Mobile app management platform Hansel.io chasing a $3-bn global opportunity

Hansel.io, a mobile app management platform , sees opportunity in businesses with consumer touchpoints, including retail, gaming and fin-tech

Today’s  enterprises face disruption from both start-ups and new-age tech giants such as Amazon, and the only way to compete is to move fast, test more hypotheses and personalise.

There are two sides to product building as a whole — one where product teams develop and launch products and features, and the other where they manage operations of products to maximise the upsides from every user. The latter is where Bangalore-headquartered tech start-up Hansel.io focuses on.

Founded in 2015 by former product team members of Flipkart, Varun Ramamurthy Dinakar along with Parminder Singh and Mudit Mathur, the startup recently raised $4 million in series A funding led by Vertex Ventures. Existing investors IDG Ventures India and Endiya Partners also participated in the round.

“Hansel’s presence in more than a quarter of a billion smartphones is a proof of the growing need for hyper-personalised experiences with faster and cost-effective turnaround,” Abhishek Srivastava, director with Endiya Partners, said.

With the new funding, the company has collectively raised $ 6 million. It had raised a seed round in 2016 from Endiya Partners and a clutch of angel investors along with a pre-series A round in 2017 from Endiya Partners and IDG Ventures.

The company will use the new funds to grow its US operations and step up hiring.

Hansel.io founders Varun Ramamurthy Dinakar (left), Parminder Singh (centre) and Mudit Mathur

Product concept

Product operation or product op is one of the most critical high-impact functions within large conglomerates like Uber and Facebook that let these companies experiment and personalise product experiences with tremendous speed. Product operation is the answer to how companies can test and deploy the most number of product experiences in the least amount of time.

In most firms, product op is heavily tied to the development cycle. Every operational change requires the product or the product op manager to align multiple teams, code in multiple items, and schedule launches across platforms. It takes weeks or even months for a change to hit actual users, and in the process, it is found that more changes are required.

“We as a company have built a platform that abstracts code for the product owners. When a product owner wants to make changes in the app or website, he or she doesn’t need to go through the code anymore. Instead. the person can make these changes on their own through Hansel’s platform,” said Dinakar.

The pain point the company is solving is to remove engineering cycles from product iterations. The moment one decouples the engineering and products, tremendous value is unlocked for the company.

Opportunities 

The company is chasing an estimated global market of $3 billion. The opportunity lies in businesses with consumer touchpoints, including retail, gaming, travel, fin-tech and banking.  

The use cases that run on top of Hansel include UX personalisation, localisation, internationalisation, product-controlled marketing dashboards and rapid experimentation, among others. “We complement optimisation and personalisation providers, yet have peripheral competitive overlaps with some of them, including Adobe and Optimisely,” Dinakar added.

The business model is Enterprise SaaS, with monthly recurring revenues dependent on monthly active end consumers of its partner businesses.

With 21 large customers and expansion plans in the US, the company eyes sourcing revenues in the ratio of 60:40 from the US and the rest of the world by 2019. “Our go to market will be driven by enterprise contracts — 1,000 companies at $100,000 average ACV is our answer to the $100 million revenue run rate question”, said the co-founder.  

It aims to break even in Q3 of 2019 if it sustains the same level of growth spending.

Challenges
 

The challenges before the company include cultivating a product op mindset and working with internal systems.  “Product marketing, with a regular stream of content, becomes an integral aspect of our expansion. Architecting the solution to work with legacy systems becomes key to overcoming the challenge,” he added.

Expert Take:  A boost for small online businesses

Hrush Bhatt Co-founder, Cleartrip

Independent online businesses face an existential threat from giant incumbents. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are  encroaching into newer territories. No business is safe from their quest for constant growth. 

Hansel.io gives smaller businesses powerful personalisation capabilities, levelling the playing field. Hansel.io helps businesses to compete by delighting users with a personal touch.

Personalisation is a powerful mechanism to get, keep and delight users. But personalisation is often hard to execute and harder to measure. 

The faster businesses can execute personalisation experiments, the faster they learn what works. Speed is the most potent weapon an online business has. And, Hansel.io delivers that.

Fact box : 
 

Founded: 2015

Funding: Hansel.io has so far raised $6 million from Vertex Ventures, IDG Ventures India, Endiya Partners and other angel investors