Deepak Siddharth of RDX Digital: my hybrid digital printing breakthrough

We spoke to Deepak Siddharth – CEO and founder of RDX Digital – about the challenge of starting a print machine manufacturer from scratch and taking on the global status quo from India.

The international print machine industry is a well-established market largely dominated by recognisable names. Therefore, it would take a certain amount of courage for anyone to think they might be able to infiltrate the club and claim a slice for themselves. And it would require even more ambition to think it could be done by a company based in India: not a nation particularly well represented in global print machinery.

But RDX Digital’s founder and CEO Deepak Siddharth isn’t short of courage, ambition and some other key qualities that meant such an idea is proving increasingly viable.

“I don’t think there has probably ever been a printer who’s made a hybrid digital printing machine before,” Deepak laughs. “But I know the problems involved in this business; I know the bottlenecks that can be caused in this business, and I know what kind of automation and what kind of functionalities really make it easier for the user of the machine.”

Deepak isn’t ‘just’ a printer (and now print machine manufacturer) – his previous career was as a software engineer. Fifteen years ago, he developed a piece of t-shirt customisation software and, to go with that, he used all his savings to buy his first print machine. But with little in the way of customer support, Deepak had to learn to do the maintenance and repairs for that machine himself. While it was a learning curve, it set the foundation for what RDX Digital would become and, in 2016, a visit to China opened Deepak’s eyes to new possibilities.

“Where I come from – Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, India – is probably the second biggest area for T-shirt manufacturing in the whole world,” Deepak said.

“Previously, I had been using a European machine. But once I procured the Chinese machines, production speed went from 30 or 40 pieces per hour to 300 or 350 pieces per hour. So the truth is, I started RDX Digital because I simply wanted to make better machines that I could use myself.”

From that genesis and the initial goal in January 2024 of making one or two machines for his own use each year, RDX Digital is now making seven or…