Shanthi spent years chasing meaningful work before building Amazech, a Frisco tech firm now navigating its next reinvention

Shanthi Rajaram never set out to run a company. She set out to build things, first as a civil engineer, then as a technologist, and it took years of being nudged away from work she cared about before she built something of her own.

Shanthi grew up in a middle-class, STEM-oriented family in India, the middle of three kids with a scientist father and a stay-at-home mother. She trained as a civil engineer at the College of Engineering, Trivandrum, and wanted to work in construction. Instead, she kept running into the same wall.

“A consistent pushback was that as a woman engineer, I had limited exposure to what goes on in the field,” she tells Local Profile. Rather than fieldwork, she was routed toward estimation and scheduling at a desk, work that never held her interest.

The shift into technology came almost by accident, driven by the Y2K boom and an opening at Infosys. It paid well, and she stuck with it, working evenings toward a diploma in marketing management on the side. But the first five years at large corporations left her uninspired. “I did not know what my contribution was, what value I was bringing to the table,” she says.

Finding the Real Problem

A move to a healthcare startup in California changed that. The hours were longer, but the work exposed her to the full picture, from user experience to how her code actually affected clients.

“I think that is when it struck me that it is not the technology that I did not like,” she says. “It is just the type of work that I was doing.” The startup eventually plateaued, and by 2006, at 35, she decided to try something on her own, reasoning that if it failed, she could always go back to working for someone else.

Her former employer became her first client. “Why don’t you take this project piece and deliver it?” they told her, and Amazech was born, founded in Frisco in 2007. For eight years, the company grew entirely on word of mouth, with Shanthi never once stepping out to market or sell.

Learning The Business Side The Hard Way

That changed around 2014, when a major client’s payments began slipping, leaving Amazech carrying more than half a million dollars in receivables. Shanthi made the call to walk away from the account, a decision that cost the company revenue and required layoffs.

“That was the most stressful time as an entrepreneur,” she says. “A lot of self-doubt.” It pushed her, an introvert with young kids at home, into networking for the first time, showing up to evening events in downtown Dallas she once dreaded.

Amazech grew again, diversified its client base, weathered COVID and by 2024 and 2025 landed on the Inc. 5000 list, along with a No. 23 ranking on the SMU Dallas 100.

Now the company is pivoting again, moving from a pure services model into products and solutions built around AI. “There is no option for us but to embrace it,” she says of the shift.

Paying It Forward

As the first entrepreneur in her family, Shanthi also became the first woman to build a business of her own. These days, much of her focus is on helping other women entrepreneurs navigate the same terrain she once crossed alone. “There is no competition,” she says. “There is enough for everyone to be successful.”

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Shanthi Rajaram is one of Local Profile’s 25th annual Women in Business Summit presented by Bank of America on Sept. 18 at the Hilton Granite Park Hotel, Plano. She will join seven other powerhouse women for a full day of inspiring conversations, networking and more.

Tickets are sold out — join the waitlist now!

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