This is part of a series about the people who got their first chance in the inverter industry through Su-Kam.
Read earlier stories about
Jagdeep Chauhan,
Venkat Rajaraman,
Narender Singh Negi,
Sunil Badesra,
the founders of Smarten Power Systems, and
Ishan Sehgal.
I Did Not Find Him in India
The Man Who Built Su-Kam’s Africa — and Then Built His Own
A personal tribute to Srinivas Pilla — engineer, entrepreneur, and one of the most quietly remarkable people I have ever hired
There are people you hire for a role, and there are people who grow beyond every expectation you had when you made that hire. Srinivas Pilla belongs firmly to the second category. But to understand what he became, you have to understand where he started — and what it took to get Su-Kam from India to Nigeria.
This is that story. And I am going to tell it fully, because it deserves to be told.
We Were Already There — And That Was the Problem
By the early 2010s, Su-Kam Power Systems had become a name that mattered in India. We had built something real — inverters, batteries, solar solutions — technology that was changing how people lived, especially in areas where power was unreliable. And power was unreliable in a lot of places in the world.
Africa, and Nigeria in particular, was one of them.
I know this not from research or from reports. I know it because I went there myself. I visited Nigeria five times. I walked those markets. I met those customers. I sat across the table from dealers and distributors who were trying to understand what Su-Kam was and what it could mean for their businesses. I felt firsthand what the demand was — and it was real. It was visceral. Nigeria needed exactly what we made.
But going to a market and building in a market are two different things. And the gap between those two things is where most companies get stuck.
We had already gone through two distributors by the time we recognised the pattern. Each one had potential. Each one fell short — not always through bad intent, but through insufficient commitment, or misaligned priorities, or simply not being the right fit for the scale of what we were trying to build. We changed them, appointed a new distributor, and kept pushing.
And here is what was extraordinary about that period: people were running after us for distribution rights. Let that sink in for a moment. We were not chasing the market. The market was chasing us. Su-Kam had already built a name in Nigeria. Dealers wanted to carry the brand. End customers were asking for it. The demand was there, the recognition was there, the appetite was there.
That is not something that happens by accident. It happens because the product is genuinely good, and because the early groundwork — the visits, the relationships, the persistence — had created something that the Nigerian market responded to.
But recognition without infrastructure is a wasted opportunity. And I could feel, very clearly, that we were at the edge of wasting ours.
The problem was simple and unsolvable from India: you cannot sustain a brand from a distance. You cannot grow it, service it, protect it, or expand it across new product categories and new countries by managing it remotely from Gurgaon. Nigeria deserved better than that. West Africa as a whole deserved better than that. And frankly, everything we had worked to build in those markets deserved better than that.
We needed someone on the ground. Not a distributor. Not a sales agent. A person — our person — who could take ownership of the entire operation. Someone who would sustain what we had built, grow it deliberately, manage after-sales service with the same seriousness we brought to our products in India, and lead the expansion of our product range across Nigeria and the wider West African region.
Handling any of that from India was simply not possible. Geography is not just a logistical problem. It is a cultural one, a relational one, a trust problem. The Nigerian market needed a face it could call, a person it could hold accountable, a professional who was present in the same time zone and the same reality as the customers we were serving.
That search — for the right person, with the right character, for that specific and difficult task — led us to Srinivas Pilla.
A Hire From Outside the Industry
Srinivas came from the white goods industry in Nigeria. He was not from inverters, not from batteries, not from solar. He understood the Nigerian market, its rhythms and its demands, but the technical world of power backup was new to him entirely.
For some people, that would have been a disadvantage. For Srinivas, it turned out to be irrelevant — because the quality that mattered most in him had nothing to do with prior knowledge of our products. It had to do with his willingness to learn, his hunger to understand, and his fundamental character as a professional.
We did not just send him to Nigeria with a catalogue and a price list. This was not that kind of posting. We went on to open a 100% subsidiary — Su-Kam’s own company, wholly owned, physically present, operating on Nigerian soil. Srinivas was at the helm of that. Which meant his job was not to sell. His job was to build.
The Rhythm of Learning
Since Srinivas was not from the inverter and solar industry, he would come to India regularly for training. He would sit with our engineers. He would walk the factory floor. He would ask questions that only someone new to the technology asks — honest, foundational questions that cut through assumed knowledge. And he would listen with the kind of attention that makes a teacher feel that their words actually matter.
Those training visits became a rhythm. He would absorb everything, go back to Lagos, apply it in the field, come back with new questions — questions born not from a textbook but from real problems encountered in the Nigerian market. And then he would refine his understanding further, carry it back again, apply it again.
