Meet NxtQuantum’s Madhav Sheth who is building the next gen of India-made smartphones
Even a few minutes with Madhav Sheth, 45, founder and CEO of NxtQuantum Shift Technologies, is enough to see he’s no archetypal tech entrepreneur. Spend longer, and the impression only deepens. For one, he sees himself less as a technologist and more as a businessman. “You don’t need to be a techie to build a tech company—you can always hire the right people,” he says. Too much obsession with the product, he warns, makes you forget the user. His mantra: 20% technical, 30% financial, and 50% business mindset. Then there are his quirks. He likes to call his motorcycle a “gadget”. And when asked for a quote that shaped his life, he doesn’t cite anyone else’s wisdom but his own: “Build mystery—it’s a powerful offence and defence strategy.”
Unconventional, yes—and that’s a word that defines Sheth who is betting that NxtQuantum’s India-made smartphones, bundled with a homegrown operating system, can loosen China’s iron grip on the market. It’s a tall order even for someone who knows the market well, but then Sheth has never taken the beaten path. His family, for instance, carries neither business nor technology DNA. His father, Prakash Sheth, was a banker; his brother followed the same path. Nothing in his upbringing suggested he would one day launch a tech company. The divergence, Sheth insists, was deliberate. “I never wanted to be a banker—there’s no point in creating wealth for someone else,” he says. With NxtQuantum, he is determined to create it for himself— “and for India”. Business may be his bias, but Sheth’s love for technology runs deep.
As a boy, he was hooked on video games, especially tennis on his Atari console. “I broke four or five joysticks trying to perfect my shots,” he laughs. Though his father eventually banned them, Sheth found cheaper substitutes and kept playing. He was just as intrigued by how cassettes drove visuals on screen—his first glimpse into how machines processed input. He later also “learnt to code”. Financial constraints pushed Sheth toward a commerce degree at St. Xavier’s College in 1998, but they also sharpened his business instincts.
While interning at Archies Gallery to pay for his studies, he saw how a ₹100 instant SMS pack could disrupt greeting cards that took days to deliver. “That’s when I realised tech can wipe out entire industries,” he says. Even when doing his two-year MBA at Harvard Business School in 2000, Sheth sold mobile recharges and exported phones to Latin America to pay rent and tuition. “Ten cents a phone—10,000 phones, $1,000. That’s how I survived.”
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After stints at Synopsys and Priory Business Group in the US, he co-founded Perfect Communications, a distributor of Samsung phones in Mumbai, in 2008.Sheth exited the company in 2016, around the time he completed a law degree at the University of Essex “to better understand geopolitics.”
He joined OPPO as India sales director in 2017, co-founded Realme, and later revived Honor phones via HTech in 2023. Lessons from Africa and ChinaSheth believes his early exposure to mobile tech—and years spent building Chinese smartphone brands in India—have given him a ringside view of how fast consumer behaviour evolves, and the fortitude to handle rough and scary situations. Around 2005, for instance, he was doing an internship with a mobile market research firm—he prefers not to name it—that sent him to Nigeria which was back then in the throes of unrest over oil. Airports were chaotic, strikes shut down entire cities, and tyres burned on the streets. “I didn’t know that I had been dispatched as a scapegoat. I landed in Lagos and realised I needed armed escorts called MOPOLs (Nigerian Mobile Police) just to move around. But I didn’t have that kind of money,” he recalls. When fellow Indians refused to help, it was a Nigerian taxi driver who came to his rescue.
Sheth had just $50 in hand. “He told me to lie flat on the back seat, covered me with a sheet, and drove me safely to Victoria Island, where I could find a hotel,” he says. For seven days, Sheth was stranded as strikes raged, scraping by until he managed to wire money from the U.S. to pay his bills—his company refused to cover the costs. The experience left a deep impression.
While Nigeria’s reputation often inspired fear, Sheth saw another side. “The locals were extremely kind. There’s humanity everywhere if you look for it,” he says. The episode not only toughened him but also opened his eyes to Africa’s potential as a market.
Over the years, Sheth would visit over 28 African nations, gaining a ground-up understanding of demand, distribution, and digital aspirations in the region. Hence, by the time Sheth joined OPPO in 2017, he had already sharpened his instincts around global supply chains and consumer channels. But OPPO has an offline-only model.
“They worked only with Chinese distributors. Flipkart and Amazon were exploding, and I kept telling them—online is the future,” he recalls. At odds with OPPO’s strategy, Sheth pitched a radical idea: launch an independent, online-first brand. “Sky Li (Li Bingzhong), who then headed OPPO’s overseas business, gave me a shot. He said, ‘Build it. If it fails, you go.’ I said, ‘Fine—I’ve got nothing to lose.’”
If we just use Android with a skin, we’re just another vendor. But if we build a lightweight, privacy-focused OS, we create sovereignty.
Working out of a borrowed meeting room at OPPO’s India office, Sheth and a small team launched Realme. Their first phone, built on a discarded OPPO model with a MediaTek P60 chip—then seen as inferior to Qualcomm—sold 80,000 units in 10 minutes. “That proved the market was hungry,” he says. Realme was built by a team of just eight. “I was the first employee. Even Li joined formally only after Realme 2 (about four months later).”
