From a Bengaluru workbench to a global engineering company.

MEI Marketing and Services — the first company

After beginning his career as a sales executive at PAM Networks Limited, A.N. Venkatesh founded his first company, MEI (Mysore Electronics Industry) Marketing and Services, in 1994 — the way many Indian entrepreneurs did then, simply by opening a bank account (at Sree Subramanyeswara Co-operative Bank). Running sales, marketing, production and engineering himself, this is where the products that would later become DigiTech were first built.

At MEI Marketing and Services, Venkatesh designed and built a complete acrylic-fronted interest-rate display board and supplied it to State Bank of India's J.C. Road branch in Bengaluru in 1995. Around the same time he was hand-building electronic Token Displays and had already won his first clients — the foundations of both the banking-display and queue-management product lines that define the company today.

Mr. A.N. Venkatesh — Electronics & Communication Engineer from Adichunchanagiri Institute of Technology, Chikkamagaluru, who had run his first venture MEI Marketing and Services since 1994 — formally registered DigiTech as a proprietorship in Bengaluru on 26 January 2001. The Token Display System he had been building since the mid-1990s launched as the company's first product, alongside industrial production displays delivered to General Electric (opening its Bangalore office) and BEL — our two foundational customers.

A.N. Venkatesh integrated a token dispenser with the token display — and the electronic Queue Management System, as India knows it today, was born. DigiTech was among the first companies in India to engineer a QMS this way, turning a standalone display into a complete take-a-token, watch-the-board, walk-to-the-counter system. It is now a standard fixture in every bank, hospital and government office in the country.

The earliest digital clocks built by DigiTech used SCL (Semi-Conductor Laboratory) ship-based timing — but these were never reliably accurate. The breakthrough came when the team moved to RTC (Real-Time Clock) architecture, the foundation that still powers our GPS, NTP and RTC digital clock product lines today. The product portfolio rapidly diversified into industrial production displays and standalone token displays.

When State Bank of India introduced the single-window banking concept, DigiTech was among the first companies in India to design, develop and implement an electronic Queue Management System for SBI — the purchase orders from 2003–2004 are still on record. The first deployment was at SBI Kumaraswamy Layout, followed by SBI Church Street and SBI Jayanagar — among the earliest QMS installations in Indian retail banking. Tokens were still printed on paper at this stage; in-house token-printer mechanisms came soon after.

Following the SBI deployments, the same QMS architecture was extended to State Bank of Mysore (SBM), State Bank of Travancore (SBT) and State Bank of Hyderabad (SBH) — all before their eventual merger with SBI — and then to Corporation Bank, Vijaya Bank, ING Vaishya and Syndicate Bank. During this period we engineered our own token-printer mechanisms in-house, eliminating dependence on external printer suppliers for queue and token systems.

Transitioned from Karnataka-focused operations to PAN-India project execution and support — establishing reach across banking, healthcare, manufacturing and enterprise sectors nationwide. Electronic scoreboards entered the catalogue during this phase, with early installations at City Institute (billiards) and the M. Chinnaswamy Indoor Stadium in Bengaluru.

The business expanded into a partnership with Mr. Venkatesh and Mrs. Shalini H.S. leading operations and growth, broadening into new product lines (nurse calling systems, advanced LCD-based queue management, GPS-synchronised clocks) and new customer verticals (healthcare, hospitality, retail).

Registered on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM), enabling participation in public-sector and government procurement across India.

Began exporting products and integrated solutions to overseas markets across the GCC, Southeast Asia and Africa — taking Indian engineering global.

The company entered a new phase with formal incorporation as a Private Limited entity, expanded leadership and a renewed focus on next-generation manufacturing, IoT and software-driven growth.