Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The One Saas To Rule Them All | Ritish Reddy @ Zluri
307 Plays2 years ago
With the deluge of saas tools available today, and the decentralized nature of work, managing these saas subscriptions becomes an administrative nightmare. This is where a company like Zluri comes in. And while this may sound like a trivial problem, by the end of this episode, you will be convinced that this is a massive opportunity.
Additional links:-
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to KooHoo and its mission
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone. My name is Riddish. I'm the co-founder of Zurich. We are the SaaS management platform helping companies manage their SaaS subscriptions from one single dashboard.
00:00:20
Speaker
India believes that every citizen has a fundamental right to education. But actually making this happen requires more than just building education infrastructure. The country also needs to enable access to finance to pay for world-class education.
00:00:36
Speaker
KooHoo is a fintech startup that is solving this problem at scale by using technology. They are in the business of lending to students for their education. And while there are plenty of companies giving loans to students who are joining tier 1 colleges in India and abroad, KooHoo is catering to the long tail of students beyond just tier 1 colleges.
India's lending evolution and KooHoo's innovative approach
00:00:56
Speaker
In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, your host Akshay Dutt talks to the founder of KooHoo, Prashant Bhosle. Prashant is a veteran of the lending industry, having a track record of building up HDFC's student lending business with some enviable numbers. This conversation covers the evolution of lending in India through Prashant's own multi-decade experience and offers fascinating insights about using first principles to disrupt the traditional way of doing businesses.
00:01:23
Speaker
Stay tuned and subscribe to the Founder Thesis Podcast and any audio streaming platform to learn about using first principles to disrupt businesses.
Prashant's personal and entrepreneurial journey
00:01:40
Speaker
Born into a pretty middle-class family. Father was an engineer working in the civil engineering department and public works department and government of Andhra Pradesh. The place where I come from, it's a very small town called Andhrapur in Andhra Pradesh. It is very well known for its drought. So again,
00:01:57
Speaker
most drug prone area in India after Jai Selma Rajasthan. Schooling completely in Aantapur until my 10th grade. So post that I had to move to a different place to take my plus one plus two. So after plus one plus two, so VIP is where I got into. I did my electrical and electronics engineering there.
00:02:16
Speaker
I always wanted to build something. I wanted to do something on my own. There was always that small niche in me. So the one thing which we started doing is I think we were, as we are competing in a lot of these events, extracurricular activities, one of the most popular thing that we used to do was building robots. So there were robotic competitions that were happening across different campuses. So we took pride in being part of it and winning those competitions.
00:02:39
Speaker
And at some point of time, we started building some of these robots. And then me and my friend Raghuendra also used to build these robots. And she had a people who are juniors to us. They used to come and say, can you help us build those robots? We'll pay for you. Oh, okay. So we are doing something with our needs willing to pay for this. So can we bring something around there?
00:02:59
Speaker
I don't think we really took it as a serious personal, but that was the first brush with something called entrepreneurship in hindsight. The TCS experience was having divertically opposite. Like in space, you spent close to three years at TCS post your engineering degree. So did you enjoy that time? It was an interesting experience out there. The initial part of the journey, I was part of very specific client relationship called Cisco, which was just getting started. I think that really helped me a lot in terms of team building, stakeholder management.
00:03:28
Speaker
really value that experience from the kind of multi-dimensional perspectives that it gave me. Honestly speaking, today I'm able to relate to a lot of things that I'm doing. So post-tetious, I haven't done any state, which was as large organization as TCS was.
00:03:43
Speaker
So I can see that you joined SPJN as the B-School to do your MBA from. And at the same time, you also had your own startup tell you about that. There are a few docs there. What I wanted to do was an MBA and I wanted to do it somewhere outside of India because I had great things about a lot of these best business schools which are out there. And so I was preparing for my GMI, gave it up to some of the IT schools as well. So when I got into the schools, so there was this
00:04:09
Speaker
Initiator that was run back then, it was called Jagrati, which was back then sponsored by TCS. But this is a 16-day train journey which takes you across India. So every day you are in a different part of India, right from Kanyakumari on the way to the northernmost tip.
00:04:24
Speaker
And you get to see how people are building social enterprises, and then you come back to the train. There are 400 people from all parts of the world, someone from Brown University, someone who hasn't even studied anything, but they have excellent certain people. So you have this very, very diverse community, diverse group coming.
00:04:42
Speaker
So I was planning to go to the US. Then I come here. It was like that Swadeesh woman. She was my mother-in-law. And so there are so many people trying to make a difference or wonder what they are doing with my life. So that was the Swadeesh moment for me. I think that was the time in which the movie came as well. And every day, Martin used to wake up in the train, used to sleep in the train, used to bath in the train. You used to have discussions in the train. So when you wake up, you used to smell the soil, right? That every day you wake up in a different place, it was different experience.
00:05:12
Speaker
That brought me really to the ground and said, hey, what do you want to do? Where do you want to go there? There are so many people building. Yeah. And that juncture. So a few things have happened. I got admins from my, for my school in the U S a bunch of them. I haven't, I decided I quit my job at TCF at that point of time.
00:05:30
Speaker
And I went to this journey and then at that journey, I decided not to go to the US. So what do I do now?
Experience with early startups and leadership
00:05:37
Speaker
So that was a question mark that I had. So that's where his vision was that you can be global, but still closer to your roots. And then, and I didn't waste two years. I thought it was a waste at that point of time. I didn't want to do a two year MBA. This was one year. This was the Mumbai campus or Dubai campus?
00:05:53
Speaker
This was actually the Tri-City program, which is Dubai, Singapore. And I think when we did it, there was more Sydney, but later Sydney came in. It was called Global MB. So that was a last minute decision that I have to take and then started with it. So that's where it was. And while I was at campus, again, the specialization that I took was finance because I thought that's something that I don't know. Let me learn what finance is and then eventually I would need to know that.
00:06:17
Speaker
And while I was there, again, was trying to find the core group who had similar interests like me. And that's when I come back to a friend, why it shows his name. So we were discussing one bunch of ideas or both of us were fast about photography. And we said, Hey, today there is no marketplace for photographers, which is out there.
00:06:34
Speaker
And there were a lot of conversations around marriage, wedding, all of those happening at that point. If you want to hire a photographer for wedding, where do you go? There was no great answer to that. Then he said, why don't we build a marketplace for photographers, like an upwork for photographers, like tapping into the gig economy, basically.
00:06:50
Speaker
Why aren't you today the founder of a photographer discovery platform? Multiple learning points there. So while I wanted to get into entrepreneurship, he wanted to take up a job for various reasons. And at the same time, the market that we are in was Singapore. It was very small. Again, that's a learning from a business perspective. The total size of the market was small.
