Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

In this  ”Walk the Talk with an Entrepreneur” session i am presenting to you an  interview with Pallav Pandey (pic below) COO & Cofounder of Knowlarity Communications, a cloud telephony company based out of India.

How did you come up with the idea for cloud based telephony solutions for Knowlarity communication

Small and medium size enterprises in India are the growth engine of Indian economy. Collectively they contribute $110 Billion of revenue with high growth rate and provide employment to 75% of workforce in India through the manifestation of the relentless entrepreneurial dreams. And, all these entrepreneurs run their business on that small piece of mobile phone.

Myself and Ambarish (Cofounder & CEO) dreamed to enable these millions of entrepreneurs with innovative, inexpensive and hosted telephony based business products.

Cloud enabled solutions as a whole are making it affordable for small businesses to automate their office workflow. Products offered by Knowlarity are filling an important gap in the domain of  intelligent telephony solutions (Fax / PBX) that were not affordable for enterprise businesses before.

What is the USP of Knowlarity Communication.

Knowlarity has built a scalable sales model where we are able to sell products in a cost efficient manner to SME businesses. Knowlarity’s competitive advantage is that we have been able to design a sales model taking into account the recurring nature of cloud business, something which bigger enterprises are not accustomed to do since they have been selling products based on high upfront license fee. Apart from being affordable  our products are scalable on demand and have lower set up times, this is an important consideration for SME businesses that are inherently nimble in their operations.

Knowlarity communication is targeting global SMEs by offering range of products, do you find challenging to push your products in SME segment.

Yes, we had difficulty initially in making them understand the concept. However than we customized the products as per the sme basic requirements on the problems they face in their daily lives and developed products that they need in today’s scenario.

The company is pioneer of cloud telephony in India and creates state of the art products for SMEs and innovative award winning solutions for enterprises. Knowlarity is a young and vibrant company and served more than 40,000 customers in India.

• We explore how Cloud technology and services can help people and companies address their problems and challenges, and realize their possibilities, aspirations and dreams.
• We apply new thinking and ideas to create more simple, valuable and trusted experiences with technology, continuously improving the way our customers live and work.
• No other company offers as complete a cloud technology product portfolio as Knowlarity.

We offer consumers a wide range of products and services from efax to Super Receptionist and from web computing to Mobile Phones. This comprehensive portfolio helps us match the right products, services and solutions to our customers’ specific needs.

Which product is selling fast in the market and for which product you would like to see more traction.

We see demand for our solutions across enterprises ranging from small to large enterprises. Our product portfolio mix addresses needs of all enterprises, Super Fax and Super Receptionist being packaged products cater to specific needs of SOHO and small enterprises and products like Super Caller, Super Tollfree and Super Conference are designed to address needs of mid sized to large size enterprises.

Whom do you compete with directly in International market.

With respect to International competitors, players like J2 Global and Twilio are direct competitors. They would find it difficult to penetrate because of two factors a) their platform supports VoIP which is allowed in a limited way under indian telecom regulatory norms b) majority of their sales is done online and it would be difficult for them to sell in developing countries where majority of population is offline.

Exotel, another young exciting startup is also in similar space, do you feel threatened by them in the domestic market.

Cloud telephony space is at a nascent stage in India which is expected to grow to grow exponentially in the coming years with enterprises shifting towards cloud enabled products. Foreseeing this growth there are Indian Players like Ozonetel and Exotel which have started to offer these services.

Their current play is more towards providing an API and expecting the developer community to design solutions using the same. We feel that this might be too early for Indian enterprises that need packaged products addressing their main pain points, in this regard we have a head start on our competitors.

Cloud Telephony Services is a scale game – you can run asterisk on a desktop and start offering services and get past first hundred customers quickly. But the systems start to fail with higher call volume – appreciate we are dealing with parallel voice circuits and not just data packets which can scale easily using Amazon Web Services. Its a reliable communications game – nobody wants a services that works great “most” of the time. A lot of R&D and VC investment went into making Knowlus platform scalable and reliable.

Knowlarity would gradually promote its API as the market become as the developer community becomes more mature and we expect this to contribute strongly towards our growth.

Knowlarity raised investment from Sequoia Capital, Any advise to entrepreneurs who are planning to raise venture capital

Startups need to identify a niche that they can dominate and then expand from there.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

HealthKart, gurgaon based online retailer has raised $5M from Sequoia Capital and Omidyar Network as part of series B round.  In April 2011 HealthKart had raised $1M from Kae Capital and Sequoia Capital.

