August 2025. Two things happened at the same time.
I walked into Anna University, Chennai as a first-year Electronics Engineering (VLSI) student. And I started building what would eventually become SidhiLynx.
Not because I had a plan. Because I had a problem in front of me and I could not look away from it.
The Problem Nobody Was Solving
Engineering colleges in India hand students a workflow that looks reasonable on paper. Assignments. Lab sessions. Submissions. Code and output — documented, dated, submitted.
The reality is different.
Our college ran a self-hosted Jupyter Lab environment on cheap virtual machines. Machines that crashed. Machines that went offline with no warning. Machines that were simply unavailable when students needed them most — right before a submission deadline.
And here is the part that frustrated me most: not every student owns a laptop. In a batch of engineering students expected to submit code assignments, a significant number had no personal machine at all. They depended entirely on those VMs. When the VMs went down, they had nothing.
The college was not going to fix this quickly. The students were not going to stop having deadlines. Someone had to build something.
Lumetrix v1: Ugly, Functional, Real
Between September and October 2025 — roughly a month into college — the first version of Lumetrix was built. Not a platform. Not an ecosystem. A single, focused tool that did one thing.
A student entered their roll number and their college Jupyter Lab credentials. That was it. Our system took over — hitting the endpoint, pulling their code, generating a formatted PDF complete with the code, the output, an algorithm breakdown, and a flowchart. Then it sent that PDF directly to their email.
No laptop required. No crashed VM panic. No missed submission.
The second version went further. Because the Jupyter Lab server was so unreliable, we built a pinging mechanism that checked the server every ten minutes. The moment it came back online, the system triggered automatically — generated the PDFs for every enrolled student and delivered them without any manual action needed.
Around 100 PDFs were generated through this system. Many students received it free — I met them personally and gave them access codes. Some paid. Within the first month, we made our first revenue: ₹2,597.
That number might look small. It was not small. It was proof.
Today, that same core idea — automated lab record and manual generation — lives on inside Lumetrix Classrooms, refined and built properly into a platform that institutions can adopt.
The Engineering Graphics Incident
A few weeks into college, sitting in an engineering graphics examination, I watched something happen that I could not stop thinking about afterward.
A question came up — a plane perpendicular to HP, parallel to VP — the kind of spatial visualization problem that engineering drawing is built on. Some students, stuck, did what students do: they tried to get help.
They sent the question to ChatGPT. They sent it to Gemini.
Both tools responded with lengthy text explanations. Step-by-step procedures. Paragraphs of description about how to approach the drawing.
Nobody in that exam hall had time to read two pages of instructions and then reconstruct a precise technical drawing from scratch. They needed to see it. They needed motion — a step-by-step visual that showed exactly how the drawing came together.
Neither of the world's most advanced AI tools could do that.
I went home and researched. I expected to find someone already solving this. I found nobody.
So I picked it up. That became EngDraft.
Why Build a Company at All?
By late 2025, I had two products taking shape — Lumetrix and EngDraft — solving two completely different problems. I had a small group of people I trusted helping me build. I had paying users.
What I did not have was a structure.
I had been studying how companies like Alphabet operate — how they hold distinct products under one roof, centralize resources and revenue, and let each product grow with its own identity. That model made sense to me. Each product I was building had its own purpose, its own users, its own roadmap. What they shared was a team, a treasury, and a direction.
On December 31st, 2025, I registered SidhiLynx under MSME. Someone suggested I wait and register on January 1st, 2026 — a cleaner date, a symbolic new beginning.
I registered that day instead.
SidhiLynx is the holding entity. Every product we build — Lumetrix, EngDraft, and what comes after — operates under it. Revenue flows centrally. Resources move between products without friction. The team has one home.
Where We Are Now
SidhiLynx is a lean team of four. We are MSME registered. We are not funded by anyone except the students who believed in what we were building early enough to pay for it.
Lumetrix has grown into an ecosystem. Lumetrix Learn is a practice and portfolio platform for engineering students — supporting software languages, database tools, and hardware description languages like VHDL, Verilog, and SystemVerilog. Every certificate issued is a permanently hosted live page, not a PDF. Every student who completes a course gets an auto-generated portfolio. Lumetrix Classrooms gives institutions the ability to build private courses, run time-locked lab assessments, and issue branded certificates to their students.
Colleges have already agreed to adopt Lumetrix Classrooms. One of them is Anna University — the same institution where this entire thing started.
Lumetrix Dev is in development.
EngDraft is coming.
And there is more being designed that I am not ready to talk about yet.
What SidhiLynx Is
The products define the mission. Each thing we build exists because a real problem existed first and nobody had solved it properly. That is not a philosophy we decided on — it is simply what has been true from the beginning.
What connects everything is a standard: build things that are genuinely useful, build them well, and build them to last.
I am a first-year student. SidhiLynx is a few months old. Neither of those facts changes what we are building or how seriously we are building it.
The work continues.
Arshad Azeez M is the Founder and CEO of SidhiLynx, a technology company based in Chennai, India. SidhiLynx products include the Lumetrix ecosystem and EngDraft.
Lumetrix Learn: lumetrixlearn.sidhi.xyz
SidhiLynx: sidhi.xyz
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