00:07:10
Speaker
The opportunity was small. So those were the learnings which we had running that. When it was in hindsight, again, it was more like a passion project and something that can be scaled into a larger enterprise. It would have never grown beyond a lifestyle business. That's right. That's right. Got it. Okay. Then tell me about your posting BA corporate journey.
00:07:31
Speaker
Yeah, post MBA, again, I never wanted to do a job, but I had a specialization in finance and back then my ex boss from TCL said, Hey, what are you doing? I said, Hey, I've done this. I wanted to do something. I'm just figuring it out. I didn't go to the placements at all. So there were campus placement. So again, I took that decision not to attend any of those placements because I didn't want to do a job.
00:07:53
Speaker
So that's when I had a chat with him. And then he said, we are trying to build something. We have a consulting practice out there. We are trying to do something very different from the business, what TCS does. So that's when I joined the global consulting practice, trying to see if we can bring something ground up in a specific area. But again, it was very slow for me. And I was having a chat with one of my professors at business school. His name is Rajeev Jayaman.
00:08:18
Speaker
So he's the one who are bouncing off our ideas and our plan of building the previous photography startup. It was called 35mm Pro. And he knew how we are building it and stuff. Then I will suddenly see a message on Facebook, Hey, can we meet in Bangalore? So then I come to Bangalore and meet him. They said, Hey, I'm trying to build a simulation based startup. He was already working on it. He was trying to build a business simulation. They were speaking at the business school and trying to build a few products around this.
00:08:45
Speaker
He said, hey, I'm trying to build this. I'm trying to scale. So this is a product for human resources. Something which helps employees to learn skills through a simulator. Is that what he was trying to do? Absolutely. This is like pilots have flight simulators. So if you want to launch a leadership skills or team building skills or team management skills. So how do you do it? Why should it be textbook driven? Why should someone teach you? Can you play a game and learn from it? So that's kind of simulations that he was building.
00:09:13
Speaker
And he said, let's meet for a chat. And then I met him and he said, Hey, I'm trying to build this. Why don't you join me? That's how I said, okay. Anyway, I wanted to build it. This is an opportunity to build. Back then it was predominantly a services company. We were trying to make it a product company. So it was, I thought maybe I'm not doing, I'm not liking what I'm doing. I eventually want to build and this is a good opportunity for me to build. So that was the, that's how I joined a non-scape very early on as part of the founding actually.
00:09:41
Speaker
When I was doing my MBA, this was like, I passed out in 2002. So that's 20 years back, but we had some simulators, like we had a simulation during that, which was essentially the professor put a bunch of students in a room and then there were these papers, which were distributed to us, which had instructions and we had to interact with each other. It could be about negotiating. It could be there's one customer and one supplier and things like that. So was it like that what I experienced 20 years back that he was trying to build or what was he building?
00:10:10
Speaker
Yeah, it was similar. Just further in a digital format, say you want to learn leadership skills. There's a virtual platform, which is out there. There is a case study, which you have where you are taking up the role of a senior leader, a bunch of scenarios within an organization playing out microeconomic citations are there. And then there are 10 people reporting into you. Now you have 90 minutes.
00:10:31
Speaker
where you need to manage these stakeholders and say, there is a goal. It can be a sales target that you need to have. So based on these actions that you take, there is a reaction to it. It's not as simple. It's a very complex, complex algorithm that is running behind it. But managing these virtual stakeholders, you learn leadership skills. The good part was based on the actions that you take in the backend. So there are a million or data points that we are capturing based on your actions, behaviors, all of that stuff on the platform.
00:10:59
Speaker
And at the end of it, we give a very detailed report saying, how are you as a leader? What are the gaps that you had? How could you become better? So it also is a diagnostic tool why you are playing the situation. And based on what are you as a leader, how can you become a better leader?
00:11:15
Speaker
That's one of the simulation, but we started off with few simulations, but eventually we built a portfolio of circuits over a period of time. These are not like group activities where a bunch of people would be like in a room doing it together because the stakeholders are virtual. So like this would be more of a solo exercise. You had the group questions as well. So you can do it individually or certain games can be played in groups. You had both variants.
00:11:39
Speaker
like groups are sitting together working on one laptop or like each person had their own laptop and you can do multiple formats. We used to support multiple formats and you had a leaderboard. You can see how other people are doing. You can compete against them and there can be multiple actors, one playing one role, other person playing another role. So you had different formats of simulations that we've been able to build over a period of time.
00:12:03
Speaker
Again, we used to work with most of the major business schools, Kellogg and CIDMIT. So on the major global Ivy League schools for our customers. And what we used to do was we used to license all of these products and then send it to business school. So that's what other business schools. So we used to distribute that as well. To help the students to develop leadership skills or whatever. Okay.
00:12:25
Speaker
That's right because we were working with Ivy League schools. So the concepts that these professors were writing or talking about used to be published on books and they used to become textbooks and other parts of the world. So that gave the usage a lot of value in terms of the outcome that they're able to deliver. So that's phase one. I think it was very short. I think a couple of years we did that.
00:12:46
Speaker
and later realized that we would need our own IP to become a product-led company from services. For such a restarted developing our IP, we used to bring in subject-matrix perch on our own and start building these assets for different use cases. And who were you sending the IP to? Was it like to corporate trainers or to B-schools or directly to corporates?
00:13:06
Speaker
Yeah. So initial part, again, we were the school focus. We were working with most of the business schools, which are out there. And then we said business schools, the cycle banks are larger, the ticket size are smaller. And then we realized corporate side, there are better opportunities and larger ticket sizes and there are larger problems that are able to solve because.
The birth of Zluri during COVID-19
00:13:24
Speaker
Unlike just a simulation that you would have played, what we've also built is a very strong analytics engine around it, a diagnostic engine. So the diagnostics are not really relevant in the context of an educational institution. They're not really looking at that data. So companies, corporates used to leverage the data for multiple decision-making points, right? Right from training to identifying high-performing talent.
00:13:48
Speaker
high potential succession planning promotion. So this was becoming a very, very powerful tool and we were able to unlock a lot of use cases on the corporate side. So that's when we started pivoting to corporate and I think for a period of time we would have worked with over 600 odd companies and I would say I think 50% of the Fortune 500 companies out there. So eventually it was a corporate driven business. Again, it was a mix of product and services because you would need to deliver the product as well.
00:14:17
Speaker
We used to train some trainers. In certain cases, we used to bring trainers, train them and deploy them to these companies. And we used to train the trainer model also used to exist. So multiple deployment models, but it was a mix of product and service actually. So that was phase three. Phase three is when we had a huge portfolio of products. We started to bundle all of them onto our platform.
