The Pune-based enterprise SaaS platform Zvolv is an intelligent no-code, or low-code, platform for automating business processes.
In the words of Zvolv’s co-founders Hardik Gandhi and Sujoy Chakravarty, it’s the “Lego Bricks” version of application development with the best combination of features, flexibility and price.
Every technology component that you need to build a complex enterprise application is pre-build, pre-tested and available for you to configure and stitch together as you want in this intelligent process automation platform for enterprises.
In the beginning…
Gandhi and Chakravarty share a lot of things in common. They studied in St Vincent’s school and later went to the College of Engineering Pune (COEP). Post-graduation they both moved to Bengaluru and joined Texas Instruments.
Gandhi later moved to the USA to pursue his higher education and Chakravarty stayed in Bengaluru to build a new start-up.
Says Gandhi, “After working at TI and Apple and observing other companies too, we had a few ideas about improving the employee experience at workplaces. Companies still work with tools that were designed years ago. Employees are using state-of-the-art applications in their daily lives, but when it comes to work applications, those are large antiquated applications which are cumbersome to use. So, we thought why not build applications to manage the employee work-life?”
“We started to build a proof-of-concept to validate our ideas. We wanted this to be an enterprise product. We hired some IITians and did some experiments. In 2018 we had something worthy to show,” Gandhi added.
Proof of concept (POC)
After the POC was ready, Gandhi decided to move back to India in 2018. Chakravarty, a repeat entrepreneur, too moved from Bengaluru to Pune. The duo considered Pune over Bengaluru to start their venture as the tech-talent pool was much better in Pune and that they also could leverage their connects.
Says Gandhi, “When I was in the US during the initial days, we had setup a team here to run the initial experiments. There were four to five people at that time in the team. Chakravarty and I thought these engineers can start building a product. In 2018 we decided to actually start setting up and running a company. We were around 12 people at that time. Chakravarty actually did the initial hiring mostly through the contacts that we had. Later on, very senior people took pay cuts to join us. As founders we were very liberal and open about distributing equity and ESOPs to our employees.”
Customers ring in
Gandhi believes it’s the value of connections when you are a startup in the early stages. “The connection at Future Group happened through a banker who was a part of the team which was evaluating us for their use case. It’s all about demonstrating value to anyone that you meet and work with, and eventually that leads to some connect or other. The other two big customers – Dominos and Titan – came through a public event and during our participation in the Wadhwani accelerator respectively. These first three customers were acquired even before we formally launched a product. We didn’t really build a sales team in the early stage. We got all this organic growth. Now we have to have proper sales team to generate leads from scratch,” Gandhi said.
“The first 20 customers are still with us. We had the writing on the wall that we will make sure we never lose our first 10 customers and we have ensured that. A lot of our success is because of them. Now we have a total of 35 enterprise customers of which a third are large companies, and others are mid-sized companies,” he added.
Seed funding
Says Gandhi, “Three big enterprises using our product gave us confidence and hence, we decided to raise a seed funding round of $0.5 million. I had put in around $0.5 million while we were bootstrapped. Angel investors, CEOs and CIOs of companies joined this round and we used that money to hire a stronger engineering team. We were focussed on India as a base and we ‘stress-tested’ our product as India has a varied set of users, with finicky demands of customers which pushed us to build all kinds of flexibility into the product.”
“During Covid we decided to double down on the accumulated customers. Our focus this year was what we can do in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Middle East market. Earlier in the year we got Srivatsan Srinivasan, a veteran from Salesforce, who wanted to be part of our team. It was a great validation for us. He joined as board advisor and then took an executive role as chief revenue officer. He became a part of our leadership team which gave us confidence to expand. In the last two years we have got clients like Swiggy, Lenskart and partners like KPMG and Accenture. Now we are a 30-member strong team and continuing to hire as much as we can,” added Gandhi.
Employee churn
“Today, hiring is one of the biggest challenges for a young company,” says Gandhi. “We are lucky that lot of our early employees are excited about the platform and its future potential and that they are all still around us. With a solid leadership base, we can keep on hiring younger people underneath and thus handling churn in the right way.”
On ESOP, Gandhi says, “In today’s day and age it can be your life changing event if you have enough equity in a company that is fast growing and goes through an exit. That’s what excites a lot of employees joining. Your return on equity can be multi-fold compared to the salary you are losing out by working with a younger startup. A lot of our employees are in our ESOP pool and are getting more and more equity. We have demonstrated every year that the value of the equity keeps on growing as we are raising funding at higher and higher valuations. They see the growth and future potential roadmap and that’s what motivates them to stick on.”
Funding and expansion
Elaborating on the expansion plans, Gandhi said, “Our India operations are now self-sustainable, but not enough to expand in other geographies. So we raised just enough money to run the experiments in APAC and the Middle East. JSW Ventures, a tech focused venture capital fund and Riso Capital, a Silicon Valley- based VC fund that invests in India-based startups solving global problems at scale, had showed an interest and we started engaging with them. We raised $1.5million this month and now we are aggressively building out a proper global sales infrastructure and process.”
“JSW brings a lot of large industry exposure for us while Riso Capital brings us the Silicon Valley connection, where they can help us in all aspects of migrating our company to US at some point. We also have individual advisors who have reinvested and who come from the ‘large industry’ background,” he stated.
Impact of Covid
The impact of Covid-19 was positive for platforms like Zvolv. “A lot of enterprises saw the need for evolving their legacy applications to modern no-code or low-code platforms. IT teams were backlogged during the outbreak and hence, building apps was least priority for them. So, the natural alternative was the no-code, low-code platforms.”
“As a platform, Zvolv reduces or eliminates dependence on developers for developing enterprise applications. It is designed for business users to conceptualise, experiment and build applications by themselves. Some support is needed to ensure IT security and scalability and compliance aspects,” claims Gandhi.
Future plans
With its international expansion in the offing, Zvolv will now compete with global giants on their turf. Says Gandhi, “There are a very few enterprise companies from India that have become global success stories. Along with a focus on customer success and on the products’ UI/UX, we are expanding in APAC and Middle East and will generate a few million-dollar revenues from those geographies in addition to India. We will also be raising a Series A from US based investors towards end of next year. We want to utilise that money specifically to make an entry into the US market and to make any meaningful entry to the US enterprise market you need to raise about $10 million dollars to have enough of a presence there.”
“In the next three years we want to be at a $50 million revenue run rate. And in five years we want to be a $1 billion revenue company and not a $1 billion valuation company,” said Gandhi.
Competitors
Explaining the market potential for no-code, low-code platforms Gandhi says: This is a $30 billion dollar market in the next four years and this number has increased significantly post-Covid.”
“It’s a crowded space from the competition perspective. There are three categories of players in this segment. Large enterprise legacy players like Pegasystems, Apian and Servicenow; Rapid application development platforms like Outsystem or Mendix; and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) players like UIPath. We consider all as competitors because the boundaries between these three segments is blurred. Everyone wants to offer end-to-end integrated solutions and the industry is consolidating,” stated Gandhi.
Investor speak
“Zvolv’s intelligent no-code platform is creating immense value for their customers. We are seeing accelerated demand for platforms like Zvolv that empower businesses to rapidly design and implement secure applications. We are excited to partner with Zvolv to help in fuelling their growth, product innovation, and expanding the global footprint. We believe that Zvolv is well positioned to become a global leader in the no-code intelligent business process automation marke,” says Sachin Tagra, Partner, JSW Ventures.
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