The Validation
By 2005, Su-Kam was the undisputed leader in India’s home inverter market. The Chic inverter had won an India Today innovation award. The Home UPS had named an entire product category. The export business had reached its first ten countries. The R&D centre was producing innovations that competitors spent years trying to copy.
What Su-Kam did not yet have was the attention of institutional capital. Indian manufacturing companies — particularly in the unglamorous category of power electronics — were not considered investible by the venture funds and private equity houses that were beginning to circle the post-dot-com Indian economy.
Kunwer Sachdev changed that single-handedly.
When Reliance Power Fund approached Su-Kam, the investment they proposed — $10 million — was unprecedented in the Indian inverter industry. No inverter company had raised institutional money at that scale before. The round represented an acknowledgement that what Kunwer had built was not a regional manufacturer but a genuine national brand with the fundamentals to become a global one.
He accepted. It was, at the time, the right call.
The US Visit — and What He Learned There
Part of the investment thesis involved exploring an acquisition of an American company in the power electronics space. The investor team accompanied Kunwer to the United States — his first proper immersion in how a Western technology company operated from the inside.
He came back changed. Not because the American company was better — in many areas it was not — but because of the systems. The documentation. The process manuals, the engineering specifications, the sales playbooks, the HR frameworks. He returned to Gurugram carrying a briefcase of sample documents and spent months using them as templates to raise Su-Kam’s internal standards.
The acquisition never happened. The learning never stopped.
“I got so much exposure to how the Western world thinks and functions,” he said later. “It always helped me.” What he absorbed in that one visit informed how he ran his R&D team, structured his export operations, and thought about building an organisation that could outlast any single individual — including himself.
The Partner Who Came to Destabilise
The honeymoon with the investment did not last.
The investor — representing Reliance ADAG’s power fund — did not behave like a growth investor. It behaved like an auditor with authority. The representative director on the Su-Kam board changed every six months, making strategic continuity impossible. Each new representative arrived without context, demanded new briefings, and departed before any relationship was properly established.
Then came V. K. Tripathi — a former Indian Revenue Service officer appointed to the board — and the character of the relationship changed completely. Where earlier representatives had been disruptive through instability, Tripathi was disruptive through intent. He began working to position Kunwer’s elder son as a board director, applying pressure that Kunwer consistently resisted on the grounds that the milestones were not yet met. The disagreement became a running conflict that consumed board meetings and poisoned the working environment.
The company was growing. The business was sound. But the boardroom had become a war.
The Forensic Audit
Out of that conflict came the single most damaging decision in Su-Kam’s history.
Tripathi ordered a forensic audit — commissioned through one of the Big Four accounting firms — without the CEO’s agreement and without board consensus. The audit was not ordered because there was evidence of wrongdoing. It was ordered as a pressure instrument.
What it triggered was catastrophic and irreversible. The moment a forensic audit becomes public knowledge in Indian banking, lenders activate their risk protocols. They do not wait for findings. They do not assess context. They see the signal — “something is being investigated at this company” — and they respond by withdrawing credit lines, renegotiating terms, and signalling to one another. In a business that ran on working capital, the withdrawal of credit is not a setback. It is a death sentence.
The banks panicked. The credit that Su-Kam needed to fund its manufacturing cycles disappeared. A company that had been profitable, growing, and expanding internationally found itself in a liquidity crisis manufactured by its own board member.
What the Chronicler Records
The collapse of Su-Kam under NCLT proceedings has been examined in business journalism, in legal records, and in the public memory of the Indian power electronics industry. The company that had defined the home inverter category, first in India, was liquidated in proceedings that many who worked there still find difficult to reconcile with the business’s underlying strength.
Kunwer Sachdev did not contest the narrative that Su-Kam had problems — every company of that scale and growth rate had problems. He contested the cause. “The very group that destabilised my company eventually faced its own downfall and went bankrupt as well,” he observed, years later. The Reliance ADAG entities that had made his life untenable had, in time, made their own untenable.
He did not take pleasure in it. He had built something real, and it was gone.
What he did instead was the thing he had always done when the situation looked impossible: he started building again. Su-Vastika, Kunwwer.AI, the patents filed, the relationships maintained — none of this happened despite the collapse. Some of it happened because of it.
The inverter man of India did not stop being the inverter man of India because a boardroom caught fire.
He just had to build a new room.