00:14:38
Speaker
And then we used to offer it as a SaaS offering to customers. So that was a purely SaaS model. This customer would either be a training agency or a corporate, which has an in-house training team who are mature enough to make use of it. Yeah. Training agencies are a channel partner for us. So there were a bunch of channel partners across the globe who used to license the products from us. We would have trained some of the trainers and then they take the product. Are there?
00:15:03
Speaker
So corporate trainers, they have their own internal trainers and also the product was in shape and format where it can be delivered in the sense of how much. Just like your LinkedIn learning courses, you can go and watch the course, play the game, get the report and get the debrief. So that was three different journeys as a business award. And how will you guys not skip today?
00:15:23
Speaker
I think it's around 150 employees. I don't think I can reveal the number, but around 150 very last lift. I haven't seen that in a recent past, but I think it's around that number. And no external funding. No, I think we raised a couple of rounds of funding. One round happened very recently, a couple of months back as well. Okay. Okay. What made you leave and what was the trigger and tell me about this is probably the idea for Zuri came to you. So tell me about that.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah. So I think Zluri has three co-founders actually. So I'm one of them. And I also have Seethu and Chaitanya, who are my co-founders. So all three of us were part of the founding team at Norm Stipp, the previous company where we work. So while we were in this journey, I think one thing which we realized was that the whole challenge of managing our own subscription. So we are owning P&Ls for different regions, driving different strategic initiatives.
00:16:14
Speaker
I think this was a time when the pandemic was about to start or people are talking about cancellation of programs because COVID was spreading in different parts of the world. So we were pretty big in Southeast Asia, China, all these places where our business was happening. And there was a sudden cancellation of programs, all of that stuff. And I think we were starting to see it happening, that this is going to, this something is happening. We weren't sure what was happening, but we knew that this is going to impact the business.
00:16:42
Speaker
So the first thing that we did was we tried to see where are our spins happening and what do we need to manage better. So obviously number one spin was people and number two was spin on technology. That was the second largest spin that we had. So we started looking at where are we spinning and that's when we realized the mess that was out there. When I say mess.
00:17:01
Speaker
because we didn't have one single source of truth which tells us the tools that you are using. So we had an Excel sheet which barely captured 20-25% of the tools that we are using and there were 75% of the tools that I was using, why co-founders were using. So that was not in the Excel sheet.
00:17:19
Speaker
I'm not able to visualize how there could be so many tools that you would be using. Like, for example, I use Gmail. I pay a subscription for that. Some people may be paying a subscription for LinkedIn. Can you set a context? What kind of subscriptions were they? Absolutely. I think one of the fundamental differences that started to happen was earlier it was on-prem systems. So if you had to do a meeting with customer, you use Webex and that's the end of it.
00:17:44
Speaker
There are so many point-in-time solutions. For example, I have to do a customer meeting today. So first thing that technology that I buy is a Chili Piper or Calendly. Someone has to book a meeting with me. So they have booked a meeting with me. Now I need to send an invite where Gmail or Google Calendar comes in. The email is sent.
00:18:02
Speaker
So now once an email is sent, as part of the email, you attach the Google Zoom link or one of those tools which is out there, then you get zoom for that. So now I'm on zoom. I want to track what is the conversation that is happening. How is the conversation happening? Now I get Wingman into it, which is like a transcription tool. It does live transcription and slags what conversation happened and so on.
00:18:25
Speaker
Absolutely, we tell that around, hey, how is the conversation happening? Are you speaking a lot? Is the customer speaking a lot? And if you bring up a competitor, name it flags, hey, they are talking about this competitor, you should bring up this point to them. So that's the tool that we use. And then sometimes after the meeting, then there is a transcription that needs to happen. So then we use the tool called Otter. So once the system that needs to be pushed into Salesforce, then the CRM, then we use something called troops to push data into CRM.
00:18:54
Speaker
So multiple other things, a small use case, which was earlier where we were using one or two tools now is broken down into 10, 15 tools. I'm talking about one use case. And if I take my entire day, there are like at least 15, 20 use cases and each use case, three to four tools. That's the volume of tools that we are leveraging at any point of time.
00:19:13
Speaker
Now, if you expand this to number of employees, number of departments, number of business units, the scheme is enormous. And there is a huge long tail of applications that you didn't even have heard about. And we are talking about tools that we are able to detect.
Challenges in SaaS management and Zluri's solution
00:19:29
Speaker
And there are so many tools that people go and sign up for free. And I'm talking about tools that I'm paying for, but we go and sign up for free. We don't pay anything. We bring in those tools into our ecosystem.
00:19:38
Speaker
Each function would have their own, like finance would be using some software for invoicing and a different software for bookkeeping. And maybe for paying vendors, there would be a different software of managing vendors. Similarly, marketing would be using some sort of drip marketing and truck spot and a lot of these marketing tools. Okay. Got it.
00:19:58
Speaker
Absolutely. So again, the other fundamental shift here is on-prem. So all the tools were costing you a lot. You used to pay 100K, 200K, 300K, or a million dollars for software. So the entire procurement was routed through your centralized team. Now with the world of SaaS, you and I can swipe our cards, pay $5 and get a tool. And sometimes even we don't need to pay those $5. We have a premium plan, all of that stuff.
00:20:23
Speaker
So the barriers to entry for a tool to come into organizations are very late today. So all of that are leading to that proliferation of applications within organizations. So that's how the scenario was in our previous company or for that matter, any company. So that's something that we realized.
00:20:40
Speaker
So the idea of Zluri, that was not the exception. That's a problem that we fixed. So now we wanted to solve it for Zluri, bigger for Dollscape, because we wanted to find the right solution, bring down the cost, optimize manage and all that stuff. So we went into the market, looked at what's available. So then we found a bunch of them, brought them into the organization to do a POC, try it out and stuff. And then we realized, there are already some tools like this which allow you to track the apps you have subscribed to.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah, there are a few tools, free tools as well. So we wanted to leverage some of those tools, see how it works. And then our experience with all of them was pretty wide in the chance the Excel spreadsheets that we had had better data than some of the data that these tools were throwing up. And so they were free. And these tools took data like through manual entry, or was there somewhere to automate that collection of data?
00:21:34
Speaker
Yeah, there was automated way to collect data, but they had only one way to collect the data in that sense. They used to connect with your single sign-on system. So if you are operating in an enterprise, you connect to applications using your Google workspace or Microsoft AD or in certain companies have Okta, OneLog and other tools as well. So they used to connect to one of these SSO systems.
