Automotive software major KPIT Tech eyes biggest headcount growth from Kerala

Kochi: Pune-based KPIT Technologies, an automotive and mobility technology major, is expecting its biggest headcount growth from Kerala in the coming years. The company which developed the fuel technology for India’s first hydrogen fuel cell ferry, made by Cochin Shipyard, has an office at the Infopark, Kochi campus and is planning to expand.

The company started functioning from Kochi after acquiring PathPartner Technology, a software company, in 2021. The company has around 100 employees in Kochi now.

“We always wanted to be here. We hope that our biggest growth will come from Kochi in terms of headcount percentage. We hope over the next five years or so we can have about 800-1000 employees here. We want to make sure we get to 250 or 300 pc growth,” Sachin Tikekar, president and joint MD of KPIT Technologies, told Onmanorama when he was in Kochi recently.

Tikekar said his company has started working for three of its clients from Kochi and all of them have been growing. He exuded confidence that the company will record substantial growth from Kochi in the next three to five years.
The company has its biggest office in Pune with nearly 4,000 employees. The second highest is in Bengaluru and it also works for some clients in Chennai.

In its bid to find more talent from Kerala, the company has started connecting with universities and colleges in the state to build partnerships. Tikekar said the company gets 50 per cent of its new employees from campuses.
Tikekar, who is part of KPIT’s founding team, said everything that the company does is aimed at making the world of mobility cleaner, safer and smarter.

“What will become important in future from a user perspective is how can you launch new features as quickly as possible without changing the fundamentals of their vehicles. It can be done efficiently through software-defined vehicles,” he said.
Tikekar said the transition towards software-defined vehicles has accelerated in the last 6-7 years. “Within that acceleration also some companies have done it half-heartedly. There are some partially software-defined vehicles already on the road. The first version of fully software-defined vehicles will be on the road by 2026-27. The better version will be out in 2028-29 and maybe we will get to a particular level by 2030,” he said, citing the schedules of European, American, Japanese and Korean companies.

He said such vehicles are likely to hit Indian roads a year or two behind the global ones. Apart from the hydrogen cell technology, KPIT has also readied a sodium iron battery prototype as part of its research into green fuel technologies.

“All of our large global clients have also hydrogen fuel cell and sodium iron programmes. They may or may not use our technology. We are fine with that, but they need a software integration partner. We can help them with the integration. It works both ways,” he said. The company has posted a 47.3 per cent year-on-year (YoY) growth in March quarter profit at Rs 164.4 crore.