From Services to AI Products: Lessons from 12 Years of Building

I founded Habilesoft in 2013. HabileLabs came three years later, Shankar Morwal and I formally registered the company in Jaipur on June 10, 2016, with a single conviction: Rajasthan could produce world-class technology, and we'd prove it. Most people who meet HabileLabs today (a Cloud, Data & AI partner with 75+ AWS migrations, 250+ people across four countries, and a growing Agentic AI practice) assume it started that way. It didn't. It started as a services company doing whatever work would keep the lights on, and it took a decade of compounding, unglamorous decisions, client by client, to become something with a real product point of view.

The first believers

Every company has a moment before it has any evidence it will work, just people who decided to bet on it anyway. Ours came from JobsIIT's Himanshu Nazkani and Ankit Khandelwal, who trusted a young, unproven team from Jaipur and became our first clients and, in every way that mattered, our first investors. They taught us what world-class product engineering actually looks like before we had the track record to claim we knew it. That early trust is the real seed capital of a services business, you can't buy it back later once you've disappointed someone.

Every client taught us something we couldn't have learned any other way

The unfair advantage of starting as a services company is that you learn, project by project, exactly what enterprises struggle with, not what you assume from the outside. Rizan Flenner at iSeeIt taught us that pivoting is wisdom, not failure. Kapil Gupta at ZirkelTech gave us our first real exposure to enterprise-grade rigor, governance, and documentation. Mucteba Celik at RevBits pushed us to treat security as a first principle rather than an afterthought, a discipline that's in every architecture review and deployment pipeline we run today. None of that pattern recognition shows up on a resume. It shows up in judgment, and it compounds.

The pivot moment

The shift from pure services to a Cloud, Data & AI partner with real productized offerings didn't happen on a single date. Chetan Shetty at Extentia saw something in us we hadn't fully seen in ourselves, and pushed us toward a business model we were hesitant to try; it now accounts for 35% of our revenue. Vinzent at UserCentric held us to a European standard of quality that turned scaling into a discipline instead of a checklist. Generative and Agentic AI accelerated the same shift: clients needed a partner who had already built the pattern, not one learning it live on their engagement.

Trust compounds, too

Not every relationship is linear. Rohit Gambhir and Anirudh Kejriwal at Centric India chose to work with us again after a management change, which meant more to me than any new logo could, it validated years of quiet integrity when nothing obligated them to look twice. Jijy Oommen at Aavas Financiers went further still, co-creating our entire fintech engineering practice over years of partnership, and turning us from a software vendor into a company that understood fintech from the inside.

Twelve years in

The company looks nothing like it did in 2013. In the last two years alone: we opened offices in Mumbai, Gurugram, Udaipur, and Surrey, BC; crossed 250 engineers, leaders, and builders serving 160+ clients across 14+ countries at 95% client retention; earned ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001 certification and AWS's Generative AI Competency; and were named Tech Titan of Rajasthan by The Times of India. Earlier this year, we were one of only 10 IT companies, and the only one from Rajasthan, selected to represent India at the Canada-India Trade & Investment Summit alongside Minister Piyush Goyal's delegation.

None of it changes the instinct that built the company: do the unglamorous work, learn from every project, and turn the pattern into a product. We didn't just build software. We built trust. We built a culture. We built each other. That's the part of the next ten years I'm most looking forward to getting right again.