Shashi Bhushan, Chairman of the Board, Stellar Innovations
In an era of rapid technological transformation, few companies have managed to successfully navigate multiple industries while maintaining innovation at their core. Stellar Group, under the visionary leadership of Chairman Shashi Bhushan, has built a diverse portfolio spanning FinTech, telecom, healthcare, and enterprise software solutions. In this exclusive interview, Shashi Bhushan shares insights into the company's strategic diversification, global expansion, and pioneering use of AI technologies.
Q1: Your group has a diverse footprint from FinTech to telecom. What core vision connects Stellar Group's various ventures?
Diversity was always in our mind, especially after the 2008 subprime market crash. The whole lending market crashed because of rising interest rates. That gave us a learning that you cannot rely on one industry. I always wanted to diversify our business into multiple sectors.
However, if you see the core engine that we built, we customize it to cater to multiple industries. We started with insurance, then customized the whole product to serve the lending market, eventually moved into telecom, and now we're in healthcare with our company called Video Mix. I've taken the same underlying technology but customized it to service different sector requirements.
Q 2: Your team spans the US, India, UAE, Germany and Philippines. How do you foster unified innovation across global operations?
It actually works for us more than managing because we're learning from each other. All the best practices from the US, we've shared with other countries. For example, India was struggling with accent problems in our CRM division. When we established operations in Dubai, we managed this deficiency.
UAE is a very cross-cultural society. I have people from Africa, Philippines, Germany ,Russia, and Ukraine working in our company who are totally different culturally. However, what brings them together is the work culture we've created. They all work towards one common goal and company values. I feel this multicultural, multi-country presence is a blessing for us.
Q 3: Can you share how AI and blockchain have transformed your service offerings?
Stellar Innovations was one of the first companies to get into AI and machine learning because of the massive amount of data we were managing. When we started working for insurance customers and land record digitization, we had so many documents requiring information extraction. We used to have 800 people doing data entry daily.
We initially used OCR to extract information, but realized OCR had limitations-it couldn't read blurred data. So we built our own machine learning and AI engine to address these deficiencies. Now, with the same amount of data going through our system, that 800-people team is only 35 people today. They just do quality control. Most work is done by our AI and machine learning engine built by Stellar Group.
Q4: How is Stellar Group contributing to India's position as a global tech hub?
I believe India is one of the leading tech providers to the world. The way the Indian education system is growing, we're going to be top leaders of tech innovation. Indian talent, especially from top universities like IITs and IIMs, has an edge over others. The world will realize soon that the Indian education system has more caliber than presumed.
I think the next century will be led by Indian entrepreneurs. You're already seeing signs-most leading tech entrepreneurs and CEOs of big tech giants are Indians. The next century will definitely be led by Indian entrepreneurs.
Q5: What advice would you give to young entrepreneurs building cross-border tech companies?
Always be foolish and always be hungry. The day hunger dies in us, we won't be successful. The good thing about Indian entrepreneurs is we're hungry because we're competing with the best in the industry with fewer resources, making us stronger.
My advice: don't do what others are doing. Don't copy or replicate things. Try to build new and unique solutions. Be unique yourself. That's my advice to all young entrepreneurs looking at doing business in the future.
Q6: How do you balance aesthetic appeal with functionality when targeting different generations?
This requirement needs balance between newcomers and those already in the industry. If we focus only on Gen Z, we lose the previous generation customer base. I have a team that's a mix of both-experienced leaders who understand business and young team members with creativity. We combine their creativity with experienced knowledge to build products fulfilling requirements of both previous and new generations.
Q7: What's your vision for Stellar Group's future?
Stellar Group will continue expanding. We've entered telecom and made our presence in multiple countries. We've started a unit in Germany, planning expansion in Philippines, and the US is where we want to go.
We're adopting more AI technology in telecom because the industry is lagging behind. We're also into genetic testing through Video Mix, building technologies around healthcare, especially genetics, because the future is precision medicines. We're currently into genome sequencing, identifying genetic disorders, but our next step would be gene editing.
Our future is very positive. We're excited about what's next, and you'll be hearing from the industry how Stellar is doing. I'm very excited about the way things are going for Stellar Innovations.
