Karan Shah


Photo of Karan Shah.

"Purdue Engineering has been instrumental in shaping my thought process and building my world exposure as a young adult. Purdue not only taught us the technical skills that allow me to make sound decisions based on technology as we are a hardcore engineering company but also created a strong foundation of leadership as we were made to work in diverse teams from the get go. My experience doing a study abroad at the Leibniz University in Germany gave me additional exposure to the European tech and business ecosystem which is very helpful as we run a global business today."

Karan Shah | Mechanical Engineering

Executive Director for Business Development, Precision Group

Karan Shah has harnessed his engineering and business degrees to expand Precision Camshafts Limited (PCL), the family operation his father established in India in 1994. Since joining the company six years ago, he has ascended to executive director, led the acquisition of three companies, and diversified into a variety of auto and non-auto component manufacturing facilities in India, Germany, and the Netherlands. The company supplies parts to marquee automotive OEMs across the globe.

He leads EMOSS (Netherlands & India), a one-stop solution for complete electrification of heavy equipment such as trucks, sweepers, military vehicles, and buses. He brought this technology to India, building the electric vehicle (EV) sector from the ground up — starting with just two people and growing to a multi-functional team of 25+ employees. They localized 90% of the supply chain and recently deployed the first batch of vehicles to large e-commerce companies, fleet owners, and government bodies across India. The total market size for this opportunity is over two million light commercial vehicles plying on Indian roads. Shah estimates these solutions, if implemented even on 1% of the diesel vehicles in India, could reduce the total carbon footprint by ~100,000 tons of CO2 per year, the equivalent impact of over 10 million full-grown trees.

Shah took the company public in 2016. PCL now has more than 50,000 stakeholders, and in the last five years has, doubled its revenue, maintained a healthy margin of more than 20%, added 10 new products to its portfolio, onboarded several new customers, and increased its share price by 600%. Shah's ultimate goal is to be an original equipment manufacturer, building and selling lightweight, 100%-electric cargo vehicles to be used for last- and middle-mile applications.