Interaction with Mr. Navinn Kapur, Co-Founder & Director of Scientia Solutions Pvt Ltd.

CardByte, contactless contact management, and business networking company in the Indian market to disrupt businesses and elevate the number game for individuals and organizations. The venture is a card-based networking and contact management platform for individuals and companies that are driven and regulated with proprietary AI-integrated management systems.

CardByte aims to aid individuals, enterprises, and companies that can’t afford fancy, hefty-priced automated solutions for contact management and regulation. It further assists people in managing and arranging contacts; scanning, finding, and updating contacts in real-time for immediate help and increases the overall productivity of individuals, clients/ businesses. In addition to this, CardByte is helping people to stay connected and updated with their network.

CardByte intends to take the sector by storm with its features and services including contact directory with organizer to organize contacts by industry, profession, and build one’s business and professional network, online/ offline sharing of business cards, AI-powered online/offline card scanner, enabling discovery to help people explore known contacts and get connected to mutual contacts and maintaining privacy to have complete control over your information.

To know more about the CardByte and its plans we had an interaction with Mr. Navinn Kapur, he is an enthusiast, a visionary business leader, and the Co-Founder & Director of Scientia Solutions Pvt Ltd. a software company. Navinn holds a rich experience of over a decade in leadership roles, managing and steering the companies to grow. He is a Chartered Accountant by profession, with 28+ years of experience in implementing successful business strategies and motivating highly galvanized teams to produce significant shareholders’ values. He possesses a distinguished background in building and creating organizations in India and Asia while managing strategic partnerships and customer relationships. Navinn is a gifted communicator with passion and drives to achieve success.

He started his entrepreneur journey in 2002, observing a growing market for software products & solutions in India, and had envisioned a greater opportunity in India for a company that can provide software solutions from the best OEMs in the world. With an aim to operate at a Global Level, Navinn aligned himself in a joint venture with a Global LSP, Comparex AG in 2011. Under his guidance, the company witnessed an ascent in its journey and had seen phenomenal growth, year on year both domestically and globally. With this collaboration, Navinn scaled his business revenues to US$ 100 million within a short span of 5 years, with healthy returns to all the stakeholders. In the year 2019, Navinn Kapur exited Comparex AG as a shareholder and Director of the Company, making high returns in the venture.

Navinn’s entrepreneur journey has been focused on solving business problems. One of the key problems he recognized during his first entrepreneur stint was Customer Contact data across business verticals/ segments which were managed in a very unorganized and inefficient manner by the employees. This eventually led to losing business opportunities and collaboration within the organization.

Looking at solving this problem, Navinn thus launched CardByte – a venture aimed at providing innovative solutions for contact management. Cardbyte, is a one-stop solution for managing your contacts whether personal or business. It allows you to share, manage, arrange, scan, find, & update your contacts in real-time.

 

How Digital Card is playing a major role in reshaping the growth of businesses in India.

Business cards are one of the most important assets when it comes to professional networking or generating quality business leads. A working professional may exchange anywhere between 2-20 business cards every week, building a large contact database over the years that gets extremely difficult to organize and access. For decades, the industry has been struggling with leveraging the existing contact database for growing its business due to multiple reasons. While outdated information remains the primary challenge why businesses are unable to make better use of the exchanged business cards, other challenges include difficulty to organize and access contacts and the considerable amount of time consumed in manually storing these contacts into their CRM or physical cardholders.

The onset of the pandemic has proved to be a massive game-changer for the industry worldwide as it caught the business world off-guard. With the pandemic outbreak in 2019, people were forced to practice social distancing, work remotely, & network digitally to sustain themselves. This is when the industry realized that the printed business cards were rendered useless in case of virtual interactions & events.

CardByte’s platform offered services that entirely changed how businesses & professionals navigated through the pandemic-

• Contactless networking: CardByte’s digital platform allows users to create digital business cards and seamlessly share them within or outside the app, thus helping them go completely touchless and adapt well to the pandemic. It also organizes the contacts cleanly, using segments & tags for easy accessibility, contactless sharing, and storage.
• Lead Generation: The pandemic also put a complete stop to face-to-face meetings to generate or follow new leads. People were forced to use digital solutions for lead generation. CardByte’s global search directory allows users, especially the underserved community, to explore and form new connections for networking, referrals, and lead generation while sitting in the comfort of their homes.

Digital business cards have emerged as the game-changer, not only solving the major challenges associated with paper business cards but also offering empowering solutions to businesses & individuals to further streamline their contract management processes.

 

What are the advantages and benefits of contact management for business professionals?

For achieving success in any field, it is critical to be empowered with the right information that is accessible at the right time. Contact management does that – it always empowers the user with the right information that’s at their fingertips and instantly accessible. From a business perspective, contact management can be a critical enabler of sales growth and profitability. After all, a lost contact is equal to a lost business. Some major advantages of contract management include:

Seamless networking
Users can create one or more business cards for every type of introduction and build and manage their network with validated & latest contact information of their peers.

