 "Cloud GRC firm FixNix raises $500,000 pre-Series A led by Tesla CIO")
The company is looking for raising another $1 million in the pre-Series A and around $15 million in Series A funding in the future. The Series A funding would be from Singapore-based investor Temasek and others
Part of the proceeds for the pre-series A came from equity crowd-funding to finish the development of their GRC analytics, said FixNix in its announcement. The fund will also be used to strengthen its GRC team, adding 36 engineers to its existing 15 engineers and the addition would be happening in Chennai, said Shanmugavel Sankaran, CEO of FixNix.Inc.
The company has plans to move its core operations to chennai from it’s current base to be with the rest of the SaaS industry friends like Zoho, Freshdesk. By 2016 the company is planning to raise its Series A funding after validating a few new markets. "Temasek has expressed interest as there was a referral from end user entities from Singapore Govt. The company is planning for additional products in the future like GRC analytics," it said.
The company is in talks to raise the next $1 million through private placements and strategic investors like a US bank, to launch the analytics , SaaS GRC to all markets that is going to change the GRC market. The company has so far raised around $1,00,000 and it was bootstrapped with $2,50,000 including debt mortgage and support from State and Central government. It was a conscious bootstrap route in the lines of its mentor Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu for validating the problem well enough. This pre-series A was done at 13.5M valuation.
FixNix with 1,500 users, got rewarded with $ 100,000 angel cheque from a silicon valley security product company as part of Nasscom Innotrek trip incubation in silicon valley.
The public SaaS version which was launched in June 2015 has over 213 companies with a large number of customers streamlining their internal audit, risk management practice. On the enterprise cloud offering, the company has partnered with Institute of Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT), established by Reserve Bank of India to serving over 400 financial institutions of the country. It is also into public-private partnership innovating on the product delivery by having the product delivered to all banks through RBI cloud itself. The company claiims that it is the only one who have officially partnered with RBI with continued efforts Governance, Risk & Compliance issues come in through a variety of channels, including phone, web, email and chat, as well social channels, among others. FixNix helps manage and prioritise the compliance issues and them to auditors.
The company has grown organically over the last three and half years and became profitable from the first year of operations, said Sankaran. It has also launched a new product called NixAnalytics in January that predicts the risk, audit using propreiatry machine learning algorithms the company has applied global patents for.
The company's enterprise customers include State of California, Cipla, Tata Motors and many banks through RBI partnership. It was set up in USA on July 2014, the Indian R&D was in place before that for a year and half, and the Singapore entity got formed to formulate the strategies of the new Asia Pacific market.
Senthil Nayagam, founder of the "ruby on rails" Thoughtworks of India, RailsFactory, who is Chief Technology Officer in FixNix and P A Subrahmanyam, executive chairman are the co-founders of the company, apart from Sankaran.
