Smart City Use Cases and Opportunities: Jay Chandan, CEO of Gorilla Technology (Part 1)

Jay talks about Gorilla’s Smart City system integration business that heavily focuses on IoT security, analytics, and workflow. In the end, we discuss open problems that could warrant new entrepreneurs building startups around.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Jay Chandan: I was born in Chennai, India. I grew up doing my engineering and computer sciences. I left India to start my first business in southeast Asia. I quickly grew that business, which I then sold at the end of 2001.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of business was that?

Jay Chandan: It was an IT services business, which was predominantly focused on implementing projects for the likes of Pfizer, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards.

Sramana Mitra: What scale did you achieve and what kind of exit did you have with that?

Jay Chandan: We sold that business for nearly $45 million. We had achieved an EBITDA of $4.2 million on a revenue run rate of $20 million.

Sramana Mitra: You sold that in 2001?

Jay Chandan: Yes, sold it in 2001 and exited in 2002.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Jay Chandan: After that, I went and joined another company. I was invited, by a person I knew, to work for a company called EXL. This was taken out of bankruptcy and they had an outsourcing services arm headquartered in the US. I came to run analytics for them for UK and Europe. That went public on the NASDAQ in 2006.

I exited in 2007 after which, I focused on buying portfolios of secondary companies from venture capital investors, debt providers, and private equity houses. We have about seven funds today. We’re pretty much focused on anything between SaaS, FinTech, InsurTech, data analytics including EdTech, MedTech, and HealthTech.

Sramana Mitra: Is that Gorilla?

Jay Chandan: No, I have a variety of funds. We took Gorilla public in July of 2022. Gorilla was a transaction that happened between Global SPAC, of which I was the Chairman. Gorilla was a Taiwanese company that has been prominent in Taiwan for about 22 years. The idea behind Gorilla was to take a specialist Taiwanese edge AI company into a global enterprise. That was where we identified and were in love with Gorilla.

The idea behind Gorilla was, there were disruptive technologies that have revolutionized the way we work and communicate. We see intelligent products everywhere. What we’ve realized is that every aspect of a smart city where innovative and intelligent technology is used to enhance the quality of life in an open environment such as minimizing waste or optimizing energy usage is made possible by IoT devices.

That’s where Gorilla comes in. Gorilla, being a 22-year-old company, started out as a video analytics business that grew quickly into a smart city solutions provider with cybersecurity. That’s what is interesting about Gorilla today and that’s where we’re finding success with customers.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Smart City Use Cases and Opportunities: Jay Chandan, CEO of Gorilla Technology
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