Excellent time & cost efficiency
An efficient contact management platform helps cut down annual spending on business cards by 80% and save up to 75% on time spent on redundant manual processes

Improved shelf life of contacts
90% of paper business cards are thrown away within a week of exchange, but contact management software stores them safely on the user’s device for longer shelf life

Real-time tracking of all changes in the network
A contact management software keeps the users notified of all the changes in their network in real-time.

Contactless card exchange
With the ‘new normal in the picture, a contact management platform allows professionals and businesses to maintain social distancing by sharing/exchanging contacts digitally.

 

Please share some insights on AI & its future in India. Can you please throw some light on the latest technologies on which your company is working?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making good strides in almost all industries, mimicking human intelligence, and predicting behaviors through various connected sensors and usage data.  AI is the fastest technology trend being adopted by industries and businesses – as per an Accenture study, the AI market is poised to grow to $957 billion by 2035.

The future of artificial intelligence in India is very promising with the government setting up a roadmap to adopt AI in various sectors and businesses looking to AI to solve complex problems. The demand is unstoppable, and while the demand is high, India has the potential to evolve into the world capital for the AI workforce, given the necessary steps are taken towards this. Massive drives are being conducted with individuals, government-affiliated skill centers, educational institutes, and software companies starting to upskill and build capabilities around AI.

At CardByte, we have taken AI from prototype to product stage by developing a state-of-the-art novel computer vision and machine learning-based novel combination of convolutional neural networks that can deliver desired performance on the limited resources of smartphones. It employs a smart and efficient-edge computing technique to balance the resources while performing complex computer vision tasks.

 

What are the services that CardByte offers and how can it benefit individuals and companies?

Acting as a collaborative tool, CardByte’s app is helping users create and share their own digital business cards and expand their network while intensifying their personal and professional relationships. Some of the salient features are:

1. Digital Business Card Creation: This is a foundational element of the app that provides the user with the ability to create one or more cards to ensure the user has a card for every introduction whether business, professional, or personal
2. Digital Business Card Sharing: CardByte provides more than enough options to share a card anywhere, anytime at the tap of the button, regardless of whether the user is connected to the internet or not. The sharing options are:
   1. CardByte to CardByte Sharing (Online):
      1. Search & Add: A user can search potential contacts using CardByte’s app directory and request/add it to their network for business/professional leads
      2. Discovery: Just click on the CardByte logo from the app menu to explore if your phonebook contact is on CardByte, tap and add/request his card to have him/her added to your own network
   2. Deep-link Sharing (Online): A user can share his/her card as a deep link on any third-party platform such as WhatsApp, SMS, email, or any other instant messaging; The receiver when clicks on the link, takes him to store to download and upon downloading the sender’s card is added automatically connecting both sender and receiver into a network
   3. Ecard Sharing (Online/offline):
      1. Online: A user also gets an option to share an Ecard, which goes as an HTML Link and can be shared with any third party. The receiver can click the link to get the details on the browser which allows the user to save, carry out CTA, and/or download the app too.
      2. Offline: A user can also share his ecard on Bluetooth or Airdrop when not connected to the internet.
   4. QR Code Sharing (Offline/Online): A user can use his/her QR Code to share his card with another F user when connected offline (when not connected to the internet) or online.
3. Digitize Business Card: The computer vision deep learning module, scanning module provides the user ability to digitize the business card and add it to their directory.
4. Contact Organiser: The app automatically categorizes and organizes the contacts by Industry, Company, Professional, and/ or Customized Tags, which can be personalized by the user’s preference
5. Networking: The app through business card sharing not only helps uncover the hidden network of users but also provides the opportunity to grow their network
6. Stay Updated: The user is always updated with the changes in his/her network whether its promotion, job change, or any event in the business or professional journey
7. Privacy: The app respects privacy, understand and provides utmost importance to its user privacy; The user has complete control over who, how his/her information shall be shared
8. Powerful Search: The app is equipped with a powerful search engine that traverses through local and global directories to get the right contact at the right time.
9. Public QR Code: Best suited for retailers, conferences, and events when you want your contact details to be published for easy accessibility, the receiver can scan through any smartphone camera and get your contact details

 

Based on your recent hiring plans, please throw some light on how you plan to expand in the next 2 years, looking at the current market scenario.

Based on the promising response Card received from the industry and stakeholders during the soft launch of the CardByte app earlier this year, the company is now planning to expand its team by 250% by the end of 2022.

As a part of its business expansion plans, the team is working on the enterprise version of the app that is planned to be launched by late 2022, offering advanced features such as CRM integration, collaboration tools, augmented reality, voice assistance, and advanced analytics among others. CardByte aims to go global in the coming years and act as a single-stop and comprehensive solution for all the networking and contact management needs of businesses, corporates, and working professionals.