This Indian-American’s app lets shoppers instantly locate products in nearby stores

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For years Srirajasekhar “Bobby” Koritala, an IT entrepreneur living in Naperville, Illinois, wanted to be able to shop at a nearby store rather than wait for it to arrive by mail. It took him 15 years to make that a reality.

Koritala, the founder of Bodaty (Bodaty.com) – which he will have you know, is pronounced ‘bo-dhuh-ti’, “is a Sanskrit word meaning perceiving, learning, and awakening” recently  released an app that will help shoppers hone in on a local store that may be carrying the thing they want from the Internet of Things.

The app that helps you do this is called Samyata, which yet again Koritala will have you know as he did this author, is Sanskrit for “equal to, equality and evenness.” Everyone he speaks to or anyone who reads the names of his company and the app, mispronounce them, he laughs. But he’s okay with that so long as they get the idea. The reason for choosing a word like ‘Samyata’ as the name of the new system, was because “We are equalizing the playing field for everyone,” the small to medium and big vendors, he emphasized.

Bodaty, aims to apply cutting-edge technology to improve everyday life, and in line with that objective, it announced the launch of the Samyata retail ecosystem, Feb. 27, an app suite designed to help shoppers buy what they want from local stores which will list their products with the online Samyata ‘store,’ and pick up their purchase or have it delivered through personal shoppers. Each step has a dedicated app which can be downloaded from the Apple App or Google Play Stores.

“(Samyata) was 15 years in the making,” Koritala told News India Times. He came to this country at the age of 17, from Chennai, studied computer science and physics at Coe College, moving on to tod computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and then studying at the prestigious Kellogg School of Management.

By fusing online and physical shopping, Samyata will help stores make more money and save the American Main Street, Koritala says in a company press release.

The three parts of the Samyata Ecosystem are seamlessly integrated to provide a geographically specific, simple buying/selling experience, Bodaty claims.

The way it works is, stores list their inventories on Samyata Store, providing them the benefits of an online-mobile marketplace and access to shoppers searching to buy what the stores are selling; Shoppers use Samyata to search for what they want to buy, which they find in nearby stores and can buy from wherever they are via the app.

“They no longer need to search through multiple stores or wait for e-commerce delivery,” Bodaty says. Shoppers can either pick up their purchase in-store or have a personal shopper bring it to them. The Samyata Personal Shopper app lets people earn money delivering purchases to shoppers near them, a more lucrative gig economy job, the Indian-American company says.

“It’s a highly scalable serverless system, completely cloud-based. It goes where you need it to, and it doesn’t consume that much of resources,” Koritala told News India Times. Currently working on Chicago and Minneapolis markets, he said, it is currently focused on smaller stories. “If we have all the Mom & Pop stores with us, then others will follow,” he predicts.

Koritala is married to Rachel Koritala, also a scientist, who graduated from Brown University in Materials Science & Engineering.