Cover Story, Founder & Director (Leap & Scale) – Business Sight’s Revolutionary CEOs in 2020

Scaling Business Impact with Diverse Expertise to Craft Innovative and Smart solutions

Technology when put to use by crafty and innovative engineers, not only solves the problems and pain points of today, but also enables newer frontiers which enhance the systems, leading to operational excellence and increased efficiency. Businesses can add value in addition to superior return on investment. Bringing newer architectures, like Internet of Things (IOT), Edge and Cloud Computing, to reality and enabling the companies to etch their digital footprints is where Leap & Scale brings in its well-crafted and smart sensor to server solutions.

Having worked in various areas over two decades, Prashant Joshi – Founder & Director of Leap & Scale, leads the company with an exemplary vision. He embarked on his entrepreneurial journey with goals to transform the industries with innovative and versatile platforms and products – all this under one roof. With smart, innovative, robust and versatile products and platforms he has built numerous solutions that increase operational efficiency, decision-making based on data, unique data visualisations and analytics which will add dramatic business value: a feat that few have been able to achieve so far.

Under his leadership, the company has grown and made a name for itself in the niche. Leap & Scale is a name to be reckoned with because of its high-quality, easy to use platforms, products and solutions, as well as best-in-class customer experience. To cater to the needs of various industry verticals the need is to bring multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise which can ultimately realise the true business value for customers. With state-of-technology the focus has been on the domains like vehicular technology, solar energy, various metering, monitoring and control applications, smart facility, Fire & Safety to name a few. All the focus has been to build systems to collect the right amount of data for the analytics and decision making.

Shaping the Journey

Ever since the 1990s and 2000s, various companies have been talking about connected architectures. As technology progressed in leaps and bounds, several key aspects of the industries have improved. Communication and wireless technologies were advancing at a very rapid pace and in turn, digital signal processing, system-on-chip along with faster processor architectures grew at a very fast pace. Standards forums and working groups brought in the necessary architectures, interoperability and compliance which has supported growth in all areas. With well-engineered tools (hardware, software, machines and systems) building products has become easier, fasters and with superior quality.

With this as the backdrop, and the experience of two decades and need to provide all the services under one roof, Prashant founded Leap & Scale, where multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary innovations, engineering, and research-oriented solutions could be crafted, built and provided to customers to bring exceptional business value. His experience of the two decades in various technology domains, engineering numerous products, exposure to communications, internet and wireless technologies and leadership positions in various standards forums made it ideal for him to clearly see the need and visualise what a company of today’s times, needs to be to bring the right kind of disruption by solution. At the core has always been robust engineering using the state-of-art technology to craft innovative and smart products and platforms to provide solutions.

A Dynamic and Multifaceted Entrepreneur

Prashant has served in some of the world-renowned and giant companies as Siemens, Motorola, Freescale, and NOKIA/HERE. With his work and experience he has developed a multidisciplinary expertise across various technologies, product and platforms development with a flair for envisioning large and smart systems and solutions with ease. He was exposed to core processes of product development with acute focus on customer-as-a-user-of-the-product. He has been involved in working with various standards bodies and forums (WAP, OMA, LiMo Foundation, IEEE, ACM to name a few). In addition to his work with the companies that brought out the best in him, he continues to be a visiting professor with premier institutes, works as a facilitator and human process consultant facilitating outbound experiential learning to various professionals in corporates and individuals. He continues to contribute in building newer courses and programs in technology and engineering education, conducting faculty development programs and helping young professionals.

With such a diverse personal background, multifaceted competencies, and exposure and experience in variety of fields, lead to defining the vision for Leap & Scale. It was about building optimal solutions and a specific focus on ROI. Business basics of managing funding and spend wisely, proved well and worked in the favour to build a company which focuses on “technology to craft smart solutions”.