00:21:57
Speaker
And that system lets you, hey, what are the other tools that are being accessed via a Google workspace sign-in? For example, you try to log into a tool that shows you Facebook login. It's nothing but an identity provider. So we were able to discover tools which were connected using these single sign-on systems using these free tools that we tried out.
00:22:18
Speaker
But the problem in organizations is only 40% of these tools are connected to your Google workspace or any of them. The remaining 60% are not connected and that's the shadow ID and for multiple razors, people don't connect it. So there is a whole bunch of 60% of the tools that these tools were not giving you visibility on. So now if I don't know those tools, how will I look into optimization? How will I look into
00:22:41
Speaker
Security, compliance, so there was no way to do any of that. Literally, this was for me a useless exercise of connecting so often. Plus, these apps would not even have data of how much you are paying, what is the payment cycle and so on. They wouldn't have access to that data.
00:22:57
Speaker
Some of them, it depends on the platform that we are talking about. Some of them would have certain features, but you'll have data only for the tools that you have discovered, not for the tools that are not discovered, right? So it's half information that you have. So that was the actual trigger point for us. Hey, there is a problem. Now we tried all the tools. There is a gap that exists and we clearly understand it because we are overpaying for these tools. We could have brought in so much efficiencies.
00:23:21
Speaker
Now, that got us excited. Now, the next phase for us is to validate our excitement. So any idea that comes out, all of us are excited. We think we'll be able to build. So the next phase for us was to validate it. So that's when we started discussing, hey, is this for real? Is this gap existing? This is so obvious. Why hasn't anyone solved for that or why hasn't anyone fixed this gap?
00:23:42
Speaker
Are we the only ones who are facing this issue or are the companies also facing this? That's when we went about speaking with 100 companies of all sizes, 50 people to 50,000 people that we know, people that in our network, all that stuff. One, we realized the problem was real. So everyone was going through this problem.
00:23:59
Speaker
And depending on the vintage of the problem, either it was a just a problem or it has translated into pee. They were somewhere in that problem to pain spectrum. Number two is the entire status adoption. I'm sure this I'm talking about the early days of COVID where people are shutting down offices, trying to go back to a remote work and stuff. This is the inception of the first wave.
00:24:21
Speaker
So we started to see more and more people back then Zoom, Google Workspace were tools that were being used. At the same time, my co-founder, he created a plugin for Google Meet to make sure your video doesn't get automatically turned on when you log into Google. And that became very popular because a lot of people are adopting tools. And the tailwind was there in general, the adoption of more SaaS tools, the tailwind was there.
00:24:43
Speaker
With more SAS adoption, the problem was only becoming more and more complex and evident with an organization. And the total addressable market size was huge. So we are talking about addressing the entire SAS point. We are saying there is $100 billion of SAS spend at that point of time, depending on the report that you are looking at. So we'll be able to manage all of that SAS spend on one single platform and give you visibility. So all these three were tick marks for us. So the total addressable market, I want to dig a little deeper here.
00:25:12
Speaker
A company which has a centralized procurement would not need this tool. What you're saying is companies have mostly empowered people that you can swipe a card and claim a reimbursement for SaaS tools and this might be leading to wastage or maybe the company card itself has got swiped by employees for different SaaS tools.
00:25:30
Speaker
So there would be these kind of more startup-y type of companies which have this kind of decentralized approach. But then there would also be these traditional companies where there might be centralized procurement. So they would not be part of the dam. And no, they will also be part of the dam actually. So two trains again that were laying out.
00:25:47
Speaker
One was the entire empowerment of the end users. So if you place a traditional procurement request for a software, by the time you get an approval and by the time you start using the tool, there is a new tool that comes up in the market. So that's how slow some of these procurements are. To drive innovation, one of the key levers that companies started to leverage was let's empower the teams. Let's decentralize this decision making process so that
00:26:10
Speaker
the procurement becomes quicker so that's one thing that has happened. The second thing that has happened is the entire remote work, people working from multiple devices, multiple environments. So earlier when they were working from within office, the computers were being accessed from within networks, within the corporate networks.
00:26:29
Speaker
So now if I sign up to any application, so there are checks and balances to say, Hey, this person has signed into this new application or log them to this application. But with remote work and distributed workforce, all of that stuff, the corporate people have come out of corporate networks. There are no corporate networks that people are operating.
00:26:47
Speaker
So now there is no way for companies to track this. That was the second trend. Third trend is again with these large enterprises where there is centralized procurement. SaaS adoption started to pick up. Eventually by 2027, 100% of the tool service SaaS. That's what the production says.
00:27:04
Speaker
So now they are slowly moving towards SaaS. So when they are moving towards SaaS, there are a lot of these SaaS tools that are freely available that people can sign up. They don't need to ask any of the procurement guys to help them with this tool. I can go in and open their browser, get the tool for myself. Like Calendly has that free version.
00:27:20
Speaker
free version. So all my company data will go there, but that's a free tool I'm using. So those are some of the trends.
Building and validating Zluri's founding team
00:27:27
Speaker
So irrespective of whether the procurement is happening centrally or non centrally, these are the trends that were playing out, which was causing a huge adoption of SaaS tools and the eventual proliferation that comes with it. So what you're saying is that it's not just about saving money.
00:27:45
Speaker
No, absolutely not. So about data security, if I pick up a free currently subscription, I am still giving it access to my calendar. So that is a data security issue, which is why even a traditional company at TCS would be part of the addressable bucket because they would be concerned about data security.
00:28:02
Speaker
Absolutely. Okay. Got it. Security is one part of it. There are multiple dimensions to it, I think, which we'll come to. So, cost is a very small part of this overall value proposition. Not actually. Got it. Okay. So, you put your jobs and put in your savings to start this off. Yeah. So, what we did was we brought in a few interns. We weren't able to offer full-time folks. So, we brought in a few interns. We were Jake. Jake was our superstar. So, he was architecting the technology side of things. Me and Seitu were focusing on the
00:28:32
Speaker
go to market side, trying to speak within our network. While we didn't have a product, we had a presentation to show, Hey, this is what we are building. And then we used to pitch as if we had a product, talk to them, get their inputs and get their insights into how should the product be architected and all that stuff. So that's how we started our journey by building in a small team. And also as the journey started to progress, I think given the eight years of working together, we have met multiple colleagues who had been seen us build other company as well.
00:28:59
Speaker
So we were lucky enough to have worked with them. They said, okay, you three guys are working together. We think we will take it somewhere. And that's how they had the trust and faith in us to join earlier. So some of them came on board in our journey and that's how it shaped up Akshay. I wouldn't understand.
