When he was doing lettering for classmates in boarding school in Rajasthan, Satya Rajpurohit had no inkling that this skill would lead him to head a design firm that has developed 450 font families for 20 writing systems.

Recognizing the Gap

Satya co-founded Indian Type Foundry (ITF) in 2009 in Ahmedabad. The vast linguistic diversity of India, with over 11 official writing systems and numerous languages, was largely underserved by the global typographic industry.

"We started ITF with just one font family (Fedra Hindi). Since then, we have produced over 450 font families, including 300 retail font families available for licensing and around 150 custom and open-source fonts," says Satya.

First Big Break

The company secured Star Plus as one of its first clients, who licensed their first Hindi font. This validation from a major broadcaster proved there was demand for quality Indian fonts.

Creating fonts for Indian languages is more challenging than world languages because Indian languages are complex to draw and have larger character sets that require several months, sometimes even years, to design.

Building a Global Foundry

Today, ITF clocks an annual revenue of close to $2 million and has around 300 clients from Fortune 500 companies. Among its clients are giants like Apple, Google, Samsung, Sony, Amazon, Hyundai, and Disney.

Satya has been featured in Fortune India's '40 Under 40' list for three consecutive years and GQ India's '50 Most Influential Young Indians' list.

Their most popular font is the Kohinoor series. "Before Kohinoor, there was no font that could support all Indian languages. Apple has licensed the Kohinoor family. If you get a message in Hindi or Gujarati from an Apple device, the font will be from our Kohinoor series."

In 2021, they launched Fontshare, providing 25% of their retail font library for free, to make high-quality fonts accessible to everyone.