The Tech Panda 7 startups of the month: SaaS

A look at the innovative Indian SaaS ecosystem, which has been raking in foreign investment. Indian SaaS has been leveraging on post-pandemic business needs. SaaS-based CRM companies have the ability to improve B2C customer experience.

A recent news in Indian SaaS, two weeks back, Newgen Software, integrated their Commercial Loan Origination Software (CLOS) with Factual Data® for seamless access to bureau credit information.

Using Newgen’s CLOS, financial institutions are able to automate their end-to-end commercial lending process, from pre-screening, application processing, underwriting, and closing to booking in a paperless and electronically-driven workflow environment.

The integration with Factual Data® will allow Newgen’s CLOS to get reports from multiple credit bureaus along with data on liens and judgments, thereby eliminating the need for manual pulls. Furthermore, the integration will enable a real-time, two-way integration with core banking and third-party systems, delivering an enhanced experience for financial institutions and their customers.

SaaS Stats

The worldwide low-code development technologies market is projected to touch US$13.8 billion in 2021 according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. Low-code adoption is boosted by the cost optimization efforts and remote development due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Forrester predicts that 75% of development shops will use low-code platforms by the end of the year.

The Tech Panda takes a look at seven of today’s SaaS startups that are determined to penetrate and ease every sector.

ToolJet

ToolJet’s technology enables companies to build their internal tools with minimum engineering effort. Its platform is still in its early days, but it has already been adopted by hundreds of startups, scale-ups, and even unicorns. The startup currently has integrations with more than 15 data sources such as MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Google Sheets, and AWS S3.

Origin

The company was founded in April 2021 by Navaneeth PK, who previously co-founded MobioPush, which was acqui-hired by Freshworks in 2015. The Tooljet team comes with rich experience in building enterprise SaaS applications.

“Companies are under pressure to do more with what they have. Open-source low-code tools enable developers to deliver what the business needs quickly and securely with enough flexibility to customize and extend,” — Navaneeth PK, Founder, Tooljet

Philosophy

Building customer internal tools require access to the company’s data. When using the self-hosted editions of ToolJet, the data access can be restricted within the private networks of the companies.

Being open-source allows the users of ToolJet to build custom plugins and connectors using JavaScript. This flexibility is not possible if using proprietary software, where custom requirements are almost always ignored.

Growth Story

Since it was made public in June 2021, ToolJet’s GitHub repository has received contributions from more than 100 contributors from more than a dozen countries. The project has observed contributions from developers working at CISCO, Freshworks, Razorpay, and Hasura. Open source products evolve around the community, and the constant feedback from the community has helped in improving the product.

ToolJet cloud offers a fully managed SaaS service starting at free for a basic plan. The enterprise edition of ToolJet ships with additional features, installation support, monthly software updates and priority technical support.

The free and open-source software (FOSS) “community edition” of ToolJet can be self-hosted for free without any restrictions on the features or the number of users.

Glampus

Glamplus is a SaaS enabled curated B2B marketplace, which helps and enables large, medium and small salons/spas to adopt technology and grow their businesses digitally. Glamplus has created a one stop platform, salon CRM for managing customers, ERP for managing staff as well as enabled B2B marketplace compounded on SaaS platform parallelly allowing to run any type of promotional offers / communication with D2C audience.

Glamplus has an AI based CRM platform, which enables salon/spa owners to manage their operations and services end to end through an online web or android mobile app. This has helped them improve the overall salon experience for their customers and staff.

The platform also allows to premiumize the salon owner’s offering via B2B2C interaction to the end customer and also integrates scheduling appointments, generating digital invoices, offer promotional offers through Bulk SMS/Whatsapp and loyalty schemes for customers. The salon owner can track the efficiency of stylists, monitor revenue generation on daily, weekly and monthly basis, inventory management of products and services offered by the salon.

“We have a strong thesis on vertical SaaS enabled marketplaces and believe that Glamplus has done a stellar job at solving a lot of friction in the workflow for salons/spas through their SaaS solution, which has enabled them to drive marketplace revenue at a rapid pace.”

