The Su-Kam Legacy — A Brand That Stood the Test of Time

At its peak, Su-Kam was the brand a Delhi household, a Lagos hospital and a Rwandan school all called when the lights were going out. Kunwer Sachdev built it from a ten-thousand-rupee start and a corner of his cable-TV office into India’s largest organised inverter and power-backup company — a sine-wave, plastic-body, India-designed brand exporting to more than ninety countries. This is that story, told properly.

From a cable shop in Delhi to one of India’s most respected brands

Kunwer Sachdev was born in Delhi in November 1962, the son of a railway employee in Punjabi Bagh. He studied statistics at Hindu College and went on to a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Delhi [1]. By the late 1980s he was running a cable-television installation and equipment business in Delhi alongside his elder brother — a profitable, hands-on operation that taught him retail, distribution and after-sales the hard way [2].

The pivot to power began with a frustration anyone in 1990s India will recognise: chronic outages. Sachdev started experimenting with backup units inside the cable business and saw a category that was technically primitive, brand-less and hugely under-served. On 14 October 1998 the team formally incorporated Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd in Delhi — the corporate registry records the date and CIN to this day [3]. The starting capital was reportedly ₹10,000. The destination was a national brand [4].

The cable-TV years are easy to underrate. They gave Sachdev three things he later spent at Su-Kam without having to learn them: a feel for which technical fixes Indian customers will actually pay for, a network of small dealers who understood retail margins, and a personal habit of running the business from the workshop rather than the boardroom. The pen-selling years before that — he and his elder brother went door-to-door on bicycles — are part of the public profile because Sachdev keeps telling them. They explain the operating temperament: a founder who has done sales calls in person never quite believes the brand sells itself [4].

The products that built the brand

The early Su-Kam product line moved fast. The first Indian inverters were standard transformer-and-board designs in heavy metal cases. The team’s first real breakthrough was electronics: India’s first MOSFET-based inverter, then India’s first microcontroller-based inverter, and then — the one that mattered — India’s first DSP sine-wave inverter, which removed the buzzing in fans and tube lights that square-wave units had inflicted on every backup-powered home [5].

The second breakthrough was the cabinet itself. In 2003, Su-Kam launched Chic, the first plastic-body inverter in India and, by several accounts, the world. Sachdev convinced GE Plastics to develop a custom flame-retardant compound for the unit [6]. India Today went on to name the plastic-body inverter one of the country’s top-ten innovations of the decade [7]. Chic stayed in the market — and in customers’ homes — for the better part of twenty years [6].

By the late 2000s and into the 2010s the catalogue widened in three directions at once. Residential: tubular and SMF batteries paired with home UPS, the Brainy and Brainy Eco solar hybrid home UPS lines that ran a household off panels and a battery without the buyer needing a separate solar inverter [9]. Solar: PWM and MPPT charge controllers in 12V, 24V, 48V and 360V variants and the Solarcon family of solar PCUs that bundled inverter, charge controller and grid-charger into one box [8]. Industrial: online and line-interactive UPS up to 500 kVA for offices, factories and data infrastructure. In one launch Su-Kam introduced India’s first touchscreen solar PCU with built-in Wi-Fi monitoring and an MPPT controller — at the time, a configuration nobody else in the country was shipping [10].

Behind that catalogue sat an unusually heavy R&D programme. Su-Kam filed more than seventy technology patents and several hundred design patents, copyrights and trademarks across India, the United States and other markets — an output rate the company described as roughly two technology patents a month at its peak [11]. The patent strategy was deliberate: lock in the technical territory the brand had opened, so that every plastic-body sine-wave inverter sold in India for the next decade would either be a Su-Kam unit or one whose makers had to design around Su-Kam’s claims.

The category Kunwer Sachdev created

Before Su-Kam, “inverter” in India meant a heavy, square-wave box bought from an unbranded local assembler, kept under the stairs and replaced when it failed. There was no category leader, no consumer brand, no national service network. Su-Kam built one. By the mid-2000s the company was the country’s largest organised inverter manufacturer, capturing a market share that contemporary trade coverage placed at over thirty-five per cent at peak [12]. Su-Kam was also the first Indian power-solutions company to win Superbrands India recognition — an industry milestone, because the category itself had not previously been seen as branded territory [13].

