In April 2004, Amit Dixit, a master's student in mechanical engineering at IIT Bombay, walked down the corridor to introduce himself to the department's newest faculty member. He wanted a thesis supervisor who worked on wind turbine controls. What he found in the office of Prof. Shashikanth Suryanarayanan was the beginning of something neither of them had planned.
Suryanarayanan had returned to India at twenty-six, a controls engineer with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a brief work stint in the US, joining IIT Bombay in March 2004. He had sent a routine note to colleagues announcing his arrival: if anyone had a student who needed a guide, he was available. Dixit answered it. Two others followed: Manish Sharma, who had heard about the new professor from a senior, and Pushkaraj Panse, a fellow master's student who needed a supervisor.
Soon, the department had secured two industry-sponsored projects: one from Sona Koyo Steering Systems, to build a steer-by-wire vehicle, and one through a government programme called CAR — Core Group for Automotive Research, sponsored by the office of the Principal Scientific Adviser — to prototype an electronic fuel injection ECU for a two-wheeler, with TVS Motor Company as the industry partner. The budgets ran to somewhere between Rs 30–50 lakh across both. The commercial expectations were, strictly speaking, nonexistent.
The prototypes worked. A steer-by-wire car ran laps inside IIT Bombay. A two-wheeler with a home-built engine management system behaved as the equations said it should. When the group demonstrated these to industry audiences — manufacturers who had spent decades importing electronic control systems from global auto component majors — the response was not applause. It was bewilderment.
"The kind of response we got," Dixit recalls, "was one of surprise that something like that had been built."
Later, a startup was incorporated in 2007–2008, and the name — Separating Decision Making from Actuation — was chosen as an acronym for engineering precision. Panse later departed the company; the founding team that carried the venture forward was Suryanarayanan, Dixit, and Sharma. The investor who materialised in those early days was Naren Gupta, a partner at Nexus Venture Partners in Silicon Valley. He took 26% of the company for Rs 2 crore in equity. Gupta, who later died in 2021 at 73, was moved less by any financial model than by the frugality with which the team had made something real, and by the fact that companies like Mahindra, Sona Koyo, and TVS were already paying attention.
The founders learnt the lessons the hard way along their journey.
They had assumed — as technically qualified people at elite institutions often do — that the quality of the engineering would be sufficient. It wasn't. A retrofittable fuel economy system for telecom gensets found no commercial footing despite working exactly as intended. More consequentially, the founders realised the original EFI strategy was wrong at its foundation: Sedemac could not build a better version of what Bosch or Astemo already made. Those companies had been engineering engine control systems collectively for the better part of a century. They had manufacturing scale, patent moats, and customer relationships that a fifteen-person company in Pune was not going to replicate, undercut, or outmanoeuvre.
"You can never do the same thing that Bosch and Astemo and so many other people have been doing for donkey's years and beat them," Suryanarayanan noted.
The question that replaced this failing strategy was simpler and has not changed since: what is genuinely new? "If there is nothing new," Suryanarayanan says, "you will get stuck."
The Sensor That Wasn't Needed
Around 2013, Dixit — now Founder and Joint Managing Director — provided the answer. He had been working on ignition timing control for carbureted two-wheelers — the category that dominated Indian roads until emissions regulations in 2020 mandated a wholesale shift to fuel injection. The standard approach used two sensors: one measuring engine speed from the crank, and another measuring engine load from the throttle. Dixit proposed eliminating the second. A combustion engine behaves differently under varying loads in specific, physically predictable ways. If you understood those fluctuations precisely enough, you could extract a load estimate from the crank signal alone — through algorithms built on the underlying physics of combustion.
"All sensor elimination ultimately requires the use of physics," Dixit says. "The sensor is one way of doing something. But you have to have another way."
Sedemac took this to the OEMs that had been sourcing from global suppliers for decades. The reaction was shock, then due diligence, then confirmation: the technology performed as described, and performed better than what two sensors had delivered. A component that every manufacturer had been using for years turned out, embarrassingly, to be unnecessary.
The value proposition was clean enough to state in a breath. "Half the sensor is there," says Suryanarayanan, now Founder and Managing Director. "There is no discussion." The OEM dropped one component from its bill of materials, reduced cost, and received better ignition timing. Sedemac, capital-constrained, initially sold the software as a licence running on existing vendor hardware — a model of near-pure elegance for a company with no manufacturing infrastructure. Revenue arrived with every vehicle the OEM sold. "You will get the money," Suryanarayanan says. "You just have to send the bill."
The TVS relationship underpins all of this. It had begun years before the company existed — students loading test equipment into a Mahindra Scorpio and driving through the night to TVS's Hosur facility.
"TVS has ended up being our anchor customer for the new stuff that we go to the market with," Dixit says. "The anchor customer is the one who believes in you."
Six Years Without a Rupee of Fresh Equity
What followed was a financial architecture that was, for a growth-stage technology company, almost aggressively unfashionable. From December 2018 to July 2024 — nearly six years — Sedemac raised not a single rupee of fresh equity capital. Revenue roughly tripled, from approximately Rs 200 crore to Rs 650 crore. The growth was funded through debt. When the founders raised equity in mid-2024, it was not because the business needed the capital — it was because leverage in a cyclical industry compounds asymmetrically on the downside, and they had decided the risk had grown large enough to address.
"We have always raised equity capital when you need equity capital — when you have to take that risk," Suryanarayanan explains. "We have never raised equity capital when we didn’t need it."
The IPO, which opened for subscription on March 4 and closed on March 6, was the logical endpoint of this discipline. The offering — 8,043,300 shares, all from existing shareholders, raising ₹1,087.45 crore — was entirely an Offer for Sale. Sedemac received nothing from its own listing. The issue was subscribed to 2.68 times, with qualified institutional buyers oversubscribing their quota 8.46 times. On March 11, the shares debuted on the NSE at ₹1,535 — a 13.5 percent premium over the issue price of ₹1,352 — even as the broader market fell more than one percent on the day.
Sedemac now holds approximately 35 percent of the domestic market for ISG ECUs in the combined two-wheeler and three-wheeler segment. Its client list includes TVS Motor, Hero MotoCorp, Mahindra, Tata Motors, Kirloskar, and Ashok Leyland. Early revenues are arriving from OEMs in the United States and Europe. Patents have been filed in Japan and China. Among its investors are Nandan Nilekani and N R Narayana Murthy — two of the seven original co-founders of Infosys — alongside N.S. Parthasarathy, co-founder of Mindtree, who sits on Sedemac's board as a director. Suryanarayanan mentions this not as name-dropping but as a data point about the quality of conviction the company has attracted.
Plans to enter the CV segment
After embedding its electronics into millions of two- and three-wheelers, Pune-based Sedemac Mechatronics is now looking toward the commercial vehicle (CV) segment.
The company’s newest frontier is the development of Aftertreatment Control Modules (ACM) for heavy-duty diesel-powered commercial vehicles. These units are essentially the conscience of a commercial engine, managing complex systems to ensure they meet stringent emission standards like India’s BS-VI. The company's launch of an aftertreatment controller for an Indian CV maker is currently under validation for series production.
In this system, an ACM monitors the system through available sensors and electrical signals and actively regenerates the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) catalyst by dosing controlled quantities of AdBlue fluid into the SCR. This controller also monitors the diesel particulate filter. When it clogs, the ECU commands the injection of some diesel fuel directly into the DPF line to burn out the clogging. This is critical because if the system controller fails, it will lead to additional emissions and harmful gases being released into the environment.