New Director South Asia

Puneet Singh – New Director South Asia to push business development in the region

If anything, year 2021 will mark the year in which Pessl Instruments team has grown significantly and has had the opportunity to welcome wonderful people. Puneet Singh considers himself a lifetime student. His passion is to contribute to global sustainability goals and create societal impact. He loves traveling, music, spiritual pursuit, spending time with his family, and buys more books than he can read.

How will he contribute to the METOS brand and Pessl Instruments team?

We asked Puneet why he joined the Pessl Instruments team, about his past experience, and what he is most excited about in the new job. Here is how he explained:

“I have been very fortunate to have enjoyed a roller coaster career ride. Looking back at my careers spanning 27+ years, I am amazed at the distance I have covered and the experiences I have enjoyed during this time. It is hard to believe that my basic academic degree is engineering in Printing and Graphics. After spending over a decade in the advertising industry, working for some of the most successful global brands, I got the opportunity to work for Microsoft.

In the 15 years (almost) that I spent there, I played multiple roles – managing internal and external communications, corporate social responsibility, business management and operations. In 2016, the Microsoft India Development Center embarked on a Digital India initiative, with the objective to leverage emerging technologies (AI/ML, Blockchain, etc.) to solve some of the hard problems India is facing in education, skilling, agriculture and health sectors. I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to further my passion of creating societal impact having worked with over 150 non-profits while driving CSR for Microsoft. So, I dived right in.

The next four years that followed were the most enjoyable and of immense learning. I deployed several digital transformation solutions partnering with some of the leading global organizations. Some of the projects I worked on include – how to help reduce school dropouts, skilling of the last mile worker, who does not have a desk and is always on the move, early detection of diabetic retinopathy (irreversible loss of eyesight due to diabetes), or myopia in children, predicting cardiac events for healthy individuals without any invasive techniques and of course, helping farmers improve yield and save their produce using solutions our team built such as predicting sowing dates for peanuts, advanced prediction of disease breakouts for cotton and predicting yield of commodities using remote sensing data.

When the pandemic hit the world, I was responsible for global customer and partner relationships and for growing the adoption of Microsoft’s flagship digital agriculture platform called FarmBeats. During this time, I interacted with hundreds of ag-tech organizations, start-ups, government agencies, ministries, development organizations and more.

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One of the partners I worked with, happened to be Pessl. Some of the key projects with strategic customers leveraged Pessl devices for building smart agri solutions. I was impressed by the solutions Pessl offered and my interactions with Gottfried and Vishnu always got me curious to learn more about them. With FarmBeats deciding to go for a product overhaul, backed on my learning and understanding of the key problems faced by the Indian agri sector, I decided to jump over. There is a huge potential for IoT and data driven solutions in agriculture in the South Asia market and I am extremely excited to join the Pessl family to drive its operations for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.”

 

I look back at not only my life and career but also draw inspiration and life lessons from the people I have met and have worked with in the past. There is not one but plenty of past experiences that are ingrained permanently in my mind that I would like to tap into to help me grow into a better person.

I have discovered some amazing people in the Pessl team already and am looking forward to connecting with the rest of the team soon. I am curious and always looking to learn and grow – both professionally and personally. I really look forward to a long and fruitful partnership with all of you. I would like to be a change agent and contribute to sustainable agriculture, helping smallholder farmers be profitable and grow healthy, safe and nutritious food.

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