Aug 1992Ma Foi is founded on 15 August. He and his wife start it in a market of some ten thousand mostly one-man placement agencies and twenty pages of newspaper classifieds. The first overseas deputation follows in September, for the EPC company Foster Wheeler, and flexi staffing has a first customer in India.
Dec 1992Babri, and a year with no market. He had put about ₹10 lakh into visiting eighteen or nineteen countries and delivered more than 7,000 profiles when Middle Eastern countries, Malaysia and Indonesia barred Indian manpower for a year. He borrowed at 80 to 90% meter interest in Chennai and pushed a 25-person team into compensation and market surveys. He traces the firm's later eight lines of business to that year.
1994Apple enters India. Ma Foi is exclusively retained to recruit almost 250 people, five directors among them, and sets itself a target of doubling revenue every year.
1997The IT boom, then Y2K. A niche in engineers for EPC and process-power projects turns into volume hiring, and the market grows ten to a hundred times over, bigger again after 1999.
2000India's first venture round in HR. ₹8.5 crore from three VCs against ₹10 crore of turnover that already makes Ma Foi the market leader, funding Singapore, Dubai, New Jersey and London offices opened at once and the industry's first real brand spend, which buys 7% top-of-mind recall against the nearest rival's 1%. Until then the equity came from 276 friends, relatives, employees and employers, cheques from ₹3,000 to ₹40 lakh.
2004A Dutch multinational buys in. The first foreign acquirer in Indian HR takes out all 276 shareholders at 14 to 24 times their money.
2008-10The poor exit. The Dutch parent is itself taken over in a largely hostile deal, he runs for Parliament in 2009, and at the end of 2010 a ₹1,000 crore company with 72,000 deputies, 2,000 permanent employees and eight lines of the value chain sells at what he still calls a very poor valuation.
2015CIEL HR starts, after the non-compete. He left a ₹10,000 crore industry in which Ma Foi's ₹1,000 crore was market leadership, and came back to a ₹1.76 lakh crore one with nine segments, twelve multinationals, listed players and private-equity money. The Ma Foi brand came back only through an arbitration that concluded in 2019.
TodayNumber eight, aiming at the top five. CIEL is at ₹1,100 crore and compounding near 51% against the industry's 15%, with about 790 full-timers and 36,000 deputies, and plans a BSE and NSE listing in five or six months to fund the run at number one.