00:29:16
Speaker
I think you talked about the fact that the existing products use the single sign-on approach to check where that single sign-on login was being used. So it could identify that these are the apps which are being used by the employees of the company, but it did not cover apps where you were
00:29:34
Speaker
not using single sign-on. So how did you solve this problem? How did you get data around what is the payment cycle? What is the amount of money being paid every month for that? Or what is the pricing of that? And how did you build the product? I want to understand that. Yeah, I was highlighting earlier. So the gap that we found in this space was the discovery or discoverability of the application.
00:29:55
Speaker
So far as the fundamental problem that we wanted to solve was, how can we discover 100% of the technology stack within a car? So that's why our friend, David, our goal or objective from a product perspective was to build the world's most popular discovery engine, which is able to detect 100% of your technology stack. So that's the goal with which we started. So now we broke that objective or problem statement and see what leads us to that 100% discoverability.
00:30:24
Speaker
How can we do that? What are the various discovery methods that we need to have? So that's where we identified five different discovery methods, which we said if you do A, B, C, D, E, you'll be able to discover 100% of your technology stack, which is a combination of connecting to your SSOs as most of the tools that we had visibility to were doing, to connecting with your financial systems, understanding where are you spending money on. That was the second discovery method. Third is having direct integrations and connections to
00:30:54
Speaker
over 750 odd applications. Speaking with those applications, if you are a Salesforce, I want to understand from Salesforce itself rather than relaying our trackers. So we built an integration engine which connects 750 odd applications directly and stretches this information. Essentially, you'll be able to query that, is there anyone with say an at zuri.com email id? Absolutely. Yeah, which is a member. So that information, these apps would allow you to fit. Absolutely. Okay.
00:31:20
Speaker
Okay. There's a lot of pricing and payment cycle and how much has been spent and like that financial data or? It depends on application to application action. So some of them would, some of them would not. So for those pieces around pricing, payment cycles, all of that, we used to connect with contract lifecycle migration, like CLM platform from where we get that data. What is a CLM platform?
00:31:42
Speaker
contract lifecycle management. So if you have a contract with Azoom or Salesforce, so those contracts are stored in a CLM platform. So we are able to connect to those platforms and get that. This is a platform which enterprise clients or enterprise level companies would be using, not like a small startup.
00:32:00
Speaker
Not small startups, but small startup, what happens is you purchase through your credit card. These reports are on your QuickBooks or NetSuite or one of those tools. So we are able to see when are they purchasing, when are the renewals happening based on that we have been able to bid the repository or calendar, saying this is when you have purchased, this is when your renewals are coming up. So we had a renewal calendar, but that's one of the discovery methods where we directly connect to these applications.
00:32:25
Speaker
And then we have a browser agent, we have a desktop agent that sits on your browser and desktop and tracks what applications are being used, how are they being used, all of that. So why putting all these fighters? That's like a Chrome plugin. So anything you do on Chrome, it will be able to read and it will keep a log of websites which you have visited. And if you're signing into a website, which you know is a paid website or for an app, then you get a flag that, okay, this could be a possible subscription.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of the discovery methods and depending on the organization, whether they want to deploy it or not. So they can choose to deploy all the five discovery methods, or they can say, I don't want to do one or two of them because for me it's difficult to get, I'll get other three. So overall, if you put all of them together, we'll be able to get you 100% to any granular visibility, but it's all the organization choose not to do everything because they see for various reasons.
00:33:14
Speaker
So that's the engine that we built very early on in our journey. We said, this is a foundation. So you build this discovery engine, which is able to distort 100% of your technology stack. So now, whatever I build on top of it, whether you're talking about optimization, compliance, security,
00:33:32
Speaker
Any add-on automation, any add-on feature is only as powerful as our discovery engine. So as we started building new features, the platform became exponentially or comportingly powerful compared to existing platforms that were there. So that's where we are able to accelerate our product lead against our competitors. That's the starting point where we identified a gap. So solve for that gap. And we started building all other features and functionalities on top of it.
00:34:02
Speaker
So what did you build on the project? Broadly, four pieces actually in terms of value proposition.
Exploring Zluri's features and future plans
00:34:09
Speaker
One is obviously the observability which we spoke about. You discovered all these tools. After observability, the second one is optimization. So looking into your usage utilization, what's being used, what's not being used. So rationalizing the licenses, right sizing the licenses as well. When I say right sizing, you might have a certain product where you have different pricing peers that are there.
00:34:31
Speaker
Your government is the highest pricing tier of the product. But in reality, you would be using the features of only the lowest tier. So you don't need the highest tier. So that's where our tool is able to come in and give the sentence and tell you, hey, you're paying for this, you're using this, you can do this. Consolidation of license suits.
00:34:47
Speaker
So this optimization won't again happen through multiple data sources. For example, in some case, an app might tell you that the last login was three months ago. So if nobody has logged in the last three months, then obviously that is a wasted subscription. Or in other cases, the browser agent might be giving you data of which app is frequently used, what features are being used, and which you could then give recommendations around.
00:35:12
Speaker
Absolutely. So then consolidation of licenses. So different teams should have purchased five licenses, 10 licenses and bits and pieces and pockets. So consolidation of all of them taking you to the right pricing tier and making the pricing. So then you wouldn't, you're paying for some of these subscriptions where you don't have a benchmarking and intelligence around what is the right price to pay, what is the right volume to buy, what is the right configuration to buy. So we provide all the attention. So helping you optimize your expense. That's the second value proposition that we provide.
00:35:40
Speaker
And then the third value proposition is automation. Where in today, IT collaborates with different teams, HR, procurement, finance, different stakeholders. There are tons and tons of workloads, which are very manual. For example, you have joined a certain organization on day one, how do you get access to the entire technology stack, get added to the right slack channels like us.
00:36:00
Speaker
like groups and you will have getting access to the right folders and on drive, so on and so forth. It's a very manual process. And no one knows who's the right person to give you those access. It takes a bit of time for you to understand what others are using, then ask them, then they will direct you and then you get access to it.
00:36:15
Speaker
So that's a typical process. So because we are able to discover the entire technology stack, we know which teams are using what, who, how, they're using it. We have on the central lens. So now we have an orchestration platform where we'll be able to onboard off-board users and one single clip. You can say this person is joining on this particular date on your HRMS system.
00:36:34
Speaker
So we'll be able to pull that data and we'll be able to provision him on the right set of tools, right set of permissions, right set of access, and all the right controls to him on Devan. So whatever it takes a few months for people to get things done on one single click, you'll be able to do it. The same with voting as well. So today people leave the organization and six to 12 months down the line, I don't know, yesterday there was a
00:36:57
Speaker
a tweet which was going on Twitter. So this was Twitter as a company. So people had access to GitHub, I think six months or seven months after leaving the company. So this was something which was very common to see people leaving the organization and having access to their CRM systems and joining a competitor after six months as well.