— Investor Anirvan Chowdhury, Vice President, Investments, Blume Ventures

Stats

With the rise in awareness about holistic wellbeing, spending on beauty and wellness products and services has increased. According to the Indian Beauty and Hygiene Association (IBHA), the beauty and wellness market in India is expected to reach INR2,463.49 billion by 2024, expanding at a CAGR of ~18.40% during the 2019-2024 period.

India caters to more than one million registered with 30% over and above unregistered. Glamplus aims to move the US$200 billion SMB-dominated offline economy to a well data-driven engagement platform followed by curated beauty order marketplace on SaaS platform.

Philosophy

With the rise in disposable income and more women joining the workforce in tier 1 cities, beauty and wellness services have witnessed an upsurge. People are now more conscious about their appearance and are willing to spend. To cater to this rising need more efficiently, Glamplus has created an end-to-end B2B2C solution for salons, spas and gyms which will help them to run their operations smoothly.

The salon/spa beauty industry is highly fragmented despite the presence of more than a million plus salons in the country. The solution will create a complete digital ecosystem for salons and spas and help transform their lives.

Growth Story

4000+ salons with 25 lakhs monthly SaaS revenue and 3 crore monthly marketplace GMV in six months with a positive CM1. Since January 2021, the company has successfully tied up with 4000 partners and plans to grow faster in the coming year.

Glamplus has scaled to 4000 paying partners in less than eight months across six cities, Bengaluru, Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, and Pune. Glamplus has grown from a team of three individuals to 40+members in less than six months. The founders understand the nerve of SMB salon/spa market really well which helped them in developing the product as per core needs of SMB market and thus creating immense stickiness for partners to engage on a regular basis.

Zluri

Zluri’s comprehensive SaaS Management platform for IT teams helps companies discover, manage, optimise, secure, and automate SaaS applications from a single dashboard. It puts the IT team back in control of their new SaaS-ified landscape. The startup has the most comprehensive application discovery engine in the industry and the largest library of over 600 in-depth direct integrations.

Philosophy

Today, companies across the globe are adopting SaaS applications. While it is easy to buy a SaaS application, managing these applications is a huge challenge for companies given the volume of SaaS tools that they are adopting. While the IT spend is increasing on these tools, the usage and utilization of these investments remain a challenge.

Orchestrating SaaS applications in organizations and helping them maximize ROI on continually increasing SaaS spend is a large problem statement that requires significant operational effort from IT Teams. With an industry-leading SaaS Management Platform, Zluri is well positioned to help enable this across enterprises.

SaaS adoption has grown exponentially amidst enterprise digitalization in the post-pandemic world across SE Asia, MENA, APAC regions creating a huge opportunity for SaaS Management players.

Origin

Zluri was founded in 2020 by Ritish Puttaparthi, Sethu Meenakshisundaram and Chaithanya Yembari. All three co-founders worked together at Knolskape, for a considerable amount of time and have a  deep and shared passion for building and scaling companies.

“We have made significant investments into our one-click automation engine, which helps IT teams streamline and automate workflows across the organization thus helping them manage, optimize and secure their technology stacks effectively.” — Ritish Reddy, Co-Founder, Zluri

 Growth Story

Zluri has added over 100 new customers from North American and Asian markets in the past year and includes large brands such as Chargebee, MoEngage, Guesty and Whatfix as customers. It has recently been awarded G2 High Performer Winter 2022 and Most Recommended tool in the SaaS Management Platform category by Software Advice for 2021.

Courseplay

Courseplay brings to the table end-to-end solutions in training delivery, employee engagement, workflow automation and impact measurement. The startup captures multiple dimensions of data to provide accurate employee growth recommendations to teams using their web application, chatbot, and Android and iOS mobile apps.

It can capture an employee’s entire experience on the platform, which includes their performance, behaviours, coaching and more. Using this data, they can provide clients with exact recommendations for training, career growth opportunities, and mentorship. Employees get a holistic experience so they may be better connected with their company and get better visibility into their career path.