It was a real education. Not the kind you get in a classroom. The kind you get from the back-and-forth between a factory and a market, between theory and consequence, between what we thought would work and what Nigeria actually needed.
I have seen many people go through training at Su-Kam. Not all of them came back sharper. Srinivas always did.
The Man Behind the Professional
I want to pause here to say something about who Srinivas was as a person — not just as an employee — because the two are inseparable.
He was sincere. Not the surface sincerity of someone who wants to impress, but the deep sincerity of a man who takes his commitments seriously and follows through on them without being reminded. He was hard-working in the way that people from good, grounded families tend to be hard-working — not to prove something, but because it was simply how he operated.
He was not someone who needed managing. He was someone who took ownership. There is a world of difference between those two things, and anyone who has ever run a business knows exactly what I mean.
His family reflected the same values. His wife was equally hard-working. His children’s education was the family’s central priority. There was a middle-class groundedness to them that I admired — the kind of values that keep a person focused on what matters even when the noise around them is loud.
When you send someone to represent your company in a foreign country, you are trusting them with more than a sales territory. You are trusting them with your name. With Srinivas, I never had to worry about that. Not once.
Building More Than a Market
Over the years he led our Nigeria operations, Srinivas did not just run a subsidiary. He built a business. He established Su-Kam’s presence not only in Nigeria but across major countries in West Africa. Market by market, relationship by relationship, he carried the brand into territory where it had not existed before.
That kind of market-building is invisible from a distance. You don’t see it in quarterly reports. You see it years later, when the foundation he laid is still holding up. You see it when dealers in West Africa associate Su-Kam with reliability, because the man who introduced them to the brand was himself reliable.
That was Srinivas.
The Battery Argument I Am Glad He Lost
The most memorable chapter of my time with Srinivas is one we disagreed on — strongly, for a while — before the facts proved me right. I am not telling this story to say “I told you so.” I am telling it because the disagreement, and what we did with it, led to something that changed an entire industry.
At the time, Su-Kam Nigeria was selling VRLA batteries — Valve Regulated Lead Acid batteries. Sealed batteries, white-labelled from China, requiring no water topping. Convenient. Easy to sell. Easy to explain to a customer. You connect it, you use it, you never have to maintain it.
There was just one problem. Their lifespan was short.
I wanted Srinivas to switch to Tubular batteries — the kind being manufactured in India. Tubular batteries are different. They require periodic water topping, which is a maintenance task. But their lifespan is four times longer than VRLA. Four times. In a market where a battery represents a significant investment for a household or a small business, that difference is not a minor product specification. It is the difference between a battery that serves a family for two years and one that serves them for eight.
My logic was straightforward, and I stated it to Srinivas clearly: Africa is a price-sensitive market, just as India was and still is. People cannot afford to keep replacing batteries every couple of years. They make one significant purchase and they need it to last. What succeeds in India on the grounds of value and longevity will succeed in Africa too, because the economic logic is identical. Long life at a fair price beats cheap and disposable, every time, in every market where money is tight and trust is earned slowly.
Srinivas pushed back. He was not wrong to be cautious — and I want to be clear about that, because this story is not about one person being right and the other being wrong. He had legitimate reasons for his resistance. The Nigerian market was accustomed to sealed batteries. The concept of water topping was foreign to most end users. The maintenance requirement was a real objection that customers would raise. He was the one who would have to address those objections in the field, not me sitting in a boardroom in India.
So he pushed back. And I held my ground.
There is a particular kind of tension that comes from a disagreement between two people who respect each other. It is not hostile. It is not petty. It is the productive, uncomfortable friction of two different sets of experience pressing against each other. That is what this was. Srinivas was voicing what the market was telling him. I was voicing what a decade of building the Indian market had taught me. We were both right about something. The question was which of us was right about the larger thing.
When the Batteries Failed — and What That Taught Us
We moved forward with the tubular battery plan. And the first shipment from India did not go well.
The early samples arrived filled with acid and water — which was the standard for Indian distribution at the time. In India, batteries are sold ready to use. You take them off the shelf, you connect them, you are done. The entire supply chain is built around that expectation.
But shipping fully charged, acid-filled batteries across continents was an entirely different matter. At that time, the HAAS regulations — the Hazardous Articles in Stores and Stowage guidelines that govern how dangerous goods are transported in shipping containers — were not yet standardised for this kind of cross-continental battery export. The batteries failed on arrival.
Srinivas, quite reasonably, pointed to those failures. Here was his argument made physical. The batteries he had warned about were now sitting in Lagos, damaged, having gone through a shipping process they were not designed for. He was not triumphant about it. That was not his style. But he was honest, and the honesty was fair.