00:37:15
Speaker
So all that is happening because no one has central visibility or control to terminate when people are leaving. And that's where we come in when you're leaving. Once you trigger something on all the voting on your HRMS system, we will terminate all the access, all the sessions, all the cookies across all these platforms, deprovision the license and reduce the spend as well. So that's the automation.
00:37:37
Speaker
I'm just talking about off-boarding automation, which is at the intersection of IT and HR. So there are tons and tons of workflows that are between IT, if an AMP's IT procurement, all the IT DevOps, different functions that are there. So because we are connected to all these stacks, all these applications, we are able to automate a lot of these workflows on one single click, no code. Give me examples of several workflows.
00:38:00
Speaker
say procurement, you have your renewal calendar popping up. So now, you need to make a decision, you need to renew the product. How do you do that? So what are the decision points you need to have? So let's take a real world example or how it pans out. So now, there is a Salesforce renewal coming up. So now, you need to renew the contract. So who's the owner of the contract? So he needs to speak with, go to the business and say, there is this contract renewal coming up. How many do you want me to renew?
00:38:27
Speaker
because this is going to be two years. If I renew for the same number, I will get X price. If I renew for X plus Y numbers, I'll get a different price. So the person that you ask the question to has no visibility, right? Now he needs to go to 10 different people and they need to do some analysis on different systems, speak with the customer success team, sales team, marketing team, and ask them how many licenses do you require? And all these need to be funneled. And hoping that they are taking a very mathematics-driven approach, you get the right number, right projections.
00:38:55
Speaker
Now once that is there, you need to go to the Salesforce guy and he'll give you a price. Now you'll look on procurement and say procurement. This is the price I got. Can you negotiate? So procurement doesn't have any data. So then blindly go in and say, Hey, you gave me this quote. I want this number. What is the basis of that number? They don't have any basis to it.
00:39:14
Speaker
So that is just a simple renewal workflow for one SaaS application in Akshay. The other stocking data point that I'll give you is a 500 employee company on an average uses 200 plus applications. Last year when we saw it was 163, today it's 200. So divided by the number of days that are in a year.
00:39:34
Speaker
for a small company, almost one subscription every day, one renewal every day. So how many people are there to manage this in an organization? If you are lucky, you'll have one person. If you are not, that person doesn't take this. So this procurement person need to have three to four different meetings to bring down the price with these guys. All of them done is manually. And there is no benchmarking. There is no science to it. There is no math to it.
00:39:59
Speaker
So, this is a workflow and this played out in the context of automation. So, I have a renewal calendar on the platform. The platform has data around who's the finance owner, who's the IT owner, who's the procurement owner, the entire government system is there. So, the platform knows historically how many licenses have been used in the last one year. What is the criteria? What is our hiring trend? What is our growth trend?
00:40:21
Speaker
Now, the system will automatically tell you how many licenses are projected to be used this year. How many can you procure? You don't need to do any math. It's all available. The platform has the data. And the platform has data around what is the right price to pay. Because we have benchmarks around if you are procuring 1000, what is the price that people pay? 2000, what is the price that pay? What is the range that you can work with? So, that intelligence is there. So, the entire workflow approval right from the business approving it to finance, approving it to going to procurement is on automated.
00:40:48
Speaker
Now, once it is a procurement has the data benchmarks. Now they don't say, wait 20% discount. They know what is the right price that they need to get. It's a conversation. This is what it is. Let's close it. So all this happens in less than 24 hours, including the manual conversation. And a lot of times these tools are available on the platform where you don't even need to negotiate because the shared volume of licenses that are managed on the platform.
00:41:12
Speaker
We get the price, a discounted price for that volume. Companies can just take it. You don't even need to negotiate. You are offering procurement as a service also in a way, whereas you are negotiating with the vendors on behalf of oil slurry customers.
00:41:27
Speaker
We do it for certain customers because of the segment that we operate. So typically, our focus is on mid-market. The way we have defined mid-market is 500 to 5,000 employees. So once we deploy the platform, this is one of the multiple automations that we have on the platform, right? So when procurement start using it, so some of our customers come and say, boss, the data is great, but we don't have anyone to run this. Can you help have someone leverage this data and get down the right price for this? That's where we offer this procurement service, which we call SAS buying action.
00:41:57
Speaker
What's up the roadmap? What is stuff that you want to build further? Where do you see the product going? One is obviously we are doubling down on a number of automations that are possible. I think I was speaking with one of the investors the other day, we have done a lot of research on this space. And I said only 25% of the workflows that exist in the organization are today automated or semi-automated.
00:42:18
Speaker
So 75% of them are manual and with more SaaS tools, that number is only going to increase. So there has to be a way to automate this. So that's where we are identifying, understanding the best ways to automate, solve some of these. One day in time-taking, time-consuming, inefficient workflows that exist, and we are trying to automate it. How are you even discovering that there exists such a workflow which you need to automate?
00:42:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think what we do is I think we have a strong advisory group. What we have done is for different roles we have. Some of them are our customers. Some of them are our well-wishers from our network. Some of them are we factor with them as prospects and continue to have great relationships. So in the process, we have identified some really great minds who had deeply cared for the problem that they are solving, who deeply care about solving for the problem.
00:43:06
Speaker
And we have created an advisory group, putting them together. So that's when we, on an ongoing basis, we do have conversations with them. Hey, what are the challenges that you are facing? And then we try and say, Hey, do you think there's a better way to solve, who's solving it today for you? What should be different? So we have this conversation.
00:43:25
Speaker
and the flow of ideas, which eventually translates into the product roadmap. And also what our customers have on the platform today is something that they can quickly request for a feature. And when we start seeing some of these repetitive requests, that's when we start prioritizing them and adding them to the roadmap. So those are a few ways in which we do this.
00:43:45
Speaker
So the number one priority for you right now is building more automation and like on the roadmap. That's what you want to focus on. That's right. So there are a few tracks which are out there. One is obviously the automations part of it. And the other part to that is there are quite a few enhancements, new integrations.
00:44:02
Speaker
that continuously happen as well. And there is a sub-component to it, contract management, spend management. So all of them are integral part of the platform. There are obviously enhancements, feature requests that have come in that are being built on the platform as well. And we had one major launch very recently, which is our employee app store. So earlier, this product was being used by administrators predominantly. Today, every employee within an organization uses this employee app store just like
00:44:28
Speaker
You have an app store on your phone. Today you are working in a company. You don't know what apps you have or what apps you can request for. That's where you have this app store where you can see all the applications that you have access to, your teams have access to, your departments have access to. And in case you want to request license or access to any of new tools, that's where you can requisition a license. And the license gets provisioned automatically without raising any tickets. We call it the ticketless IT.
