In 2020 I started Upshift Autos, a car workshop in New Delhi. I started it out of a passion for cars and for solving the problems they bring in through the gate. Every car is a small puzzle. So is every customer.
The software never fit the floor
Like most workshop owners, I tried the software on the market. Several of them. The simple ones were simple in the wrong places. Customers still had to call us to ask where their car was, so the software saved nobody any time.
Stock was worse. A workshop does not use materials the way a shop sells them. Paint protection film is used by the foot, a little on one job and a little on the next. The software only knew it as goods: one roll, in or out. I wanted every material recorded the way it is actually used in the workshop, on the job it was used for. Nothing I tried did that, so I built it. That story is in Why I built workshop software on a workshop floor.
Why a separate company
By 2026 it was clear that the software and the workshop had different needs. A workshop is a brick-and-mortar business. It needs the car done right and the bill paid. Software needed room to grow beyond one floor, and beyond cars.
So I started TUD Innovations. The idea is simple. India needs digital change, but most of the talk is about replacing the way businesses work. I think the businesses that built this country deserve help, not replacement. A family shop, a distributor, a factory run on registers and WhatsApp: these businesses resist change more than anyone, and for good reason. They have seen software that did not understand them.
Help opens doors that automation never will. If you walk in and say "throw away your register," the door stays shut. If you walk in and say "keep working the way you do, and let me take the parts that cost you time," people listen.
What we will not do
There are a few things TUD will not do to the people who trust us with their business:
- No lock-in. Your records are yours, and you can take them out at any time, even after you stop paying us.
- No per-user fees. Your whole team uses it. We never charge per person.
- No surprises. The scope, the price and the delivery date are agreed in writing before work starts.
- Nothing untested. A system is offered only after it has run a real business.
What TUD should be
The best way I can put it: TUD should be like a son who helps the family business become just a little more advanced. Not a stranger with a sales pitch. Someone who knows how the business works, speaks its language, and brings in only as much of the new as the time needs.
No kind of work is too small or too far from what we know. We bring the knowledge of how to build systems. The business brings its expertise, which no software has. Together we build it the way they like it, around their own products and in their own look.
That is what TUD Innovations is for. Today it works through three brands: Karyo Studio builds websites, portals and systems to order, Quoreca makes self-serve tools businesses run themselves, and Kenro runs pre-owned car showrooms. The brands will change and grow. The idea will not.