Set up in 2014, digital gaming and entertainment firm JetSynthesys has expanded at a furious pace, drawing investors like Adar Poonawalla and Kris Gopalakrishnan. Can founder Rajan Navani keep up the tempo?
Rajan Navani, founder, JetSynthesys
Rajan Navani first sniffed a business opportunity in the ’90s in the US. Armed with a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University—with a specialisation in digital satellite imaging and remote sensing—Navani worked at Goddard Space Flight Center at NASA in 1995. In remote sensing, he recalls, satellite imagery and pattern recognition were used to predict the quantum of corn that was likely to be produced in the state of Indiana, which was then extrapolated to forecast for the country.
“If I can predict corn quantity with accuracy, then I can make money,” he thought. And he did. Navani called up his uncle, who would use the knowledge to make money from commodity pricing on the London Stock Exchange. “I gathered how technology can be leveraged from a business perspective,” recalls Navani, whose grandfather Kishinchand V Navani was the local Thai management partner of Indo Thai Synthetics Company, Aditya Birla Group’s first overseas venture in 1970. Establishing business roots in Thailand in the 1930s, over the next four decades the Navanis had set up extensive operations in textile, packaging and steel. In 1975, the family set up operations in India by building a packaging plant in Pune.
Meanwhile, after spending over a decade in Thailand, Navani came to India in 2005 to take care of the family business. The third-generation entrepreneur, though, started looking for opportunities outside the family business after 2011—the early days for smartphones, data adoption and digitalisation. He roped in McKinsey to find out how to reach out to mobile users with digital offerings. “People were spending time on the phone, especially for calling,” he recalls. The choice for Navani was to get into telecom. But it was a crowded space. The next thing he looked at was email, but Google and Hotmail were already dominant. Chat was the next option. “We missed the bus here as well,” he recounts. WhatsApp was ruling the roost. Finally, he went back to the basics of what was driving mobile engagement in India̶̶—The ABCD formula of astrology, Bollywood, cricket and devotion—and started JetSynthesys in 2014.
Fast forward to November 2020. JetSynthesys has morphed into a digital gaming and entertainment company, present in segments as diverse as fintech lending and job search. The idea, says Navani, is to reach out to the daily digital lives of mobile users, which calls for multiple digital platforms. “The only way to scale in the digital world is to work with the right partners,” he says. “You can't build everything yourself,” he concedes, explaining how he has gone about finding collaborators.