00:44:51
Speaker
So that's how their latest launch that we have added as well. So which exploded the number of users that are using the platform within an organization and the number of use cases that you'll be solving for these users. Do you also want to work on discovery as part of the roadmap for companies to discover and subscribe to apps directly through Zuri? We already have it actually on the platform. So customers can discover the applications. We tell them how likely is this application to fit within your ecosystem.
00:45:20
Speaker
We give plenty of visibility into the tech stacks that are outside of your organization and help you make better decisions in the buying process. Okay. But you don't facilitate the buying. You'll redirect them to the company. You're not yet monetizing discovery. Currently we don't.
00:45:35
Speaker
And our fundamental philosophy is, we'll never be making money from the SaaS OEMs or SaaS vendors. So if there is any efficiencies that we'll bring in, so we'll always pass it on to the customer actually. That's our fundamental philosophy. We'll never make money out of vendors. Tell me about the name Zuri. What does it mean? It's a very tough name.
00:45:55
Speaker
I have a very boring answer for you, actually. So we had all fancy t-shirts to come up with names, but unfortunately we couldn't when you start searching for dot coms. It's a very painful process to get any of that. So we did the reverse. We said, we are very particular about having a PI character domain.
00:46:14
Speaker
So what are five character domains that are available and what is that? Sounds good. And all of us, we just had a bunch of names. We did a poll and this was a name that all three of us agreed on. So we got started. So yeah, we optimized for that time and deciding the name of the company.
00:46:31
Speaker
So now we are in the process of figuring out a story for that, given the fact that you asked. Tell me about your go-to
Customer acquisition and funding insights
00:46:41
Speaker
-market. How do you go out and acquire customers? Is it like a personal approach where you have people sending cold emails and calling and LinkedIn and all that? Or is it like through performance marketing or help me understand?
00:46:54
Speaker
So we do have a multi-tiered approach. So performance marketing, the search volume and the space that we operate is pretty low, given that it's evolving. We haven't seen, had great success with that. We did a few experiments, we don't spend much on it, but outbound and inbound are the two channels that we leverage on. So those are the two that we focus on. We haven't
00:47:14
Speaker
SDR team who reaches out to customers. There are certain segments that we focus on and then generate leads and then inbound. So we do a lot of thought leadership content on an ongoing basis. So that brings us to Akshay. And you're targeting which territories? Is it India or is it US? Predominantly US. So that's the market that we are focused on. What is your subscription costs? What is the pricing? It varies from geography to geography. It's anywhere between six to $12 at this point of time.
00:47:44
Speaker
And I'm assuming like your chart would be very low once somebody's data is on Slurry. It would be very painful for them to, unless the company itself is downsizing or something like that. But without anybody would be leaving for a competitive product. What do you see typically? Like how long do customers stick in? We haven't lost a customer until this point of time. So I think August 2021 is when we commercially started selling the product. So as of now, most of them who have subscribed with us have renewed with us for multiple years.
00:48:14
Speaker
We haven't seen churn as of yet. We haven't seen customers who have signed up and they didn't have bandwidth to take this forward. And even before starting, we had to say, Hey, six months you haven't gone live. We churn this customer because they don't have bandwidth or few arc changes. A lot of downsides happen. So they have to, some of them have no longer with the organization. So few, some of them happened that way.
00:48:36
Speaker
But we haven't seen a customer who has adopted the platform and has left. What is the onboarding? Is it self-serve, onboarding, like quick and easy? You just spike your card and all? How does the onboarding happen? No, because it's paid via invoicing and stuff, so there are multiple payment methods, but it's not self-serve at this point of time.
00:48:53
Speaker
So there is a one hour 30-minute onboarding call that happens where people are guided and then they get onboarded. So there is a CELSA version of it as well, but currently we hand-hold customers that too, because we are very early into our game. We want to understand the feedback from customers, the challenges that they face, so on and so forth. So we have mandated it to be guided. So we have a PLG motion that's launching very soon, what is PLG motion?
00:49:22
Speaker
a product-led growth wherein you can directly land on a website, click on sign in and start using the product. What is product-led growth? So today, one of the common languages that we use is MQNs and SQLs, right? Marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads.
00:49:37
Speaker
Marketing qualified leads, so you might send an email marketing team sent out a email or call someone as a cold calling. You ask a bunch of questions. Hey, what are you using today? I'm using pre-sheets to manage my subscriptions. How much do you spend on your subscriptions? I spend 2 million. So do you think you need an automated system to manage your subscriptions? Yes. So all these three are tick marks, all within my ICP. Now my marketing teams.
00:49:59
Speaker
ICP user. Yeah. Ideal customer profile. So this is what ideal customer profile is the attributes that I've defined for my customer, where I would say if they meet ABCD criteria, then they're most likely to buy from me because they fit what my ideal customer would require. You're solving the pain for them. Like they have that exact kind of thing, which you can solve. Absolutely. Absolutely.
00:50:25
Speaker
So now based on that, I identify a bunch of questions that I would need to ask my ideal customer profile or persona. And our team defines who are those people who fall in this criteria, they start sending out emails or calls them on the phone, or they might land inbound on our website. And then the team looks into the LinkedIn profile and then asked a bunch of questions.
00:50:47
Speaker
So by multiple modes like this, so we understand the responses for these customers. So now based on that, we come and say, and what is the difference between NQL and SQL? Like marketing qualified lead would be more based on research, LinkedIn profile, sales qualified lead would be where a person has actually spoken. Is that the difference? There are more to it. So marketing qualified leads is based on the primary ICP criteria, ideal customer person or profile criteria that has been defined.
00:51:15
Speaker
So marketing can say, hey, this guy is the right person to buy our product. That's a marketing qualified leader. Now, when this MQL is given to the sales team, now sales team need to get into it. So sales team is not interested in someone buying two years down the line. So sales team is interested in hitting this quarter numbers for this month now. So now they have an additional set of criteria where they say, does he have the budget? What is the timeline that he is looking at to buy a bunch of other buying?
00:51:42
Speaker
criteria that they use. So now, based on that, they will define a lead as a SQL, which seems qualified. There are tick marks for all these parameters. So those are the traditional criteria that we follow. So now, because all these leads that we are talking about are handled by someone, there is an individual in the back end who is looking at these responses and qualifying.
00:52:05
Speaker
Now, if I have a product with me and the prospect is not thing with forms on my website or not interacting with marketing person or not interacting with sales person, they are interacting with my product. Can my product qualify and say there is a prospect and qualify that prospect saying that, hey, he can be your potential customer. That's a product qualified lead for me.