Philosophy

Upskilling employees and improving workforce performance through regular staff training programmes has always been a must for companies across sectors. However, training employees offline is an expensive affair as it needs to fulfil multiple criteria including upgrade in training programmes, location, availability of trainers and employees and more.

Courseplay provides the most cost effective and scalable online learning technology solution, which not only aims to provide a holistic learning experience at one’s convenience, but also tracks the performance of each employee along with needed recommendation and area of improvement, thus ensuring a high success rate of the training programmes.

This online training program has been the need of the hour especially with the world going digital due to COVID. Courseplay has some renowned brands which itself speaks volume of the brands end-to-end solution.

Origin

Arjun Gupta, Founder CEO, Courseplay graduated from Boston University in 2011 with a degree in Economics and International Relations and is committed to the idea and understands customer behaviour and market gaps very well.

“Courseplay is changing the way employers look at enabling their teams for professional and personal development. Skill development alone is not going to cut it in this day and age, employers need to look at the growth and experience of their employees in the company.” — Arjun Gupta, Founder & CEO, Courseplay

Stats

The corporate learning and talent development market is a US$450 billion market worldwide. Employee experience is one of the fastest growing segments in the enterprise SaaS sector and Courseplay is in prime position to take advantage of the staggering growth of this market over the next few years. They estimate that the market will grow at the rate of 20-25% YoY for the next three years given the recent push for digital transformation by companies in the region.

Growth Story

In 2020, the startup engaged almost 400,000 employees across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. With over 100,000+ activities in the form of e-learning titles, behavioural scorecards, coaching evaluations, performance management, assessments and more, the breadth and depth of services is one of the reasons that makes Courseplay a clear choice for industry-leading companies.

They work with some of the leading companies across automotive, aviation, IT, healthcare, retail, finance and tech. Some of its prominent clientele include Amazon, SpiceJet, Emami, Swiggy, etc. Courseplay’s entire technology infrastructure is completely hosted on the cloud and leverages a number of services by AWS and Google for regular operations of the platform as well as build and deploy unique and innovative features.

Paxcom

Started in 2014, Paxcom is a technology company providing eCommerce and omnichannel solutions trusted by leading global and domestic brands for their eCommerce growth. Their eCommerce solutions include analytics software, advanced data analysis, marketing and advertising, content management, sentiment analysis, custom webstores creation, order and inventory management solutions among the others.

Its cutting-edge solutions can collect and analyze data from all eCommerce channels, across multiple geographies to deliver actionable insights for improving digital shelf share, stock availability, competitive pricing, product discoverability, ROIs on marketing spends, placements, and more.

Their eCommerce solutions include a strong suite of proprietary technical solutions, supported by an experienced services team to ensure end-to-end support for brands looking to accelerate their digital presence.

Origin

Paxcom’s founding team took its plunge into ecommerce in 2010 through an ambitious foray into omnichannel retail, before amazon.in marketplace was launched in India. The in-house omnichannel technology that was built, empowered them for seamless growth across their D2C website, 11 physical locations and to be the pioneer in D2C and marketplaces in India.

Mirchimart was one of the first few sellers that Amazon onboarded when they started their business in India. They also won the award for the largest seller in the electronics category on the Flipkart marketplace in 2014.

In 2019, Paxcom became a part of the Paymentus group – a leading global paperless electronic billing and payment solution, ranked by Deloitte to be amongst the fastest-growing North American companies.

Philosophy

Paxcom is known to provide end-to-end digital solutions that encompass all aspects of day-to-day eCommerce operations. analytics software solutions, and experienced services teams to boost the overall online performance of brands. With Paxcom, the aim is to make it easy and efficient for brands and retailers to sell online.

Growth Story

It helps over 150 brands and sellers across 19 countries to accelerate their digital commerce through channel intelligence, strategy and execution, and omnichannel solutions.

Daily, Paxcom analyses multi-crore ad spends and over 1.4 lakh products across 148 platforms and 450+ pincodes to provide seller and location-specific insights to aid their clients’ ecommerce growth. The team has supercharged over 10,000 products on ecommerce platforms through their content support services and provides multi-language support.

