For most founders, the story would have ended in 2019. For Kunwer Sachdev, that was the year a new one began.
2019 was the year Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. — the company Kunwer Sachdev built into a household name and India’s most recognisable inverter brand — wound down its operations following insolvency proceedings. By any conventional reading, the man widely called the Inverter Man of India had every reason to step away from the industry.
He did the opposite.
This third-person profile, part of InverterManOfIndia’s ongoing public record, follows what happened next: how a new company was started by his wife Khushboo Sachdev to protect Su-Kam’s people and dealers, how Kunwer Sachdev pivoted from inverters into Lithium batteries, BESS and BMS, and how the second chapter is being written through patents instead of advertising.
Chapter one: how Su-Kam became synonymous with “inverter”
Between the late 1990s and the mid-2010s, Su-Kam went from a small Delhi outfit to one of the most visible consumer power-electronics brands in India. In millions of Indian homes, “Su-Kam” did not refer to a company — it referred to the thing under the staircase that kept the lights on.
In that period, under Kunwer Sachdev’s leadership, Su-Kam was associated with several firsts and category shifts:
- Plastic-body, design-led home inverters that replaced the heavy industrial metal boxes of the 1990s and made inverters look like furniture, not factory equipment.
- Sine-wave inverters for households at a time when sine wave was treated as an industrial premium feature.
- Solar hybrid inverters and off-grid solar for Indian homes and small businesses — years before rooftop solar became a government policy headline.
- Exports to 70+ countries across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and beyond — a rare achievement for an Indian power-electronics brand.
- R&D, manufacturing and after-sales owned inside India — not licensed from abroad.
The phrase Inverter Man of India did not come from a press release — it came from the fact that an entire category in India learned to identify itself with one brand.
What changed in 2019
Su-Kam’s wind-down was painful and public. Insolvency proceedings, legal disputes, and the end of a 20-year run as one of India’s defining hardware brands all played out in the press. But two things are easy to miss in the headlines:
- The technology, the patents, and — most importantly — the people did not disappear. Engineers, R&D staff, service technicians, dealers, distributors, and installers across India still had decades of inverter and solar expertise. They needed an organisation that could put them back to work.
- Kunwer Sachdev’s design and engineering instincts had not aged. If anything, the timing was about to favour them: India was about to enter the lithium and battery-storage decade.
Chapter two: Su-vastika, founded by Khushboo Sachdev
The new company, Su-vastika Systems Pvt. Ltd., was set up and led by Khushboo Sachdev, Kunwer Sachdev’s wife — and very deliberately so.
Khushboo Sachdev had spent her professional career outside the family business, in HR, training and operations roles at global firms including American Express, EXL and Headstrong. That background — running people systems and operational programmes at scale — turned out to be exactly the right toolkit for what Su-vastika needed to do in its early days:
- Re-employ former Su-Kam staff — engineers, technicians, and service personnel whose institutional knowledge of the Indian inverter market is hard to recreate.
- Re-engage the Su-Kam dealer and service network — thousands of small businesses across India that had built their livelihoods around the brand. Many of them, in effect, came back online through Su-vastika.
- Run the business on operational discipline and ethical conduct, with Kunwer Sachdev positioned as the technical visionary while Khushboo Sachdev led strategy and operations.
The third-party press has captured the essence of this distinction: Su-vastika is not simply “Su-Kam 2.0.” It is a new company, founded under different leadership, with a clear governance line — and it consciously absorbed the human capital that the older system left behind.
A clean operating split: Khushboo Sachdev leads the company; Kunwer Sachdev leads the technology and patent strategy.
What Kunwer Sachdev is actually building now: Lithium, BESS and BMS
Inside Su-vastika, Kunwer Sachdev’s own focus has shifted up the stack — from inverters as a product category to the battery and intelligence layer underneath modern power systems:
- Lithium-ion battery packs designed for Indian conditions — heat, humidity, partial-shade solar, irregular grid behaviour.
- BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) — the storage units that sit behind rooftop solar, telecom towers, small commercial properties and increasingly grid-edge applications.
- BMS (Battery Management Systems) — the firmware-and-electronics brain inside every modern battery pack, which is now where most of the real differentiation in energy storage happens.
- Solar PCU, hybrid inverters, lift inverters, and AI-assisted power-backup systems — extensions of the original Su-Kam product DNA, now built around a lithium-first architecture.
The shift from being called the Inverter Man of India to being described by the press as the Lithium Man of India is not a marketing flourish. It is a description of where his engineering attention has actually moved.
Patents as the new moat
In the first innings, Su-Kam’s moat was brand, distribution and category creation. In the second innings, Su-vastika is being built on something quieter: patents.
The filings span battery inverters, BMS, solar PCU, BESS, and AI-assisted power-backup architectures. For an Indian power-electronics company, that is a notable IP footprint, and it reflects a deliberate choice: in a market where Chinese and global vendors compete on price, the long-term defensibility of an Indian brand sits in owned IP, locally engineered for Indian conditions, manufactured in India.
Why the second chapter matters
Indian business folklore tends to celebrate either the meteoric rise or the dramatic fall. The Su-Kam → Su-vastika story matters because it is neither. It is a third, less-told kind of story:
- A founder who built a category, lost the company that defined it, and went back to work.
- A spouse who stepped in not as a passive shareholder but as the operating leader of the next chapter.
- A team and a dealer network that survived a corporate collapse because someone deliberately rebuilt the structure around them.
- An R&D effort that quietly piled up patents in batteries, BMS and BESS — exactly the technologies India needs as it electrifies transport, expands rooftop solar, and starts to take grid-edge storage seriously.
If the 2000s were the inverter decade, the 2030s in India will be the storage decade. The same person who shaped the first is, demonstrably, still in the room for the second.
Disclaimer
Kunwer Sachdev is no longer associated with Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. He founded Su-Kam in 1998 and led it for two decades, but his formal association with the company ended before its 2019 wind-down. References to Su-Kam in this article are historical and biographical — describing the period during which he led the company — and should not be read as a current commercial, managerial, or financial association.
His current entrepreneurial work is through Su-vastika Systems Pvt. Ltd., founded and led by Khushboo Sachdev, where he contributes as a technical and product visionary and named inventor on patents related to lithium-ion batteries, BMS, BESS and solar storage. Patent counts and product details cited in this article reflect figures publicly stated by the company; readers and journalists are encouraged to verify current numbers directly with Su-vastika.
InverterManOfIndia is an independent third-party editorial site. It is not owned, operated, sponsored, or endorsed by Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd., Su-vastika Systems Pvt. Ltd., Khushboo Sachdev, Kunwer Sachdev, or any related entity. All trademarks, brand names, and company names belong to their respective owners and are used here only for descriptive, journalistic, and biographical purposes.