coditas. 

What are your top 3 priorities as the CEO today?

My first priority is to grow the team in all aspects; knowledge, career, role, responsibility, and finance. Secondly, I want to ensure that we are continuously creating value for our clients. Thirdly, I want to ensure the business continues to grow while riding on the first two focus areas. 

What emerging technologies is Coditas capitalizing on, and how?

Coditas has always been using the latest technologies to build software products. We evaluate the real long-term business benefit and applicability and start using the technologies and frameworks. For example, we were among the first to begin using micro-frontends more than three years ago, before the terminology became mainstream. Similarly, digital and data engineering are must-haves for any business to stay relevant and think for their own progress.

What steps are you taking to ensure that your employees’ skills remain relevant in the fast-changing tech world?

Primarily, we ensure that the leadership stays on top of the latest tech trends, so that information and knowledge automatically trickles down to the team through various channels in formal and informal ways. The reverse is also true in that most of our team members are savvy and update themselves on the latest tech trends out of passion and interest. They in turn, share this knowledge through various internal team-level forums. Aside from this, we are in the process of setting up a formal L&D team for seniors. We already have a very robust training program for freshers, but we want to take it to the next level for every other team member to upskill and improve both their core and soft skills. Finally, there are many workshops/webinars that we conduct, both for internal and external audiences.

What does the roadmap for Coditas in the next 5 years look like?

We started the organization with a mission and philosophy to improve India’s overall software quality. That has struck the right notes with both our clients and team members. Coditas, today, is known as a clean code evangelist, and there is a significant amount of buzz around everything we are doing. All our clients are on a massive growth path, and we are hiring very aggressively to meet the high demand for our offerings.

How has Indian IT fared compared to global competitors in the last few years, and what does the future of Indian IT look like?

India is now moving away from being a place where you save costs to where you need to be to grow. For many of our global clients, Coditas is the only tech team that they have to build their software intellectual property. Many do not have a CTOs or anyone who understands tech. We are deeply involved in real value creation. This shows the skill, talent and opportunities that Indian IT is able to offer in the global arena.