A Man from a Two-Room House in Coimbatore Who Built the Platform Microsoft, Google and Walmart Use
Every large company on earth buys things by making strangers fill in forms. These 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.
Crossing the ₹84 Lakh Crore Mark
In March this year, the value of deals that had passed through his software crossed $1 trillion roughly ₹84 lakh crore. The company announced it on 13 May from Portland, Oregon. Around $30 billion (about ₹2.52 lakh crore) 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 (approximately ₹84,000 crore) of revenue.
Why Almost No One in India Has Heard of Him
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.
The Road Not Taken
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... Otherwise I would have gone to MCA.”
The MBA was at DJ Academy for Managerial Excellence, out at Othakkalmandapam on the Pollachi highway. Then he sold mutual funds and financial products, first at Indiabulls in Coimbatore, then at Navia Markets in Chennai, where he ran the southern region. He was there when the subprime crisis arrived.
“The 2008 market crash came in and was brutal... That’s when I realised that the stock market is not my thing. And I wanted to be in a place where innovation happened.”
He joined a small startup in Taramani as a business analyst. By the end of 2009 he had gone back to Coimbatore to work for Exterro, an American legal technology firm. He stayed nine years, moved to the United States on the company’s account, and became a product manager. That job is where the idea for Responsive came from.
A product manager is supposed to plan sprints and study competitors. Shankar found that a third of his week was going somewhere else entirely—helping the sales team respond to requests for proposals and security questionnaires.
What made it worse was the repetition. Two salespeople chasing two different customers would arrive with the same question a fortnight apart. He would point the second at the answer he had already written. They refused to reuse it. The salespeople were not being lazy; they were being careful. An out-of-date answer about data residency, sent to a bank, is not an inconvenience but a liability.
In 2014, Shankar and two colleagues—Sankar Lagudu and AJ Sunder—went looking for software that would do the job. There was not much. RFPIO was founded in February 2015. Shankar’s summary of the years since is four words long: “the rest is history”.
What the Product Actually Does
Strip away the category names and the product is a memory with manners. Responsive sits on the seller’s side of a tender or request for proposals. It nags the experts inside a company to keep their answers current and files everything in one place. When a salesperson gets a request for proposals with 300 questions, an agent drafts the answers from that library, stamps each one with where it came from and when, and goes back to a human only where it finds a gap.
Senior people get their afternoons back. He calls the output the four Cs: current, compliant, customer-facing content.
Customers soon stopped using it only for formal requests for proposals. A simple email with three questions could now pull the same approved answers. That insight drove the 2023 rebrand from RFPIO to Responsive and the creation of the category “Strategic Response Management”.
The Awkward AI Question
Every company selling writing assistance is now asked the same thing: if a large language model can draft a response to requests for proposals, what is left to sell?
Shankar does not reach for the usual defence. “If you don’t feed the AI with the most accurate information, it’s going to still hallucinate... Even if it’s not hallucinating, it’s going to create content that has been outdated. So where is the most recent information? It’s all in people’s minds and brains.”
“I truly believe enterprise knowledge is a living organism. It’s not like one time setup and done, it’ll become junk after a month.”
On top of the system sits a scoring framework called TRACE that rates each generated answer on trustworthiness, relevance, accuracy, completeness and explainability. The system does not invent answers; it is grounded in the company’s own approved knowledge. If nothing matching exists, it simply says it could not find an answer.
The Cleanest Cap Table in Oregon
Responsive has been profitable since 2018 and has never grown slower than 25% a year, including through the pandemic. There was early angel money, then a $25 million (about ₹210 crore) cheque from K1 Investment Management in July 2018. That is the last round they raised; the money mostly went to buying out the early backers. K1 now holds under 30%. “We now have the cleanest cap table which has only one investor, which is K1 now.”
He will not disclose revenue. On an IPO he is unhurried: the company is customer-funded and does not need external capital. It has acquired RFP360, InHub and Bidhive instead of being acquired.
The Two-Room House
Shankar grew up in a two-room house measuring roughly 10 by 10 feet in Coimbatore. His father was a clerk in the agriculture department. “The only asset my parents gave us is education. Never had anything fancy. I got my first personal computer when I was 26.”
He never went to the United States as a student or on an H-1B. He arrived on an L-1B visa, the most constrained of the lot, and then built a product company rather than a services firm—something almost nobody in his position does.
He credits Coimbatore’s entrepreneurial culture more than himself. Asked about religion or spirituality, he answers briefly: he believes in doing positive things, and that good karma leads to good things.
The Real Measures of Success
Two numbers matter more to him than revenue. The first is local: the company has created more than 300 jobs in and around Coimbatore, with about 90 people there now, plus teams in Bengaluru and Pune.
The second is that on any given day you will find more than 300 job postings on LinkedIn asking for experience with Responsive or RFPIO not posted by the company, but by its customers. A product becomes infrastructure when people start putting it on their CVs.
Shankar lives in the United States with his wife and two daughters. His parents remain in Coimbatore. None of this will appear on lists of India’s most valuable startups, because Responsive is not, technically, an Indian startup. It is an American company whose product was built in Tamil Nadu by a man who did not like computer science, sold mutual funds for a living, and spent nine years being quietly annoyed by a chore nobody had bothered to fix.
That is a better story than a garage, and he knows it.