Pune-based InnovizeTech Software’s four founders – Shirish Deodhar (in photo), Madhukar Bhatia, Swati Deodhar and Hemant Joshi – are preparing for a big year in 2012. Their cloud-based software product Sapience, which began as a just-for-fun project in early 2009, has started to gain traction in the Indian market. Next year, nearly 40 per cent of the company’s overall spends will be channeled into sales and marketing, against 10 per cent now. It claims to have about 50 new customers in the pipeline, of which over 20 are already piloting Sapience.
“We’re now entering the second phase of our growth,” says CEO and co-founder Shirish Deodhar, in an interview with Startupcentral. Sapience allows companies with large workforces to measure and analyze how employees are using computer-based applications such as Excel or PowerPoint. This helps companies to better monitor individual productivity and improve the overall productivity of the organization. The software, which is currently patent pending, can be installed at the customer’s data center or hosted on InnovizeTech’s cloud-based servers. In its second phase of growth, the company roll out Sapience across significantly larger workforces, going up to over 10,000 people per customer.”We currently have pilots running with some of the country’s top ten information technology services firms,” says Deodhar.
Demand for the software, says Deodhar, has scaled up rapidly in the past few months. About six months ago, it was still working with customers whose workforces ranged between 100 and 200 people. Three months ago, companies with between 300 and 500 employees started to sign up for the product. “The product business is very different from services. Once customers start coming in you have to scale up quickly,” he says. To support the increased demand from the market, the company has recently inducted Avinash Sethi and Ranjit Nambiar into its management team. Sethi earlier spent several years at TCS and Intel, while Nambiar comes to InnovizeTech after a six-year stint at Dell India.
For the founder team, though 2012 promises to be a demanding year, scaling up will not be an altogether new challenge. Deodhar, Bhatia and Joshi earlier co-founded software services firm In-Reality Software, which was acquired by Symphony Software in 2004. Deodhar had also founded another software services firm, Frontier Software, in 1988, which was acquired by Veritas Software in 1999. Swati Deodhar, who came up with the idea for Sapience, has earlier held several leadership positions in companies such as Symphony Services, Ruksun Software, Mafatlal Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
InnovizeTech is currently not profitable though Deodhar says that the company expects to post $100 million in revenues in five years. Last July, the company raised seed funding of about $350,000 from Indian Angel Network (IAN) and over $850,000 in Series A funding from Seed Enterprises this November. Onward Group founder Harish Mehta represents IAN on the company’s board, while Seed Enterprises is represented by Mitesh Bohra. It currently employs 23 people, of which 17 are engaged in product development and support.
Image Courtesy: InnovizeTech Software