The home-UPS / inverter category as Indian buyers understand it today — sine-wave output, plastic body, named brand, dealer warranty, retail packaging, demoable in a showroom rather than discovered in a workshop — is, in large measure, the category Sachdev’s team designed. The competitors who came after, including those who outlived Su-Kam itself, copied the template Su-Kam wrote: brand the box, ship a sine wave, give the buyer something with a face on the carton and a service phone number on the back.

That category leadership attracted institutional capital. On 31 March 2006 the Reliance India Power Fund — a private-equity vehicle jointly sponsored by the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings — signed a Share Purchase-cum-Share Subscription Agreement to acquire a twenty per cent stake in Su-Kam for ₹45 crore [39]. It was the brand’s first major external investment and, in 2006, an unusual one: an Indian power-electronics company taking institutional money from one of the country’s largest groups and a sovereign-linked Singapore investor at the same time. It signalled that the inverter category had crossed from cottage trade into something serious capital was prepared to back.

A factory of firsts

The operational base was Plot 54, Udyog Vihar Phase VI, Gurugram — Su-Kam’s headquarters and primary inverter plant [14] — supported at scale by a battery factory in Himachal Pradesh staffed by trained engineers and equipped for in-house testing [15]. Vertical integration was the deliberate strategy: design, electronics, plastics, batteries and software under one company umbrella, so that a sine-wave inverter, the battery it drove and the charge controller that fed it could all be engineered to work together rather than bolted into a system at the dealer’s shop floor. At its peak the company employed in the high hundreds and ran a pan-India service network [16].

The plants ran ISO-certified processes for both quality and environment, and the in-house design team carried the work of three or four separate companies: power electronics, plastics tooling, battery engineering and embedded firmware. That combination is rare in Indian electronics manufacturing even today; in the early 2000s, when Su-Kam was building it, it was effectively unique inside the inverter sector.

From India to ninety countries

Su-Kam’s international expansion ran parallel with its domestic growth. Independent industry coverage put export reach at more than ninety countries at peak across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, supported by a dealer network of more than twenty-five thousand partners [17]. Concrete African deployments include thirty-five schools in Rwanda powered by Su-Kam solar systems [19] and approximately two thousand solar street lights installed across the Gabonese villages of Kango, Mouila and Bitam — many of them communities that had not previously been electrified [18]. In the power-backup sector specifically, Su-Kam set what was at the time the highest export-sales record by an Indian manufacturer [20].

The export book wasn’t the easy markets, either. Many of the deployments were in places where grid power was either unreliable, intermittent or absent: Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Arab Emirates. The pitch was simple in any of those languages: a unit that ships from India, designed to handle Indian grid behaviour, that will run a household, a clinic or a classroom when nothing else will. Su-Kam representatives showed up at trade shows like Middle East Electricity year after year, and by the mid-2010s the brand was being specified into government and donor-funded electrification tenders in markets where Indian manufacturers had previously been a footnote.

Pioneering solar in India

Su-Kam moved into solar earlier than most Indian power-electronics companies. By the early 2010s the catalogue already covered solar inverters, off-grid systems, grid-tie inverters, PWM and MPPT solar charge controllers, solar PCUs and solar lighting — aligned with the launch of the National Solar Mission and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy’s first phase of off-grid programs [21][22]. In a 2018 pv magazine India interview, Sachdev argued that the company was “four to five years ahead of competitors” on inverter technology, and used the conversation to position Su-Kam squarely on solar hybrid systems — Solarcon, Brainy and the touchscreen PCU [23]. He carried two informal titles by then: the inverter man of India and, increasingly, the solar man of India [24].

The solar bet had a particular logic to it. India’s grid was unreliable in exactly the geographies where solar irradiance was highest. A Su-Kam solar PCU sold into a Rajasthan farmhouse or a Gujarat shop did two jobs at once: it ran the load when the grid was down, and it offset diesel-generator hours when the grid was up. That dual-purpose framing — back-up first, sustainability second — let the brand sell solar to customers who would not have bought a stand-alone solar inverter on environmental grounds and might never have bought a stand-alone backup unit on cost grounds. It was a category-design move of the same order as the original sine-wave plastic-body decision a decade earlier.