I will tell you what I felt in that moment. Not defeat — but a redoubling of conviction. Because the problem was not that tubular batteries could not work in Nigeria. The problem was that we had not yet figured out how to get them there.
Those are two entirely different problems. One has no solution. The other just needs work.
Solving the Problem Instead of Retreating From It
We made a decision together that I think defined the entire arc of what followed: instead of abandoning the tubular battery idea because the first attempt had failed, we committed to solving the actual problem.
What we developed was a method and system to ship the batteries dry — without acid — and fill and test them at the destination in Nigeria. This required several things simultaneously. It required training the local team in Lagos on the filling and testing process. It required sourcing and setting up the right equipment in Nigeria. It required building a reliable, repeatable process from scratch — one that could be documented, taught to new team members, and trusted to produce consistent results.
It was not simple. I want to be honest about that. There were logistical problems, there were training challenges, there were moments where the process did not work the way we wanted and had to be refined. It took time and it took patience from everyone involved, especially Srinivas, who was managing all of this at the market end while simultaneously running a business.
But it worked.
What a Disagreement Between Two People Built for an Entire Industry
Srinivas launched the tubular batteries in Nigeria. They succeeded. Customers who had been accustomed to replacing their sealed batteries every couple of years discovered what it felt like to own a battery that lasted eight. The value proposition, which I had always believed in, proved itself in the Nigerian market exactly as it had proved itself in India.
And the system — ship dry, fill and test at destination — became something far larger than either of us anticipated.
That process we developed for Nigeria became the standard method for exporting tubular batteries from India to the rest of Africa and the Middle East. Today, Indian tubular batteries are sold across the continent using exactly this approach. The infrastructure of trade that allows an Indian manufacturer to get a high-quality, long-life battery to a customer in Ghana or Kenya or the UAE traces back, in part, to the problem we were forced to solve in Lagos because the first shipment failed.
I think about that often. I think about how the failure — the frustrating, embarrassing, here-is-your-proof-I-was-right failure of that first shipment — turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. Because it forced us to build something. And what we built outlasted Su-Kam Nigeria. It outlasted any single business relationship. It became part of how an industry operates.
What started as an argument between two people about one market became something much larger than either of us.
“Instead of abandoning the idea, we solved the problem — shipping batteries dry and filling them at destination. It was not simple. But it worked. And what started as a tussle between us became a system that India now uses to export tubular batteries across all of Africa and the Middle East.”
Four and a Half Years That Built Something Lasting
Srinivas worked at Su-Kam Power Systems from November 2010 to January 2015. Four and a half years. In that time, he built our Nigerian operations from the ground up, established the market across Nigeria and major countries in West Africa, navigated a complicated and consequential product transition, and helped create a supply chain innovation that the entire Indian battery export industry still uses.
Four and a half years. It sounds like a long time when you list it that way, but it does not feel like enough time to have done all of that. And yet, that is exactly what he did.
When he left Su-Kam in January 2015, he left behind something solid. The Nigeria subsidiary was not a project anymore — it was a functioning business, with trained people, established relationships, and a product lineup that the market had come to trust. That was his work.
Stanford — and What That Recognition Said About Him
After Su-Kam, Srinivas went on to study at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business — one of the most prestigious business schools in the world. For a man who had spent years in the trenches of a market as demanding as Nigeria, learning not from professors but from the real, daily work of building something in a foreign country, the validation of Stanford said something important: that the kind of intelligence which operates in the field, which solves real problems under real pressure, is the same intelligence that the world’s best institutions recognise and want to develop further.
But the Stanford chapter did not end there.
For the academic year 2025–26, Srinivas was selected as one of just 100 entrepreneurs from the entire African continent — and one of only 200 entrepreneurs chosen from across the globe — for the Stanford Seed Transformation Program.
Let me say that again, because I want the weight of it to land properly. Out of every entrepreneur building something in Africa, Stanford identified 100. Srinivas was one of them.
The Stanford Seed Transformation Program exists for a specific purpose: to bring the power of innovation, entrepreneurship, and leadership to established businesses and their leaders in developing and emerging economies throughout the world — on the ground, in their communities, where it matters most. It is not a credential programme for people who want to add a line to their resume. It is a programme for people who are already building something real, and who have been identified as worthy of investing in further.
To be chosen from an entire continent for that programme is a distinction that very few people in the world earn. It is a recognition not just of what Srinivas has built, but of the kind of leader he is and the potential that people with fresh eyes can still see in him after everything he has already accomplished.
Eight Years, One Brand, and a Market He Made His Own
After Stanford, Srinivas did what the best people eventually do: he stopped building for someone else and started building for himself.
