Top Infosys BPO executive Asheesh Mehra resigns to launch own venture Antworks

Asheesh Mehra, who till recently was Infosys BPO's vice-president, is the latest to be bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.

Mehra has joined hands with outsourcing veteran Govind Sandhu to launch Antworks, a back office outfit that will focus on medium-size clients in the financial services and healthcare domains, as per a press statement.

"After spending 18 years in the industry, I felt this was the right time to take the plunge. Starting a technology firm of my own was always a dream. I feel that there is a genuine requirement for a niche technology services provider to address the needs of the mid-market segment," Mehra, who headed Infosys' business process outsourcing (BPO) operations in the Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East regions in his most recent avatar, said.

Antworks, which would offer services through BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) and TaaS (Technology as a Service) delivery models, aims to sign its first customer over the next few days. BPaaS is a form of BPO that employs a cloud computing service model. On the other hand,TaaS treats IT as a commodity,providing an enterprise with exactly the amount of hardware,software, and support that it needs for an agreed-on monthly fee.

Antworks will be headquartered in Singapore. It will have a global footprint with offices in Qatar, London and Mumbai initially, the statement said. The startup has already opened a 200-seater delivery center in Pune. "We will have atleast 200 employees in the first year. Our aim is to ensure non-linearity in the business model so that our revenue growth is not directly proportional to headcount addition," Mehra said.

Sandhu, Antwork's co-founder and CFO, has over 18 years industry experience. Prior to this, he held upper management positions in Capita, WNS and Tata Consultancy Services, where he helped set up the BPO practise.

Mehra spent over seven years with Infosys. He is the latest senior official to exit infosys in the last few years. The company has lost V Balakrishnan (former Chief Financial Officer), Ashok Vemuri ( former global head of manufacturing), Stephen Pratt (former head of utilities and resources for North America), and Basab Pradhan (head of global sales) among others, in the last two years.

In 2013, V Balakrishnan, another former head of BPO and finance division at Infosys, along with Girish Paranjpe (who was earlier the joint-CEO of Wipro Technologies), Deepak Ghaisas (earlier CEO of i-flex Solutions), Mohandas Pai (earlier with Infosys and now with Manipal Global Education), floated a venture capital fund - Exfinity Fund in Bangalore with a corpus of Rs 125 crore to back inno .... Read more at:

The global healthcare BPO market is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 10.8 per cent to touch $188 billion by 2018, as per research firm MarketsandMarkets.