The recognitions

• Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year — 2011 [25].
• Bharat Shiromani Award (Government-of-India-affiliated honour for entrepreneurship and innovation) [26].
• Entrepreneur of the Year, Entrepreneur India Awards — 2011 [27].
• Superbrands India — the first Indian power-solutions company so recognised [28].
• India Today — Innovation of the Decade for the plastic-body inverter (Chic) [7].
• Profiled in Connect the Dots by Rashmi Bansal — one of twenty entrepreneurs-without-an-MBA the book is built around [29].

Two of those recognitions matter more than the rest. The Superbrand title — awarded on the strength of consumer recall and category leadership — was the clearest external acknowledgement that an Indian power-backup company had become a household name. The India Today “Innovation of the Decade” was the clearest acknowledgement that the underlying engineering was the real story.

What the brand meant — and what it still means

Su-Kam was never only an inverter company. It was, for the better part of two decades, evidence that an Indian electronics brand could be designed, engineered, manufactured and marketed in India to a global standard, and sold from Delhi to Dakar without apology. The company trained a generation of power-electronics engineers — some of whom run their own firms now — built a dealer base whose owners are still in the trade, and seeded several of the entrepreneurs who today run their own backup-power and solar businesses across India and the Middle East. For Indian manufacturing more broadly, it was a useful counter-example to the assumption that hardware brands had to be imported: the country could in fact produce its own, retail it in its own languages, and ship it to the world under an Indian name.

“Each step of this branding journey has contributed to what I believe will be a lasting legacy for Su-Kam — a brand that stands the test of time.”

— Kunwer Sachdev, founder, Su-Kam Power Systems [30]

In the Josh Talks conversation he is more pointed: an entrepreneur is not, finally, a portfolio of products; an entrepreneur is the person who takes the category forward [31].

The end, when it came, was abrupt. By 2017–2018 the company was carrying debt it could not service; insolvency proceedings followed at the National Company Law Tribunal, and Sachdev’s formal association with Su-Kam ended in 2018 [32]. The brand and its assets later passed through a corporate-insolvency resolution and now operate under new ownership [33]. Sachdev has since settled his personal bank guarantees with the lenders. None of it changes the part of the story this page is about: the brand Su-Kam was, and the firsts it shipped.

What that brand still means, twenty-six years on from incorporation, is a question with two answers. For the customer who bought a Chic in 2003 and is still running it, Su-Kam means the box that worked. For the operator running an Indian electronics company in 2026, it means a working template — a domestic brand can be built, scaled internationally, and held against multinational competition for two decades. Both readings are the founder’s legacy.

Beyond Su-Kam

Sachdev’s current operating focus is Kunwwer.ai, an AI company he founded that builds multipurpose AI-based software for Indian businesses — practical AI products across HR, operations, healthcare, customer engagement and the other workflows where AI can either replace manual work or sharpen decisions [37].

Alongside Kunwwer.ai he has started a new role as an investor and mentor to Indian founders, with a particular focus on early-stage AI and deep-tech ventures. The work draws directly on the Su-Kam playbook: positioning, distribution, story, and the operating discipline of running a hardware-and-brand business at national scale [34].

He also remains a mentor and advisor to Su-Vastika Systems, the storage and lithium-UPS company founded by his wife Khushboo Sachdev in 2019; majority ownership of Su-Vastika passed to Rotomag Enertec in 2025 [38].

The arc, in other words, isn’t broken. It’s continuing — under new vehicles, with the same operator and a sharper focus on AI, capital and the next generation of Indian founders.