00:52:32
Speaker
Right now, how do you, but how can the product qualify without asking them to fill some forms and get that data? Yeah. Going back to the example of marketing quality, I just randomly spoke about three questions. Actually one is, what is the size of your company? What is, how much do you spend on your dressing? Are you using spreadsheets? So on and so forth. Now within the product, what we can do is we can set milestones. The milestones are nothing but.
00:52:57
Speaker
Has he taken an exaction on the platform? For example, when you log into the platform, you need to sign up using your Google workspace. When you sign up using Google workspace, we understand how many users are there within that domain within your organization. So if you have signed up and we understand that there are only 10 people in your organization, you are not a PQL for me because I don't send into that category. I sell to 500 to 5,000 employees, 500 to 1,000 employees, depending on the organization that you are.
00:53:27
Speaker
So I can immediately disqualify that. So once you connect your financial systems and other platforms, I now know what is the spend that you are incurring. If you are spending only two lakhs on the platform, my platform will cost you 10 times that. It doesn't make sense for you to get onto the platform. Let's say product disqualified lead. So like this, we will set up multiple milestones on the product where the product will tell me
00:53:52
Speaker
whether the prospect who's coming onto the platform is a qualified person or not. That's a PQL for me. That's how we define PQL. So that's a journey that we are embarking on, which we haven't launched it officially, but we'll be going through that journey. Sounds like a highly intellectual challenge to really think through. And it's more of a thinking challenge than execution. Really think about what are those milestones and
00:54:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's a journey. I think you just need to keep iterating based on what you're learning. But thankfully, there are quite a few companies who have mastered this. I think there are a lot of learning. Which are the companies which are generally admired for using PLG? Like any consumer-facing? A lot of these companies are consumer-facing. Canva? Yeah, Canva or Miro or any of these platforms. All of them have a free plan. You can go and drive the product.
00:54:41
Speaker
And then you'll start receiving the emails if you don't end up using the product. So they definitely, all of them have this approach. I think they have mastered that. It's a PLG will only work with a free plan. Otherwise like you would not be able to get milestones. That's free plan. This should take plan. You don't need to offer all the features. You can look at the number of features, but they should find some value on the platform.
00:55:04
Speaker
Once you've implemented a product-led growth, once you've executed on that, your requirement for physical salespeople would probably go down to 10% of what you might require without it. Essentially, the work of what a salesperson does gets eliminated with this. Again, it depends on the segment. Actually, if you are talking about SMBs, that would definitely eliminate. But when you're talking about the mid-market and slightly higher index mid-market and later price,
00:55:32
Speaker
Again, there are multiple stakeholders who are involved in the decision-making process. This accelerates the whole funnel and success criteria and the timeline that it takes to close the deal. Today, when you are doing sales as a salesperson,
00:55:48
Speaker
You don't know what's happening on the other side, whether the person is finding value from the product. You need to communicate that value on an ongoing basis. But if someone is using the product and they are taking ABC actions, they are deriving value, they are seeing some data. So you can anchor conversations around value rather than going blindly into a lot of these conversations, I think.
00:56:08
Speaker
We believe this will aid into an entire fast integration making cycle, empowering the sales team members to accelerate a lot of these conversations. So give me some idea of numbers like you, what are the number of pay users you have on the platform or what is the top line that you're expecting this year. First one, I'll answer that question. Second one, I'll skip that for now.
00:56:31
Speaker
So we had close to 180, 120 paying customers at this point of time. So these are like 120 organizations. Within an organization, they could be anywhere from 500 to 5,000 licenses. Yeah. Some of our customers are smaller as well, but a large portion of it would fall in 500 to 5,000 employees. But 120, I18, 120 is the kind number of paying customers.
00:56:57
Speaker
Tell me about your running journey. Initially, you probably bootstrapped it, like when you started. Yeah, initially we bootstrapped. We were bootstrapped for a very short period of time. Five months we bootstrapped. So in January 2020 is when we raised our seed round of party.
00:57:13
Speaker
from India Partners and Kalari Capital. We didn't have a product. We had a presentation, which we were using to talk about our vision, all of that stuff. So that's how our journey started. And thankfully, both India and Kalari, they came on board just believing in our vision. The back division, not really a product at that point of time. And the team, I guess it would be another thing, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. So those were the, that's how we started our journey. In January, 2021, we raised the second round of 40.
00:57:40
Speaker
which is offered 10 million dollars from mass mutual ventures and participation from India and Alari capital. So those are two rounds of funding that we have made as of now. What are some of the internal major milestones that you have in mind? Say this milestone you want to cross in the next 18 months or next 36 months or whatever. Tell me about some of those internal targets that you are chasing.
00:58:02
Speaker
Yeah. So internet targets we are chasing is number one from a customer perspective. I think today 70% of our customers come from outside of India, which is a mix of North America and Europe at this point of time. So we, what we are solving for and what we are focusing on as a next milestone is to set up our US organization right from having a robust sales team to having key anchors in the market and getting that motion. So that's the key goal that we have.
00:58:32
Speaker
I think needs revenue, all of that will follow. Right now, we are more focused on replicating and scaling structures of what worked for us in markets where we want to double down Akshay. By when will you cross 10 million ARR? 10 million ARR, maybe another 24 months. Akshay, I think we should be.
00:58:50
Speaker
Why do you want to have a team in the US? Like you could sell remotely from India only. Yeah. So I think one thing which starting to happen is I think we are ACVs are going up. So as our ACV is ACV, sorry, annual contract value of our deals is going up.
00:59:06
Speaker
So as that goes up, we see a need for account executives to be locally present because of the number of conversations, because of the collaboration that needs to happen all of that. So that's why for larger deals, we want to have a team serving from those regional geographies. Whereas for smaller things, we can orchestrate a lot of them from India.
00:59:28
Speaker
As you go down the PLG journey, I'm assuming that journey would eventually also lead to a stage where you don't really need account executives to be having a lot of conversations because the product itself would anticipate and take care of things for the clients.
00:59:44
Speaker
I think that we aid in having more meaningful conversations, but we don't see a scenario where that will completely remove those conversations. It will aid and have more meaningful conversations, which will in turn reduce the buying cycle times. That's how we engage the panel rather than completely eliminating the need for sales and customer success.
01:00:04
Speaker
Once we pivoted to that local model for larger deals, that got started to accelerate because our customer was having these conversations with three, four vendors. The experience, the parity and experience is different. And when you're trying to put, say, $100,000, $50,000, $150,000 on a particular company, you don't want to create those questions in customer's mind. And that brings us to the end of this conversation.
01:00:30
Speaker
I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at ad at the podium dot in. That's ad at t h e p o d i u m dot in.