The brand soared, even becoming India’s No. 2 smartphone player in October 2021. Sheth exited Realme in June 2023 to co-found HTech India, which relaunched Honor smartphones (a Huawei sub-brand, sold in November 2020 to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology) in India. Around the same time, he joined Nxtcell as shareholder and director to lead the launch of Alcatel-branded smartphones in India, under license from TCL Communication (owned by Nokia). This July, Sheth launched NxtQuantum’s handset and OS.
Against odds Sheth knows well that despite India being one of the world’s largest smartphone markets, no major domestic brand has made a dent in the last decade. According to research firm Canalys, India shipped 39 million smartphones in the June quarter—yet not a single Indian brand figures in the top five. Chinese brand Vivo (excluding its sub-brand iQOO) led with 8.1 million units shipped, commanding a 21% market share. Samsung followed with 6.2 million units (16%), trailed by OPPO with 5 million. Xiaomi also shipped 5 million units, while Realme, which Sheth once led, came fifth with 3.6 million. By contrast, NxtQuantum is still a minnow. The company claims it has already sold over 100,000 units since launch. “We’ve received purchase orders for more than 300,000 units before Diwali,” says Sheth. “Our target is to hit 1 million units by March end.”
“All the Chinese brands in India—Vivo, OPPO, Realme, OnePlus, iQOO—are owned by a single group: BBK Electronics,” says Sheth. “It’s a duopoly disguised as consumer choice.” He also argues that while these brands dominate demand in India, they’ve made little effort to localise supply. “They use India purely as a consumption market. No R&D (research and development), no design, no serious supply chain movement here. And the worst part—Indian brands haven’t even tried. Lava has less than 1% share. Micromax started strong but now manufactures for Vivo. There’s no real Indian player left,” he explains.
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Sheth points out that India imports nearly ₹5 lakh crore worth of smartphones annually but Indian brands make up barely 0.5% of that market. “That’s embarrassing,” he says, asking, “If we can’t even capture 1% of this ₹5 lakh crore TAM (total addressable market), what are we doing?” Sheth aims to change that with NxtQuantum’s dual strategy: own the hardware via its Ai+ smartphone series, and the software via a new operating system, the NextQuantum OS that is built on Android 15 but with no pre-installed third-party apps. All user data is hosted on Google Cloud’s India regions. “It’s built on three pillars: transparency, privacy, and democratization,” says Sheth.
Transparency begins with visibility. “We created the Next Privacy Dashboard—one tap lets users see what each app accesses: mic, messages, location, background activity. You can revoke access instantly. It’s about awareness, not alarms.” Privacy ties into India’s new Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act. “We offer root access, open APIs (application programming interfaces), and let Indian developers build on top,” Sheth says. “No black boxes.”
Democratization is about access. “Over 450 million Indians still use 2G phones. We sell a full smartphone at ₹4,500. Our 5G models—with 64GB (gigabyte) internal and up to 1TB (terabyte) expandable memory—start at ₹7,500. If you want a sovereign digital nation, it starts with sovereign access.”
NxtQuantum’s first batch of 100,000 units sold out on Flipkart within weeks. “West Bengal, Mumbai, and Delhi were top buyers,” says Sheth. “We’re building deliberately—not everywhere at once. Our team is just 40 people—only eight handling business, and 32 managing the OS.” But why no Amazon or physical stores yet? “I didn’t want to overstretch. You need patience in this game. The phones are manufactured by United Telelinks in Noida. Ratings on Flipkart are strong: 4.4 stars. “Best in our price band,” says Sheth.
NxtQuantum is also bootstrapped—no venture capital (VC), no government grants. “I raised ₹180-200 crore from friends and family, including working capital,” says Sheth. “My background in finance helped. I know how to structure cash flows. I didn’t run to the government for help. I want to prove the concept first.”
For Sheth, building the OS wasn’t optional—it was strategic. “Without your own car, you can’t sell fuel. If we just use Android with a skin, we’re just another vendor. But if we build a lightweight, privacy-focused OS, we create sovereignty.” That being said, Android has a whopping 72% global market share, and iOS accounts for about 27%, according to web traffic analysis site, Statcounter. Further, most Android forks—like CyanogenMod or LineageOS—have fizzled. Forks are custom versions of Android built using its open-source code, often without Google apps or services. India’s Indus OS tried, too, but was absorbed by PhonePe, which now bundles it as Indus Appstore on Xiaomi devices. There’s also BharOS, developed at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras. It’s used by select agencies, but lacks mass-market traction.
To succeed, NxtQuantum must achieve critical mass by winning over both consumers and developers. Sheth insists that while “software gives topline, hardware builds national wealth”. He points out that while China and Taiwan export $900 billion worth of electronics, India does a mere $30 billion. “Even if we get 20% of that, we become a $200 billion economy. We have the users. We have the brains. What we need is intent.”
For Sheth, India can’t just be a demand market. He has proven intent with NxtQuantum. Now he will need his grit, tech passion, business acumen, and global experience to help him succeed.
Leslie D’Monte specialises in technology and science writing.
Source: www.livemint.com