DEV Community: Arshad Azeez M

I Started a Company the Same Month I Started College. Here's Why.

Arshad Azeez M — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:17:14 +0000

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

I Was a Biology Student With No Laptop. I Wrote Code in a Diary. Here's What I Built.

Arshad Azeez M — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:32:21 +0000

By Arshad Azeez M — Founder & CEO of SidhiLynx, Electronics Engineering student at Anna University, Chennai

Let me tell you something that sounds a little crazy.

I started learning to code with no laptop, no computer, no system. I was a biology student in 12th standard — not computer science, not engineering. Biology. And I wanted to code.

So I did the only thing I could. I wrote code in my diary.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Pen and paper. I'd write Java programs in a notebook, then use OCR to extract the text, paste it into Programiz, and run it. That's how I learned. That's how I wrote my first loops, my first functions, my first programs.

Did it make sense? Not always. Did it work? Sometimes. Did I stop? No.

Why did I even start?

I just liked building things. That's honestly it. No grand plan, no startup vision, no money goal. I just saw software and thought — I want to make that.

After 12th, I picked up Java. Then Python. Then Dart. Then Flutter. One after another, self-taught, no formal training, just tutorials and trial and error and a lot of frustration.

Here's a formula I believe in deeply:

If you were given a job with no salary, no credit, no media visibility — and you had to do it for your entire life — would you still do it? If yes, that's your purpose.

For me the answer was always yes. I'd build software even if nobody ever knew my name. That's how I knew this was real.

The First Project — Travelling the World Without a Map

My first real project was a YouTube clone.

I suffered. A lot. I watched hours and hours of tutorials. I didn't understand half of what was happening. I hit walls constantly. But I kept going — and eventually, it worked. A full video platform. Built by me. From scratch.

That was the moment. That confidence boost when something you struggled with for weeks finally works — there's nothing like it.

But something interesting happened while building the comment section.

I was sitting there coding comments, replies, likes — and I thought: wait. Isn't this basically WhatsApp?

That one thought turned into my next project — a full end-to-end encrypted real-time chat application. Except this time I was also learning Firebase for the first time. No experience. No guide that matched exactly what I was building. Just me, searching, reading, trying, failing, trying again.

Travelling the world without a map. That's the only way I can describe it.

What I've Built Since Then

After those first two projects I couldn't stop. Here's what I've shipped independently:

Encrypted Real-Time Chat System — E2E encrypted messaging with group support, built on Flutter + Firebase
Video Streaming Platform — Full upload, playback, channels and subscriptions
Audio Streaming Platform — Cross-platform audio with playlists and artist pages
Instapresent — AI-powered face recognition attendance system using Flutter + Firebase + Flask
Mikey — A voice-first AI chatbot powered by Mistral. You talk, it talks back. No typing.
Lumetrix — An automated pipeline that scrapes JupyterLab, injects code, captures outputs, and generates a complete academic PDF with flowcharts and algorithms. Zero manual formatting.
EngDraft / CADEVEL — An engineering education platform that generates step-by-step technical drafting explanations from natural language

All of this while studying. All of this self-taught. All of this because I like building.

In December 2025 I registered SidhiLynx as a company under India's MSME framework — a technology holding entity for all these platforms. I'm 18. I'm in my first year of Electronics Engineering at Anna University, Chennai.

The Thing Nobody Tells You

You don't need the perfect setup to start. I didn't have a laptop. I wrote code in a diary.

You don't need a computer science degree. I studied biology.

You don't need to know the full path before you start. I built a comment section and accidentally invented my next project.

The only thing you need is to genuinely like what you're building. Because the nights when nothing works, when you've been staring at the same bug for 4 hours, when you feel like you have no idea what you're doing — the only thing that keeps you going is that you actually want to be there.

Ask yourself that question. The no salary, no credit, no visibility one.

If the answer is yes — stop waiting. Open a tab. Start building.

The map will appear as you go.

Arshad Azeez M is the founder and CEO of SidhiLynx, a technology company based in Chennai, India. He is currently pursuing B.Tech Electronics Engineering (VLSI Design and Technology) at Anna University. You can find him at ceo.sidhi.xyz

Tags: beginners career webdev flutter