The Man Who Built Su-Kam’s Mind — My Story with Sanjeev Saini

Every company that wants to last reaches a moment when borrowed ideas are no longer enough. For Su-Kam, that moment arrived around 2000. We needed a real Research & Development wing — not a drawing-room hobby, not a vendor’s leftover designs, but people who could think from first principles and own the product end to end.

I was looking for someone I could groom personally: someone who could grow into technology leadership, handle the hard technical calls across factories, and eventually build the team itself. That person was Sanjeev Saini.

2001: One engineer, no department yet

Sanjeev was then working on wheelchair automation — niche, careful, technically demanding work. That told me he thought like an engineer, not like a brochure. I made him an offer. He joined Su-Kam in 2001 as our first R&D engineer — the sole founding member of a department that did not yet exist.

I did not hire him to decorate an org chart. I groomed him personally — product debates, lab nights, factory fires, recruitment calls. He and I grew the company together. Over time he owned the technology stack, the major technical recruitments, and the technical issues that surfaced across plants. When something broke on the line or a new platform had to be defended in a review, Sanjeev was in the room.

Sanjeev started with Su-Kam in 2001. I groomed him personally. He grew into technology leadership — recruitments, factory technical issues, product truth. We grew the company together.

Eighteen years of building the mind of Su-Kam

What followed was nearly eighteen years of close work. Sanjeev did not merely “manage R&D.” He built it — hired engineers, set standards, argued patents at the whiteboard, and stayed with problems until the field data agreed. He held an M.Tech in Instrumentation Engineering from REC Kurukshetra (now NIT Kurukshetra). He rose from engineer to Head of R&D, then Director R&D and CTO — and a formal Director of the company, because the work had become institutional, not personal.

Together we filed patents in power conversion, backup, and energy storage. More than fifteen were granted. Each one was lab work, argument, field failure, and finally an invention we could defend. That is how a company stops being an assembler and starts being a technology house.

Why I trusted him with the hardest rooms

I hired many brilliant people. Trust is rarer. Trust is what you feel when someone has stood with you through failure as well as launch — when their judgment is sound and their intentions are clean.

Sanjeev was quiet. Not timid — precise. He let the products, the patents, and the team speak. For nearly two decades, if a technical decision needed honesty rather than theatre, he was there. That is also why putting strong technical leadership close to the board mattered later: product truth belongs in the same room as finance truth.

He was the most trusted technical partner I had at Su-Kam — not because he sought the title, but because eighteen years of honest work earned it.

When insolvency hit the builders

I cannot write honestly about Sanjeev without saying what the Su-Kam insolvency did to people who had only built. As a Director, he was pulled into legal process — investigations, court proceedings, and ultimately personal insolvency. He was not the promoter. He was an engineer who had given eighteen years to something he believed in. The law does not always honour that distinction cleanly.

He left with much of the R&D team, spent a period at Microtek, and then a silence came between us.

The silence I learned to respect

I tried to reach him more than once. The replies were cold — polite in a way that hurt more than anger. He had closed the door. I stopped pressing because pressure would only deepen what he had already carried.

Somewhere, I feel, he holds me responsible — not because I wished harm, but because he gave eighteen years to something I built, and that something brought the state’s machinery down on him. That is a hard thing to forgive. I carry that.

Some people stories end with a warm reunion. This one does not. I am writing it because eighteen years of honest work should not vanish into silence — whether or not he reads this.

What he built next — Inteli Energi

Sanjeev did not stop building. With R. Sivarajan and Dhananjay Sharma, he co-founded Inteli Energi Technology Pvt. Ltd. in Udyog Vihar, Gurgaon — R&D, product development, testing, OEM/ODM in power electronics: MPPT hybrid PCUs, sine-wave UPS, solar charge controllers, motor drives. Patents. Original work. The man did not change. Only the letterhead did.

Also read: Jagdeep Chauhan · Venkat Rajaraman · Srinivas Pilla · R. Sivarajan

Sanjeev — you gave eighteen years to something we built together. You built the mind of Su-Kam. What the insolvency process put you through was unjust, and I know it. I tried to reach you, found silence, and have respected that silence — but I have not forgotten what you gave, or what you endured. What you are building at Inteli Energi is exactly what I would expect from you. I hope it returns some of what was taken.

— Kunwer Sachdev, Founder, Su-Kam Power Systems | Founder, Su-vastika

Kunwer Sachdev

Founder of Su-Kam and Kunwwer.ai, and mentor at Su-vastika and several other companies — the “Inverter Man of India” and the “Solar Man of India.” Read his story →