Suresh Sambandam

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Kissflow

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Suresh Sambandam is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kissflow, a low-code work platform headquartered in Chennai that unifies process management, case management and application development in a single product rather than selling them as separate tools. His career is the clearest Indian example of a founder who was right too early: he built OrangeScape as a self-funded platform-as-a-service company in 2003, roughly a decade before the low-code category the product anticipated actually existed as a market, and spent that decade keeping the company alive on workflow software until the market caught up. He has done it without ever raising external capital, and without the credential that nearly every comparable Indian SaaS founder holds – he never attended college in person, took a commerce degree by distance education, and taught himself software from textbooks in the early nineties.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Kissflow, serving roughly 10,000 business customers across around 160 countries, including PepsiCo and Michelin, with about 400 employees based largely in Chennai.
• Founded OrangeScape Technologies in Chennai in 2003, entirely self-funded, as a platform-as-a-service company.
• Introduced Kissflow at Google I/O in 2012, then rebranded the US operation as Kissflow, Inc. and retired the company’s other products to concentrate on it.
• Has kept the business fully privately owned with no external investors across more than twenty years.
• Authored three US patents while working on fraud-detection systems at Hewlett-Packard.
• Led a team in the insurance software unit at Selectica until that unit was acquired by Accenture in 2003.
• Co-founded SaaSBoomi, a community-led movement of SaaS founders and one of the largest such networks in Asia.
• Started out at nineteen running a four-machine computer training centre in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu.

Professional Journey

Sambandam grew up in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, and did not go to university in the conventional sense. At nineteen he set up a small computer training centre with four machines in his home town. His technical education was self-directed and financed out of very little: a three-month software course costing five thousand rupees, and textbooks expensive enough that he would cycle to Puducherry to find them. He completed a Bachelor of Commerce through distance education at the University of Madras in 1993, which is why sources that say he holds a degree and sources that say he never attended college are both correct.

He entered the industry at Hewlett-Packard, spending over three years building fraud-detection solutions and authoring three US patents in the process. He then moved to Selectica – later renamed Determine – where he led a team in the insurance software business. That unit was acquired by Accenture in 2003, and in the same year Sambandam left to start his own company.

OrangeScape Technologies was founded in Chennai in 2003 and funded entirely by him. Its thesis was low-code, no-code application development, which in 2003 was a product with almost no buyers. His own framing is that the company was a decade early; the market did not genuinely mature until around 2014. Rather than shut down or raise money on someone else’s terms, he adapted the business, moving into workflow software around 2010 to generate revenue from a problem customers already knew they had.

The turning point was 2012, when the company introduced the Kissflow platform at Google I/O. Kissflow found the traction OrangeScape’s earlier products had not, and the company progressively consolidated around it, rebranding the US operation as Kissflow, Inc. and discontinuing its other products. Much of its early growth came through inbound marketing rather than an enterprise sales force – a channel that suited a bootstrapped company with no capital to buy distribution.

Kissflow has since re-entered the low-code category its founder originally bet on, now with the market behind it, and positions itself as a unified work platform against much larger competitors including Microsoft. Sambandam has stated an ambition to make it one of the two dominant players in low-code, and has said he expects to reach $100 million in revenue within three to five years, targets which remain aspirations rather than results. Alongside the company he co-founded SaaSBoomi, a founder-led community that has become a central institution of the Indian SaaS industry, and mentors early-stage founders through 100X.VC. Indian business press has returned to him repeatedly as the counterexample to the elite-college founder archetype.

Education

University of Madras

Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com), 1993, completed by distance education