With more than 400 employees across 6 office locations globally, Paxcom’s strength lies in having a strong combination of technology and experienced ecommerce experts working in tandem, for a comprehensive approach towards the online growth of its clients.

Paxcom has been helping brands like PepsiCo, Mondelez, Abbott, Zydus, Britannia, Wipro, Paperboat and many more to establish and scale up their eCommerce presence and have been successfully supporting them in India as well as global markets.

Rocketlane

Rocketlane is a purpose-built customer onboarding platform that helps businesses accelerate their time-to-value, boost customer satisfaction, and thereby reduce churn. The platform replaces generic project management and document collaboration tools with a unique, unified workspace that improves communication, collaboration, and project visibility for businesses and their customers. It equips teams with trends and benchmarks across projects, which in turn helps them develop and optimize playbooks and best practices.

Rocketlane also runs Preflight, an invite-only Slack community for onboarding, implementation, and CS professionals. Currently serving 1200 members, the community, Srikrishnan said, is a part of Rocketlane’s holistic approach to help businesses level up and make their implementation process seamless.

 Origin

The idea for Rocketlane grew out of the founding trio’s own problems with onboarding customers for Freshchat, Sri, Deepak, and Vignesh had built Konotor, an in-app messenger that was acquired by Freshworks and relaunched as Freshchat. Rocketlane was #1 Product of The Day on Product Hunt the day it was launched and has since been growing rapidly.

“Rocketlane has helped us move from lack of visibility, poor hand-offs, and hit-or-miss go-lives, to a streamlined implementation methodology that every team member adheres to. What we have now is project visibility for management and for customers, smoother onboardings, and accelerated time to value.” — S Balajee, Chief Customer Officer at Netcore

Growth Story

The startup has quickly become a global leader in onboarding, with customers such as Chargebee, ParcelLab, Yellow.ai, LinkSquares, Appcues, and Netcore.

Oloid

Oloid is a physical identity software provider committed to providing secure and privacy-forward authentication for the modern workplace. Their vision is to replace antiquated technologies such as pin-pads, badges and fingerprint readers, with frictionless identity based single sign-on for all physical access and authentication needs in a workplace.

The startup claims to offer the industry’s first multi-modal authentication software reader for enabling mobile and facial access for employees, contractors and visitors while coexisting with the existing locks, badge readers and access control systems.

The talent in India is massive and Oloid plans to expand its product footprints in the region with the right team supporting the development and distribution. The company is currently running a Beta program of its self-install product wherein the retrofit upgrades are being offered at no cost.

Philosophy

Today, organisations that need to modernise their physical access control must invest in the hardware and installation costs to upgrade each door or turnstile for enabling access with their smartphones.

In addition, many organisations are experiencing disruption and friction with their dated, physical badges as knowledge workers return to in-person or hybrid environments. Managing the physical badging process for millions of workers has become costly and operationally complex – especially true for employees that have lost their badges since working from home or those hired during the pandemic who may have never received a badge for physical access.

With the movement towards hybrid work and hot desking, employers are re-evaluating many aspects of the physical workplace. Seamless access control will be an important part of this shift and Oloid can take away a big part of the costs and heavy lifting of ripping and replacing existing systems and hardware.

“Oloid is accelerating the adoption of mobile access by introducing an easy, self-install SaaS model that avoids the cost and resource constraints that traditionally plague the physical access control market,” said Mohit Garg, Co-founder and CEO of Oloid.

Stats

An Oloid survey of more than 100 large employers revealed that 58% are ready to adopt mobile access but find the cost and installation experience of current solutions to be prohibitive. The startup solves this challenge with a mobile access product that enables organisations to grant badge-less access to existing doors and turnstiles to hundreds and thousands of employees with the click of a button.

Once retrofited with Oloid, companies can integrate physical access with other IT systems such as employee records, onboarding and offboarding workflows, domain login, desk reservation and employee health databases for verifying vaccination and immunity status.