B2B Analytics SaaS Startup Factors.ai raises $3.6 Mn in Funding Led By Stellaris Venture Partners

Bengaluru-based B2B Analytics Software Startup Factors.ai has raised $3.6 million in a pre-Series A funding round, led by Stellaris Venture Partners.

Other investors who also participated in the round include Elevation Capital and Emergent Ventures. Angel investors such as Kris Rudeegraap of Sendoso, Sreedhar Peddineni of GTM Buddy, and Khadim Batti of Whatfix.

The startup intends to use the freshly raised funds in expanding its Go-to-Market (GTM) teams and scaling up its offerings

The Analytics SaaS startup had earlier raised $2 Mn co-led by Elevation Capital and Emergent Ventures, in August 2021.

Founded in 2020, by Pravin Das, Aravind Murthy, and Srikrishna Swaminathan, Factors.ai was part of Google for Startups Accelerator programme in India-2020.

Factors.ai is a B2B visitor intelligence, account analytics, and revenue attribution platform. It help teams identify sales-ready accounts, decode customer journeys, and drive go-to-market performance, which teams can maximize pipeline, with minimum spends.

It offers software solutions that help B2B marketing teams of large enterprises, especially other SaaS firms to make sense of their diverse customer data and make better decisions and increase the ROI (Return on Investment) of each marketing events. It also offers account intelligence, analytics for individual accounts and the overall sales funnel, and revenue attribution.

Zendesk Debuts Sophisticated Real-Time Analytics Solution

Advanced capabilities in Explore Enterprise will allow businesses to use customer service data to inform decisions across support, sales, product and more

Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE: ZEN) today announced the launch of Explore Enterprise, the newest solution within its service-first CRM platform, which enables companies to analyze real-time data in order to understand changing needs. As global ticket volume reaches record highs, leaders can use Explore Enterprise to share relevant insights instantly with other teams and departments, helping them make faster decisions to improve their entire customer experience.

"Over the past few months, companies in India have been striving to adapt to the changing needs and demands of their customers as the pandemic continues to unfold and new trends emerge. Our Benchmark Snapshot Report indicates that even though service requests may finally be stabilizing after months of volatility, higher volumes may continue to persist, at least for a foreseeable future. Therefore, having timely insights are even more crucial for businesses to spot gaps in their customer service and quickly implement modifications that people expect. With the ability to stay a step ahead of their customers and proactively improve their overall customer experience journey, Explore Enterprise will help many businesses in India not just survive, but thrive in today’s landscape," said KT Prasad, MD and RVP Sales, India & SAARC at Zendesk.

“Customers are seeking more support from businesses than ever before, which is putting increased pressure on CX leaders and their teams,” said Shawna Wolverton, EVP of Product, Zendesk. “With Explore Enterprise, Zendesk gives companies the ability to analyze data in order to have a clear view of customer trends they are seeing across our Support and Sales Suites. These comprehensive insights allow businesses to quickly address emerging challenges and opportunities not just in customer service, but throughout their entire business.”

Zendesk customers such as Mailchimp are already benefiting from using Explore’s reporting analytics to understand trends in over 30,000 tickets a month. “It’s about understanding our data as a whole, and being able to look at the big picture,” said Spencer Caratti, Senior Director of Customer Support at Mailchimp. “We’re able to take that cumulative voice of the customer and distill that down to figure out what needs to be prioritized and make meaningful fixes that happen."

With real-time analytics and enhanced team collaboration features, Explore Enterprise enables leaders to manage and scale their business by:

• Monitoring data across customer support channels with pre-built and customizable live charts
• Acting on current trends by setting threshold alerts to see when teams are under a heavy load
• Improving productivity and reducing context switching with embeddable dashboards
• Boosting team collaboration with advanced report sharing and scheduling capabilities inside and outside the organization

“There is still a massive global shift towards digital transformation, and that has recently accelerated across every industry sector. Businesses must respond to this new pace of change and the organizations that are already digitally driven will pivot faster,” said Sheryl Kingstone of 451 Research.

Explore Enterprise provides instant insight across Zendesk products including Support, Talk, Chat, Sell and Guide* to provide a comprehensive, unified view of the customer. This includes information on how customers are using social messaging for support and which channels they prefer for communication. These learnings enable leaders to refine how they serve customers over channels such as Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter Direct Messages, WeChat, and LINE. Additionally, teams will be able to bring in data from external third-party systems through integrations with Zendesk’s open and flexible CRM platform, Sunshine, for a holistic picture of their business.**

With visibility into customer data across channels, Explore Enterprise gives leaders the ability to make improvements beyond the support team, such as informing decisions across sales, engineering, marketing and other departments. For example, when a CX leader sees a support team falling behind on ticket resolution, they can promptly test potential solutions and implement the option that makes the most impactful change for agents. Additionally, a CX leader can see an increase in the number of page views about processing refunds and can adjust existing knowledge base content to better help customers get the answer they are looking for faster.

