The Next Zoho Isn’t Coming From Silicon Valley — It’s Coming From Siddipet

In October 2019, Sridhar Vembu made a decision that challenged the conventional playbook of technology entrepreneurship. With Zoho already established as a global SaaS company, he left the Bay Area and moved to Mathalamparai, a small village in Tamil Nadu with a population of barely 2,000 people. He did not move there to establish a satellite office. He chose to live there himself, cycling to work while building a technology company far from the traditional centres of the startup ecosystem.

Today, Zoho operates across more than 100 offices, including locations in tier-2 towns and villages that many technology companies tend to overlook.

Years later, Shyam Sankeerth has followed a remarkably similar philosophy, but with his own version of the bet. He left the United States and chose to build his company not from Hyderabad, Bengaluru or another established technology hub, but from Siddipet, a tier-3 city in Telangana.

In less than eight months, his bootstrapped venture, ApplyWizz, grew to more than 100 employees without a single outside investor. A year later, the team had crossed 120 people.

From a Lab Coat to a Sales Pitch

Shyam’s entrepreneurial journey did not begin with a business plan.

During his undergraduate years, he worked as a Junior Scientist intern, gaining his first experience with structured research, data and analytical thinking. After graduation, however, his career moved in a completely different direction. He spent three years working as a Business Development Manager in sales.

The combination was unusual but powerful.

Science taught him to analyse problems and identify patterns. Sales taught him how to understand people, communicate value and turn conversations into action. Years later, those two experiences would become central to the philosophy behind ApplyWizz.

The platform was built around an analytical understanding of a broken job-search process, combined with a practical understanding of what candidates actually need to move from submitting an application to securing an interview and, ultimately, a job.

The Reset That Changed Everything

Three years into his sales career, Shyam decided to return to education. He moved to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in bioinformatics and computational biology.

After completing his studies, he entered the technology industry in the US. But the journey was far from smooth.

Shyam lost two jobs — one because of a budget cut and another because of visa-related constraints. For many immigrant professionals, such setbacks can bring an entire career trajectory to a standstill.

For Shyam, however, they became turning points.

During this period, he even experimented with stand-up comedy, an unexpected detour that reflected his willingness to step outside conventional career paths.

What appeared to be professional setbacks eventually became the experiences that pushed him toward entrepreneurship.

The Return Home

With a science master’s degree, a background in sales and experience working in technology, Shyam eventually made the decision to return to India.

But he did not return to build in one of India’s major startup hubs.

The earliest version of ApplyWizz actually began in his sister’s garage in the United States. Thousands of miles away from the ecosystem he would eventually build in, the idea began taking shape before Shyam brought it back to India and established it in Siddipet.

His personal experience with job hunting became the foundation of the business.

Reflecting on his journey in a LinkedIn post marking a year since ApplyWizz appeared on Shark Tank USA, Shyam recalled a period filled with applications, assessments, interviews and rejection.

He attended more than 55 assessments, participated in over 40 interviews, completed two internships and eventually received four offer letters.

But behind those achievements were countless hours of uncertainty, late nights and unanswered applications.

Instead of viewing job hunting purely as a matter of luck, Shyam began looking for patterns.

He studied timing. He analysed recruiter behaviour. He examined what made some applications receive responses while others disappeared into crowded inboxes.

That process eventually led him to what he believed was a system.

That system became ApplyWizz.

Building ApplyWizz

ApplyWizz developed as a subscription-based platform combining automation with human support to help job seekers, particularly those based outside India, navigate the complexities of finding employment.

The idea was deeply personal.

Shyam was building a solution for a problem he had experienced himself — including the additional challenges faced by international candidates dealing with visa limitations, unfamiliar hiring systems and highly competitive job markets.

The company has since grown to more than 16,000 users, with its customer base consisting of job seekers outside India.

What started from personal frustration gradually became a technology-driven platform focused on making the job-search process more structured, personalised and outcome-oriented.

Betting on Siddipet

Perhaps the most significant decision in Shyam’s entrepreneurial journey was not the product itself, but where he chose to build it.

Instead of moving to Hyderabad or Bengaluru, he remained committed to Siddipet.

