From A Poor Farmer’s Son To A Global Technopreneur

Today’s story is about a man who was born and brought up in a small village named Padam in the Kollam district of Kerala. Surrounded by jungles, the village has a scenic beauty but this also kept it away from infrastructural development. He grew up helping his farmer father in the fields and it had become a routine.

They earned very little which was not enough to get them proper food. Early in his life he learnt the importance of hardwork and labor and resolved to end their day-to-day struggle. Difficulties in his childhood made him accept challenges and put the extra efforts for success. Varun Chandran is now a millionaire who owns Corporate 360, a firm based in Singapore, and has expanded to four continents.

Varun’s parents were educated only till STD 5. Despite their poor financial background, they wanted Varun to receive higher education. He was admitted in a school near their village where he excelled at sports, thanks to the extensive labor he put in the fields. After completion of STD 10, he was given scholarship by the Kerala Government to play football.

Footballer IM VIjayan was Varun’s chilhood hero. Vijayan had stayed on streets, sold soda and peanuts for a living but went on to become the greatest footballer in the nation, inspired Varun.

He couldn’t say no to the money owing to their financial condition and started playing football at various levels. He played beautifully and won medals for the best player of Kerala. He also lead the Kerala State Team and Kerala University Team. But after an injury he decided to quit the sport.

When Varun was nervous and stressed about what to do in future, his grandmother came to his rescue and gave him her gold bangles. She told him to sell the bangles, raise some money and settle at a new place. Varun picked Banaglore and shifted there in 2002. His small village could have never given him exposure to the knowledge available in a city like Bangalore. He spent hours in the cyber cafes to learn about technology, entrepreneurship and coding. Alongside this, he also worked hard to improve his spoken English. He joined libraries and watched CNN to improve his English skills.

Now it was time for one more twist in life and this time round the biggest one. In 2008, Varun got an opportunity to work at Singapore. While working in Singapore, he coded a few programs that would make everyday work of people easy. This impressed the people around him. Varun was also a master in using the data available on internet to make sales strategy. Many companies were willing to hire Varun for this skill.

He made a smart move and decided to launch his own company and so Corporate 360 was born. His company introduced innovative sales intelligence software to the tech industry. Some of the world’s largest IT-companies and tech startups are Corporate 360’s clients. “A lot of companies talk about Big Data and Predictive Analytics for marketing methods, but they are not designed to be industry specific. Their algorithms are designed to grind transactional data and web behavior hence providing generic data indicators,”says Varun. “We bring industry specific sales relevance to the customer, which enables them to create highly targeted sales campaigns to the right people at the right time with the right messaging,” he says.

The flagship product, Tech SalesCloud is a cloud software, designed for IT marketers to avail comprehensive marketing campaign data services powered by Big Data, Patterns, Predictive Analytics, Competitive Intelligence, Contacts Intelligence, Web Analysis and IT research.

Corporate 360, started in 2012, had a revenue of more that $ 1 million in 2014 with revenue of $5 million in 2015. Having presence in four continents, Varun is also planning to open offices in Europe and US. Varun also received several offers to sell his company but he denied all of them. He has also opened an office in his hometown in Kerala.

The early life of Varun Chandran is similar to the life of many Indians. However, the efforts he put to scale himself to this level are not common. Varun did it in very early days of internet spreading in India. Today in 2015, the resources are better and opportunities are bigger. We hope to see many such Varun Chandran making a mark on international business.