Zendesk Explore Enterprise is available starting on August 31, 2020. More information can be found on the Zendesk website.

*New Sell and additional Guide integrations are expected to be generally available Q4 2020.

**Sunshine integrations are expected to be generally available Q1 2021.

About Zendesk

Zendesk is a service-first CRM company that builds support, sales, and customer engagement software designed to foster better customer relationships. From large enterprises to startups, we believe that powerful, innovative customer experiences should be within reach for every company, no matter the size, industry or ambition. Zendesk serves more than 160,000 customers across a multitude of industries in over 30 languages. Zendesk is headquartered in San Francisco, and operates offices worldwide.

Mumbai-based GenY Labs closes $700K Seed Funding led by Cyient Chairman BVR Mohan Reddy

GenY Labs has announced today that it has raised seed round funding totaling approximately $700k. The round was led by Mr. BVR Mohan Reddy, Executive Chairman of Cyient and other Indian and Canadian investors. This funding will be used for further development of their unique IP and business expansion in North America.

The company was co-founded by the trio of IIT alumni Ravi Jain, Giridhar Rao Apparusu and Yashwant Kumar. The founders have been entrepreneurs previously and bring together domain expertise in consumer research as well as AI and deep learning. GenY Labs, based in Hyderabad (India) and Toronto (Canada), provides license to Auris, its AI platform which curates consumer insights in real time.

GenY Labs operates in the B2B SaaS space with its platform Auris, which empowers CMOs with curated industry specific customer insights to improve their customers' experience and customer engagement. These insights are generated with Auris’ unique artificial intelligence engine and analytics which acts on unstructured consumer data. Auris is transforming the way consumer research is conducted and is already being used by industry-leading brands across financial services, healthcare, e-commerce, education and consumer goods and services domains among others, globally.

The seed round was led by Mr. BVR Mohan Reddy and was supported by other investors and entrepreneurs. Mr. Devdatt Shah, former Managing Partner of Brookfield Asset Management and former CEO of ICICI Securities, and Mr. Vikram Khurana, a serial entrepreneur, participated from Canada.

Commenting on the development, Ravi Jain, CEO at GenY Labs said, “It’s fantastic to have the support of such accomplished investors as we look to grow the company. Our aspiration is to build a global product company driven by innovation and IP.”

Mr. BVR Mohan Reddy, Founder & Executive Chairman of Cyient Ltd. said, “We’re excited to participate in the seed round of GenY Labs. We are impressed by what the team accomplished in a short time and look forward to supporting their vision.”

GenY Labs joins several India-based B2B SaaS players who have hit their fundraising milestones this year.

GenY Labs, founded in 2016, is an ‘alternative data’ and insights company. GenY Labs’ Auris platform helps derive actionable insights by analyzing data across public and proprietary sources. Auris is being used to augment consumer research by leading brands across the world. GenY Labs operates out of its Toronto and Hyderabad offices.

~ BusinessWire India

India's Business Intelligence and Analytics Software Revenue To Reach $245 Mn in 2017: Gartner

According to research firm Gartner, India's business intelligence (BI) software business is on a roll as it is expected to reach a whopping US$245 million this year, which would result in a 24.4 percent increase over the revenue last year of US$206 million.

Gartner has further clarified that the US$245 figure forecasted is inclusive of revenue for BI platforms, data science platforms, analytic applications and corporate performance management suites.

Explaining the huge potential that the industry holds for the Indians, Zaidi, principal research analyst, Gartner said that the data and analytics market is undergoing a significant change in the Indian subcontinent. A few of these changes includes techniques for data management and analytics, settling of a potential hype cloud around big data through more mature data storage, and processing and analysing solutions.

The research firm further added that they're a witnessing a rapid switch to the cloud and hybrid data management brought by through focused offerings, and the emergence of modern business intelligence platforms, smart data discovery and self-service data preparation solutions, which are expected to power the next round of investments.

In addition to this, Gartner also talked about how India is currently seeing a growing focus of Indian tech companies on Internet of Things data integration, data management and analytics, especially in the manufacturing and consumer packaged goods sector, who are expecting to be market leaders as a result of their competitive differentiation in the aforementioned important areas.

The research firm also took into account how senior Indian executives are now increasingly exploring different styles of analytics in order to meticulously resolve their business imperatives. According to Gartner, this can be seen as a crucial sign of the emerging importance of data management and analytics in the South Asian country.

Gartner is currently holding its Gartner Data and Analytics Summit in Mumbai where Gartner analysts are examining the key issues facing the data and analytics market.

This year, Gartner has shifted the theme from solely BI/analytics and has incorporated some of the key elements of data management, such as data integration, data quality, data governance, master data management (MDM), and the upcoming tools, architectures, processes, skills and roles that when combined together will provide organisations opportunities to leverage data as an asset. The research is also focusing on how digital business dynamics are completely changing the field of data and analytics in India.