His philosophy reflects a broader idea that technology companies do not necessarily need to be built in the places traditionally associated with startups.

“We’re not from Hyderabad. We’re from Siddipet — a tier 3 city that dared to dream tier 1 dreams,” Shyam has said.

The decision has also created opportunities for people who might otherwise have had to migrate to larger cities for technology jobs.

More than 60% of ApplyWizz’s workforce today is women, adding another dimension to the company’s growth story.

The company has reportedly crossed ₹5 crore in revenue while remaining entirely bootstrapped, without seed funding or venture capital backing.

Based on the broad revenue multiples sometimes applied to bootstrapped SaaS companies, that could imply an estimated valuation in the ₹15–20 crore range. However, this is an indicative estimate rather than an audited or officially declared valuation.

Building More Than a Team

For Shyam, employees are not simply numbers on a company spreadsheet.

The people working at ApplyWizz refer to themselves as “ApplyWizz-ians,” reflecting the culture he has attempted to build around the organisation.

When the company completed its first year in Siddipet, Shyam celebrated by taking the entire team to Wonderla amusement park.

For a bootstrapped company, the gesture carried significance. The celebration came from the company’s own revenue and was intended as a thank-you to the people who had helped build the organisation.

Shyam described the team as having built more than a company — they had built a home, a family and a story together.

That culture, however, came with its own sacrifices.

During the company’s early growth phase, Shyam and his team reportedly worked between 16 and 21 hours a day for more than four months to maintain their pace of expansion.

The intensity took a toll on their health and wellbeing.

Building a 100-plus-person organisation in less than a year after returning to India, while personally carrying the responsibility for hiring, cash flow and growth, was far removed from the glamorous version of entrepreneurship often seen on social media.

It was the demanding, behind-the-scenes work of building a company from the ground up.

From a Tier-3 City to a Global Ambition

Although ApplyWizz was built in Siddipet, Shyam’s ambitions have always extended beyond the city.

He became one of the immigrant founders to appear on Shark Tank USA, an especially notable achievement considering that he had already left the United States and returned to India to build his company.

He has also taken the ApplyWizz story to the TEDx stage as its founder and CEO.

The company has received recognition including Aatmanirbhar Startup of the Year and an award for Women Empowerment and Rural Development.

Together, these recognitions highlight several characteristics that distinguish ApplyWizz’s journey: it is bootstrapped, has a women-majority workforce and has been built from a city that is rarely considered a conventional destination for technology startups.

Challenging the Traditional Job Platform

Shyam’s long-term ambition is even bigger.

He wants ApplyWizz to become a serious challenger to established professional networking platforms such as LinkedIn.

The difference lies in the philosophy.

Rather than focusing primarily on networking and passive job discovery, ApplyWizz aims to combine automation, personalisation and measurable outcomes to make the job-search process more active and efficient.

The ambition mirrors an important aspect of Zoho’s story: creating a technology business outside the traditional startup ecosystem and competing globally through product, persistence and operational discipline rather than relying solely on venture capital.

Why the ApplyWizz Story Matters

The significance of ApplyWizz extends beyond the growth of one company.

Global employment remains a major challenge, particularly for young professionals. For international job seekers, the process can become even more complicated because of visa requirements, unfamiliar recruitment practices and different hiring expectations.

ApplyWizz attempts to address that gap through technology and human support.

But perhaps the more important lesson lies in where the company was built.

For years, India’s startup narrative has revolved around cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi-NCR. Shyam’s journey presents a different possibility: that a technology company with global ambitions can emerge from a tier-3 city when talent, opportunity and determination are given the right environment.

Sridhar Vembu demonstrated that a global technology company could be built from a village.

Shyam Sankeerth is taking that philosophy one tier further — building from Siddipet, bootstrapping the journey and creating opportunities in a place that traditional startup maps often leave blank.

His story is ultimately about more than ApplyWizz.

It is about returning when staying away would have been easier, building when the ecosystem was missing, and turning personal setbacks into a system designed to solve a problem experienced by thousands of others.

“Sometimes the biggest company systems are built from one person’s hardest days.”

For ApplyWizz, those hardest days were not simply part of the founder’s past.

They became the foundation of the company itself.