Watch the journey

Watch more on Kunwer Sachdev’s YouTube playlist →

Sources

1. Kunwer Sachdev — Wikipedia. Birth, family background, education at Hindu College and University of Delhi.
2. YourStory — “With Rs.10000, this entrepreneur went on to build India’s first inverter company,” 2015. Cable-TV origins, ₹10,000 starting capital.
3. ZaubaCorp — Su-Kam Power Systems Limited corporate registry record. Incorporation 14 October 1998; CIN U64201DL1998PLC096685.
4. Zee News — “From selling pens to building a million-dollar empire”. Early-life narrative, brand-building, Su-Vastika transition.
5. Su-Kam Power Systems — Wikipedia. Product firsts: MOSFET, microcontroller, DSP sine-wave, plastic body, touchscreen PCU.
6. Brands Awareness — “Su-Kam Case Study: Rise, Fall & Rebirth of India’s Inverter Empire”. Chic plastic-body inverter, GE Plastics partnership, longevity.
7. APN News — “From Pioneers to Defaulters”. India Today “Innovation of the Decade”, peak revenue ₹600 crore.
8. pv magazine India — interview with Kunwer Sachdev, March 2018. Solarcon, Brainy, hybrid focus, “4–5 years ahead” claim, Make-in-India.
9. Su-Kam — Brainy solar hybrid UPS product page.
10. Su-Kam Power Systems — Wikipedia. India’s first touchscreen Solar PCU with MPPT and Wi-Fi monitoring.
11. Brands Awareness. Patent and IP portfolio: 76+ technology patents, 189 copyrights, 136 trademarks, 88 design patents.
12. APN News — “From Pioneers to Defaulters”. Peak market-share figure (>35%).
13. Outlook India — “Su-Kam’s Ownership Transition Sets the Stage for Exciting Growth”. Superbrand status; ownership transition context.
14. TradeIndia — Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. Gurugram facility profile.
15. pv magazine India interview. Battery factory in Himachal Pradesh, in-house testing.
16. Su-Kam Power Systems Limited — LinkedIn company page. Headcount band, manufacturer category.
17. Su-Kam Power Systems — Wikipedia. Export coverage 90+ countries, dealer network.
18. Sukam India blog — “Su-Kam lights up remote villages in Gabon”, January 2014. ~2,000 solar street lights across Kango, Mouila, Bitam.
19. Su-Kam Power Systems — Wikipedia. 35 schools in Rwanda powered by Su-Kam solar systems.
20. Tracxn — Su-Kam Power Systems company profile. Highest export-sales record by an Indian manufacturer in power-backup.
21. Ministry of New and Renewable Energy — Solar Off-Grid programme. National Solar Mission Phase 1 timing (2010 onward).
22. Su-Kam Power Systems — Wikipedia. Solar product range: inverters, off-grid, grid-tie, PWM/MPPT controllers, PCUs, lighting.
23. pv magazine India — Su-Kam interview, March 2018. “4–5 years ahead” claim, hybrid focus, manufacturing.
24. SiliconIndia — “Kunwer Sachdev: The Solar Man of India”.
25. Entrepreneur India — Kunwer Sachdev award profile, 2013. EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2011.
26. Kunwer Sachdev — Wikipedia. Bharat Shiromani Award.
27. Entrepreneur India award profile. Entrepreneur of the Year — Entrepreneur India Awards 2011.
28. Business Standard — “Su-Kam’s ownership transition sets the stage for exciting growth” (ANI). Superbrand recognition.
29. Goodreads — Connect the Dots by Rashmi Bansal. Sachdev among twenty entrepreneurs profiled.
30. Kunwer Sachdev — “The Su-Kam Legacy: A Brand That Will Stand the Test of Time”. Quoted phrasing on legacy.
31. Josh Talks Hindi — Kunwer Sachdev episode. First-person framing of category-builder mindset.
32. Outlook India — ownership transition piece. 2018 leadership change.
33. APN News — “From Pioneers to Defaulters”. Late-2010s financial-pressure record.
34. Kunwer Sachdev — LinkedIn. Angel investor / startup mentor positioning.
35. Su-Vastika Systems Pvt. Ltd. — official site. Lithium-ion BESS, online lithium UPS, surge protection, solar storage focus.
36. Guardian Nigeria — “Su-kam founder, Kunwer Sachdev starts new firm, ‘Su-vastika’”. International press confirmation of the (then-new) Su-Vastika venture.
37. Kunwwer.ai — official site. Sachdev’s AI company building multipurpose AI-based software for Indian businesses.
38. Su-Vastika press — “Statcon Energiaa and Su-Vastika come together to advance Made-in-India battery-storage technology”. Documents Rotomag Enertec’s majority acquisition of Su-Vastika in 2025 and the strategic partnership with Statcon Energiaa.
39. The Economic Times — “Reliance Power Fund buys 20% in Su-Kam for Rs 45 crore”. Records the 31 March 2006 Share Purchase-cum-Share Subscription Agreement under which the Reliance India Power Fund (ADAG & Temasek joint PE vehicle) acquired a 20% stake in Su-Kam for ₹45 crore.