Capillary Technologies mulls another round of funding

Company may raise funds next year to expand into new markets

Cloud-based customer relationship management solutions provider, Capillary Technologies, which completed five years in business this month, is now mulling another round of fund raising that may happen in Jul-Sep 2014. While its venture capital funding last year was used to strengthen its existing operations, this time the company may look to expand into new geographies.

The Bangalore-based company, which was started by three IIT-Karagpur alumni with a seed loan of Rs 15 lakh from their alma mater, today has 140 clients across 16 countries. The company employs 300 persons and has offices across US, UK, South Africa, Dubai, India, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.

Last year, the company received funding of $15.5 million from three investors - Qualcomm Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. In the earlier years, the company had also received funding of $1.5 million from 17 angel investors.

“The last round of funding we received was and is primarily being used for expansion in these eight markets and in building our technology and making it more scalable… We believe that our product can scale into many more markets like Latin America, Germany, France, and Japan,” Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Aneesh Reddy told Business Standard.

Capillary Technologies’ products enabled retailers and other consumer-facing businesses to collect data through multiple channels, warehouse it, and run analytics and business intelligence. The company also helps its clients to run campaigns or deliver actionable insights based on this data.

Even as the company competes with global giants who are eying the retail sector in view of its fast growth in the recent years, it enjoys an edge as its cloud-based product reduces costs for clients and is faster to show results, Reddy said. While typically customer relationship management software takes about two to three years to start showing results, Reddy claims that Capillary Technologies’ products start producing results within months.

“In most cases, the products that we compete with are very heavy software models, where the upfront investment is massive and it takes six months to install, train and so on. While being on the cloud, the big advantage we have is we are very quick to market. Since we are on the cloud, there’s no heavy duty installation,” he said.

“Because we are on the cloud and our analytics happen real time, we are able to show far quicker and far better results,” he added.

Capillary Technologies has helped many big retail and food brands in identifying customers’ purchase patterns and preferences, which helps them engage with buyers intelligently. The company, which has 300 employees, has an impressive clientele ranging from retail giants like Raymond, Nike, Peter England, Inc.5, Catwalk, and Puma, to food chains like Pizza Hut and Faaso’s.

Going forward, the Capillary Technologies’ ability to use data is what will set it apart from competitors, Reddy said.

“As we move forward, being able to use data will be a big differentiator for us and that’s something we have invested quite a bit on. I think everything will move to software being more intelligent,” he added.