In the eight years since leaving Su-Kam, driven by a passion and a zeal and a desire to make an impact that has never wavered, Srinivas built his own brand from the ground up in Lagos. With everything he learned at Su-Kam — the technology, the market, the customer behaviour, the supply chain — and everything he refined through his own years of experience and reflection, he created Afriipower, his own label in the power backup and renewable energy solutions industry.
Think about what it takes to do that. The Nigerian energy market is one of the most competitive in the world. He was not entering a quiet space. He was entering a market full of established players, low-cost imports, and customers who have been burned before and are understandably cautious about who they trust. He did not have the backing of a large corporation behind him. He had his knowledge, his relationships, his reputation, and his conviction.
Today, Srinivas is the Founder and CEO of African Power Ventures and Energy Ltd., operating through the Afriipower brand in Lagos — selling inverters, batteries, and solar solutions in a market he helped shape.
The man I hired to sell Su-Kam products in Nigeria is now running his own power company in that same market. His own brand. His own team. His own vision.
I do not experience that as competition. I experience it as pride. As the deepest, most satisfying kind of professional pride — the kind you feel when someone you believed in before the world believed in them goes on to prove that your faith was not only justified but insufficient. Because what Srinivas has built is bigger than what even I imagined when I first made that hire.
Srinivas Pilla — Career at a Glance
White Goods Industry, Nigeria (pre-2010) | Su-Kam Power Systems — Head, Nigeria Operations & 100% Subsidiary (November 2010 – January 2015) | Stanford University Graduate School of Business | Stanford Seed Transformation Program — Selected Entrepreneur, Africa (2025–26) | Founder & CEO, African Power Ventures and Energy Ltd. (Afriipower) — Lagos, Nigeria
What Nigeria Taught Both of Us
The Nigeria chapter of Su-Kam’s story is one I think about often. It was one of the most ambitious things we attempted — going into a market that complex, that large, that different from everything we knew in India, and building a wholly-owned subsidiary from absolutely nothing.
It required a kind of courage that is easy to underestimate from a comfortable distance. The courage to go to a country that is not your own, represent a brand that is not yet known there, sell products in categories that are unfamiliar to your customers, navigate a supply chain that does not yet exist, and hold the whole thing together with nothing but your own determination.
Srinivas did all of that. Every single day for four and a half years.
And the battery story — what felt at the time like a disagreement, a frustration, even a minor crisis — turned out to be one of the most consequential things we did together. It was not just a product decision. It was an innovation in how an entire industry ships and commissions goods across continents. That kind of outcome happens when two people are willing to stay in the problem instead of walking away from it.
I could have let Srinivas keep selling VRLA batteries and none of the difficulty would have happened. But none of the breakthrough would have happened either. I am glad I held my ground. And I am glad Srinivas, even while disagreeing, had the character to follow through when we found the solution.
That is what good people do. They argue honestly, and then they execute faithfully.
Also read: Jagdeep Chauhan — The Man Who Invented India’s Sine Wave Inverter | Venkat Rajaraman — The Man Who Left Nvidia for a Dream | Sunil Badesra — The Boy Who Became a Leader
Srinivas — you came from a different industry, in a different country, and you took a bet on Su-Kam just as I took a bet on you. You flew to India again and again to learn something new, and you went back to Lagos every time and made that learning real. You built our Nigeria business not on the strength of a famous brand or a deep pocket — you built it on your own back. You argued with me when you thought I was wrong, and then you executed brilliantly when we found the answer together. You established Su-Kam across West Africa. You gave the Indian battery industry a method it still uses today. You earned your place at Stanford, and now you have earned something even rarer — the recognition, in 2025, of being one of just 100 entrepreneurs from an entire continent worthy of the Stanford Seed Transformation Program. And through eight years of your own, with nothing but passion and hard work, you have built Afriipower into a real brand in one of the world’s most competitive markets.
I could not be prouder. The work we did together mattered. The work you are doing now matters more. Keep going.
— Kunwer Sachdev, Founder, Su-Kam Power Systems | Founder, Su-vastikaDISCLAIMER
I, Kunwer Sachdev, wish to clarify that I have had no involvement, affiliation, or relationship of any kind with Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. since 2019. As per official IBBI records, my directorship and all associated capacities ceased upon the initiation of the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process (CIRP) ordered by the Hon’ble NCLT, after which a court-appointed Resolution Professional assumed full control of the company. I do not represent, endorse, or speak for Su-Kam in any capacity. Readers and consumers are advised to be aware of this before purchasing Su-Kam products or entering into any dealings with the company, as I hold no responsibility for any actions, commitments, or representations made by Su-Kam or its current management. Source: IBBI Official Record — Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd.