As the company saw the light of the day, challenges came along the way. Such a vision required an execution with a unique mindset. It is all about building a great team which will follow unique processes to put the current technology to build superb products. First of the challenges was to build a team. As he describes, it is not easy to get “Ready to Fly” engineers in fields like IOT, especially where you need multidisciplinary people. The second challenge was to ensure that Leap & Scale is ready to work with customers right from concept to delivery. While many companies may have products, the key is to invest time with the customers to ensure that the ultimate solution is built which enhances business value. With investing time in understanding the problems from clients and working when them to define them right and at times educating the customers, Prashant was able to satisfy the clients and therefore, retain them for future projects. Customers and clients know their area extremely well, it is for us to provide them with the appropriate technology and solutions to take their business to the next level.

And the third one was to build a company culture which would improve the management processes that will enhance the entire journey of building product and platform. It is this culture that helps take a concept to delivery and beyond. A culture of learning, experimentation, exposure and learning from experience have paved way to creating tremendous value as a team. As one of the team members says “Prashant’s involvement to enhance and add value at each step and appreciation for what every member does, just motivates the team member go the extra mile”. Prashant looks up to the exemplary leaders like Ratan Tata, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Nikola Tesla. His educational and experimental interactions have been heavily influenced by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman and Sir Ken Robinson.

He leads the company with a acute focus on innovation, robust engineering and unparalleled ways of “Think Through” and “Think Deep”. Key is to develop people, provide a path for their career development, and make sure they are happy contributing. End the day with satisfaction. Deliver product with high-quality, if it is not up to the mark, then take all it takes to make it right. Prashant says with conviction, never hesitate to take anything to the drawing board again and again till you get it right.

Business Excellence

To gain an edge, which helps compete and ensure that Leap & Scale excels, Prashant utilizes excellent business practices and leverages the challenges to propel the company to new heights. He has the entire company focus on building products, platforms and solutions that exceed customer expectations. That is the attitude while engineering the products and platforms, research and innovation to build the “just right” solution and ensure that it creates business value for the customer.

“We will continue to face challenges in areas of technology and engineering. Competition is also fierce with many player coming in and offering same or similar solutions. Thus, we will need to focus on radical innovation, and get better in our engineering. Needless to say, high-quality – the Leap & Scale way – will always remain one of the key parameters. We will also need to use all our strengths in engineering and technology to build high quality solutions at a faster pace”, proclaims Prashant.

Services Under One Roof

His view is, customers of today and tomorrow are looking for solutions, for companies that can put together platforms and products to ultimately create business value. Leap & Scale is headed to building such versatile platform and products which can be used to build solutions. Under his leadership, Leap & Scale, has grown to build platforms executively for customers, platforms and solutions which are provided as services (PAAS and SAAS models) and also engineering and technology services for customers to build products. With diversified expertise on board, Leap & Scale builds hardware devices, embedded software, mobile apps, server side software, data collection frameworks, and portal and web interfaces which are cool. Leap & Scale has an acute focus on the User Interface (UI), User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX).

Prashant and his team have developed state-of-the-art solutions for various industry requirements.

  • - Leap & Scale offers products, platforms, and solutions based on IoT, Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing, and Edge Computing architectures
  • - Its solutions are for Industrial automation, Telematics, Telemetry, Vehicular technology, Remote monitoring and control systems
  • - Offer hardware platforms for sensing, data collection and edge computing which can be customized for the target application
  • - Offer smart Sensors to Server solutions and more using IoT architectures. Its target domains are Smart City, Industrial Automation, Health Care, and Education. The company’s versatile and innovative platform is all to do with Solar energy, Fire and Safety, Smart Lighting, Smart Facility, Location Based Services, Remote monitoring, analytics and Control
  • - It has a specific focus on intuitive User Interface (UI), class apart User Experience (UX), and superior Customer Experience. With a dedicated effort and team who specializes in this, it can provide best-in-class solutions
  • - Example platforms are Sensoyo® which is a versatile platform that provides smart solutions in data collection, processing, monitoring, and analytics. A unique platform (SAAS) for data collection using various protocols, processing analytics, visualization, and control and EMROC® is a yet another versatile platform for research-oriented medical professionals which is extendible to various other areas too

And end-to-end view, has helped provide holistic solutions for customers and Leap & Scale has become a one-stop-shop for customers and clients.

Future Landscape

“We are heading to from being noticed to a preferred company that provides best-in-class solutions in the connected things and technology space. A company that can provide products and platforms all under one roof. And we just want to get better in all that we do,” states Prashant.


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