Every large company on earth buys things by making strangers fill in forms. The forms are called tenders, or requests for proposals (RFPs), and they are long, repetitive and dull. A bank shopping for a cloud provider will send 300 questions. An insurer buying software will send even more, half of them about security. On the receiving end a sales team goes hunting through old files, pestering engineers for answers somebody in the same building already wrote down last month for a different customer. Ganesh Shankar has built a large business out of that misery, and almost nobody in Indian technology knows his name. In March this year, the value of deals that had passed through his software crossed $1 trillion. The company announced it on May 13, from Portland, Oregon. Around $30 billion of live opportunities, he says, now move through the platform “every single month”. The company is called Responsive. Until 2023 it was RFPIO. Its engineering sits largely on the ninth floor of a building in Coimbatore, at Ticel Park on the Anna University campus, on Maruthamalai Road. Behind the office are the Marudhamalai hills. Its customers include Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Google, AWS, Walmart, UnitedHealth, Roche and BBVA. Twenty-five or twenty-six of the Fortune 100 are on the platform. Responsive’s website claims nearly 2,000 customers, more than 20% of the Fortune 500 and over 300,000 users worldwide. Microsoft has been a customer since 2019, and Shankar says more than 25,000 of its employees use the platform. The proposal team there, by Microsoft's own account, has helped bring in over $10 billion of revenue. There are decent reasons you have not heard of any of this. Responsive has taken no outside money since 2018, so it never turns up in the funding tables that Indian technology coverage runs on. It sells almost nothing in India. Its legal home is in the United States, and its US office is now listed in Frisco, Texas. It also changed its name three years ago, which erased whatever small recall it had. What is left is a company of 550 people, profitable since 2018, growing at more than 25% a year, that may never be called a unicorn because it has no interest in the sort of round that hands out the label. We were meant to meet in Chennai. He could not make the trip, so we spoke over video. I had been to the Coimbatore office 18 months earlier, when I happened to be in the city, and met some of his colleagues, but he was in America at the time. Shankar is not an engineer, or at any rate not one who lasted. He did a BSc in computer science at Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology in Kuniamuthur, on the road out of Coimbatore towards Palakkad, and worked out fairly quickly that he had picked the wrong subject. “That’s when I realised that is not my cup of tea and I said okay, Computer science is not my thing. So I went into MBA (Master of Business Administration). Otherwise I would have gone to MCA (Master of Computer Application).” The MBA was at D
