Self help is the code that worked for Solutions Infini

25 May 2016

Self help is the code that worked for Solutions Infini

For both Aniketh Jain and Ashish Agarwal, who were 21 and 22 year old when they launched their startup back in 2009, neither venture capital nor media attention has been important in their journey so far. The duo, who run enterprise communication company Solutions Infini, just struggled their way to Rs 100 crore revenue mark in March this year. “We knew the market really well and had a vision. But after a couple of meetings with the investors, we realised that our vision was not aligned to theirs. So we stepped back and put the focus back on the product and growth,” said Aniketh Jain, the CEO of Solutions Infini, which has doubled revenues from last year’s which was Rs 58 crore. In the next five years, the college buddies hailing from traditional Marwari families, want to take their company public.

Solutions Infini sees new-age startups and BFSI as its biggest growth areas and works with over 6,500 large and small enterprise customers ranging from ecommerce biggies like Jabong and Myntra to startups like Practo and Capillary Technologies, and finance companies like Muthoot Finance and Federal Bank. The company’s cloud based platform, which can send out about 100 million messages a day, is now mostly focussed on requirements of new-age startups.

Its been all about taking well calculated risks, staying away from aggressive growth strategies, whether in hiring or expansion plans, and putting 100% of the earnings back into the business.

That meant no salaries, no mobile phone or even petrol reimbursements to take home for the first six months. The 110-people company was bootstrapped with a startup capital of Rs 8 lakh from family members. “It took a while to convince the family since being a tech product, it was difficult to show them what we were selling or buying,” said Jain, whose friend Ashish’s family helped get a rent-free office space for a few months in Bangalore’s startup hotspot Koramangala.

The first big break came with orders from Tata Communications and Benetton India, both of whom gave cheques worth a lakh each. The company galloped with revenues inching ahead from Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1.5 crore in the initial years to Rs 100 crore in 2015-16. The target is to achieve Rs 250 crore in the next 18 months. “Enterprise communication is not only growing, it’s changing too,” says Shivakumar Ganesan, CEO at enterprise communication company Exotel who estimates that companies large and small are spending close to Rs 40,000 crore a year on communication. “Earlier, large companies would think of this technology as something that will make their backend more efficient, but for new age companies, it is the part of the business model itself, that is going to change the future.”

A number of SMSbased enterprises communication tools started life around six to seven years back when SMS was being seen as a dying peer-to-peer communication tool. Those like Webaroo, which rose to fame with its product Gupshup, allowing users to communicate within communities through SMS, later pivoted to an enterprise communication tool. Besides Webaroo today, Solutions Inifini’s closest competitors include Knowlarity Communications and mGage.

Read the coverage here: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/entrepreneurship/self-help-is-the-code-that-worked-for-solutions-infini/articleshow/52425780.cms