HireMee also made it to the shortlist of 10 qualified teams out of 118 entries from 20 countries in the $5 million XPRIZE Rapid Re-skilling challenge. Aimed at incentivising teams to develop and demonstrate the effectiveness of a quick training and re-skilling solution for those who are most vulnerable to employment loss in the US, XPRIZE challenged contestants to develop solutions that would cut training time by half for occupations with a living wage.

“The team sought to tap the best CEO and technology talent in the world in solving the critical challenge of rapid re-skilling,” Chocko says. The aim is for the finalists to offer training solutions to 3,500 displaced workers first and then expand this to help at least 25,000 such people by the last round. The best solutions, if adopted on a nation-wide scale, have the potential of transforming the way workers train for more than 12 million jobs.

HireMee, founded in 2017 with the vision to get companies to discover young graduates from Tier II and Tier III towns, is empanelled as an assessment agency by NSDC’s three sector skills councils and NASSCOM’s IT/ ITeS sector skills council. “The past year presented us with unique challenges,” says Chocko. “The global pandemic disrupted the way we work and the way we go about with our day-to-day lives. If the 9/11 incident brought a shift towards security as the central focus for businesses, the recent pandemic made healthcare the epicentre of all businesses.” 

However, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to rethink our priorities and diminished the line between work and life outside as everyone has to answer questions like “Do we work where we live or do we live where we work?” he points out. On the bright side, however, the world has healed because reduced human activity. “We hear more birds chirping and for the first time we saw peacocks in the Sona campus,” he says. 

The fact that Vee Technologies’ employees adapted to the work-from-home model in just eight hours, he points out, showed that the business continuity planning that had been planned and designed was ‘indeed very useful and effective’. Thanks to this, the company was able to fulfil all its clients’ requirements without any disruption. 

During the year, Vee Technologies and Sona College collaborated on a CSR project to develop VeeTrace, an app to measure social distancing. This project won the first prize in the government of India’s fight against Covid-19 and won the Vishwakarma award.

 Mapping hunger spots

Technology has also helped the Valliappa Foundation’s Anadhanam, a platform to solve global hunger, providing tools for NGOs working to feed the 800 million people in the world who are hungry, by mapping the hunger hotspots and identifying surplus food centres. Vee Technologies has also worked with Saudi Arabia in 2020 to help create the Kingdom’s DRG-based reimbursement system, working with hospitals and insurance companies to set up a payment method. And, in Toronto, it co-founded a new hygiene start-up, Code-9 Technologies.

“We were forced to change our offerings to our engineering services clients,” Chocko says. “We started offering new services like 7D, including scheduling and cost analysis, and started a sustainability engineering, energy modelling and digital twins practice.”

Meanwhile, Vee Technologies USA celebrated its 10th year in August 2020, spending two days “looking back, reminiscing the past and looking at the progress we made as a team and the achievements and awards we have won as a company”. The year also saw Vee Technologies emerging as the only Indian company to make it to the list of the Top 100 Healthcare Companies in the world to work for.

Vee Technologies also bagged a spot among the top healthcare employers in 2020 in Modern Healthcare’s global rankings. “We are particularly pleased that this recognition has come at a time when the global healthcare industry is navigating through the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Chocko.

Modern Healthcare is a 44-year-old weekly business publication from Detroit, US, targeting executives in the healthcare industry. Its recognition programme honours companies in the healthcare industry that empower employees so they can provide patients and customers with the best possible care, products and services. This year, the companies have been selected on multiple factors, including how they navigated the Covid-19 pandemic crisis.

Vee Technologies’ teamwork, in tandem with hospitals and insurance companies in the US, has come up with a new-age medicare plan that incentivises people to stay healthy. It is the only company in the list with development centres in India at Bengaluru, Salem and Chennai.

“Our future remains bright with our students of both Thiagarajar Polytechnic and Sona College of Technology winning the All-India Smart India Hackathon to solve farmers’ problems. Our research labs have conceived products like nano quantum dot organic oil to save the environment,” Chocko adds. “Our group of institutions have won over 10 awards this past year from Visvesvaraya Best Teacher award to AICTE-CII award.”

Entrepreneur

Chocko Valliappa

Company

Vee Technologies Pvt Ltd

Business

Strategy and consulting services for healthcare and other industries

Locations

Bengaluru, India and New York, US

No. of employees

5,000

Turnover

Rs300-350 crore