Primarily the investments will be utilized in strengthening the product portfolio, supply chain system and good chunk of investments will be deployed in marketing.

Healthkart, is founded by two IIT-D graduates – Prashant Tandon and Sameer Maheshwari. They have able to bring in some talented entrepreneurs in their core team, for instance Animesh Jain is head of Online Marketing & Product, Animesh was CEO and Cofounder of iTasveer.

Healthkart which began as online health store has expanded its product portfolio, now it sells baby care, cosmetic products as well.

Lets have a look at their monthly traction:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	–	150K
Unique visitors (users)	–	69K
Page views	–	1M
Total visits	–	150K
Avg time on site	–	8:00

-Hitesh, vcBytes

Groffr, the only group buying portal of high value items like real estate, cars, home loans etc is about to close a funding round. It is learnt that the group buying space seems to be only gaining momentum. We have learnt that Groffr is about to raise capital from a prominent Angel Network and another institutional fund. The details are not known but sources say it’s close to a million dollar. The funds are largely going to be used for expansion purposes. Since this is not from company sources we can’t confirm it with certainty.

In another development Groffr got an offer for one of the biggest internet company in India for a complete buy out which was in tune of $4-5M. Groffr founders Sandeep Reddy and Vikhyat Srivastava  declined this tempting offer, Certainly they want to play bigger game in this $1B real estate brokerage market.

Transactions over Groffr platform has been very healthy, around 115 crores transaction has been done and they have saved around 21Cr for their customers. Groffr monthly net revenue has been growing steadily.

Groffr is a a year old Mumbai based startup founded by Vikhyat Srivastav and Sandeep Reddy, both IIMK graduate and worked earlier with PE real estate funds. The group aggregates people interested in a particular property and negotiates with the developers for a discounted price for everyone. Groffr employs 20 people in three cities – Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Given the recent volatility in the sector, it makes sense for the real estate developers and car dealers also as they are able to sell a good chunk of their high value inventory in one shot. It’s a win-win situation for both the parties. Buyers get a good bargain while developers are able to sell a lot of flats in one go while saving on marketing cost.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Wouldn’t be nice on sharing the experience of your favorite hangout place with your friends and get rewarded? also getting recommendation on new hangout places you may like all through SMS. Good news is Revu.in has arrived.

Revu.in is a customer engagement plus reward platform on mobile. Revu.in is an innovative way to publish reviews about anything you like in real time by just sending a SMS. The platform enables businesses to build and engage with their community.

Revu.in is a Bangalore based startup founded by Mayank Sharma, Ishwar Sundararaman, Jaishankar Jayaramakrishnan. Revu was started in June 2010 with an idea of using mobile phone as a platform where consumers can talk about places they have been to and immediately promote it within their social media.

Revu bridges the gap between businesses and consumers using an existing device that consumers anyway use today – Their Mobile phone. Businesses run their mobile loyalty, engagement and informational programs and consumers subscribe to them with just their mobile number.

For users Revu.in provides a platform for them to share their experience in a restaurant/pub/concert plays etc with their friends on twitter/facebook and also let them socialize with other people in platform with similar interests.

Revu.in monetizes from the business for deploying its customer reward platform. For businesses Revu provides platform to offer rewards and discounts to their customers.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Now buying your favourite fruits and vegetables is just as simple as ordering pizza, Thanks to Vegwala. Its an online vegetable & fruit shop, its a Bangalore based service started by Mitera Agrotech. I have earlier tried other similar services but discontinued because of various reasons- service wasn’t prompt, need to meet their minimum order amount etc.

Couple of weeks back I tried Vegwala and was impressed with their service, within 1 hr of ordering it online i received the items. Vegwala charges extra Rs 10/- as delivery charges for bill below 200/- and no delivery charges if bill meets 200 or above.

Salient features of Vegwala-

• Products are competitively priced.
• Directly delivered at user doorstep, just a click away.
• Fresh vegetables and fruits soured everyday.
• Handpicked, hygienically packed and ready to be placed in refrigerator, user is saved from cleaning etc.

To save time for users in selecting vegetables and fruits, Vegwala has packaged box system containing vegetables/fruits/mix of fruits & vegetables for a nuclear family of 2 or 4 person. Great packaging and bundling by Vegwala.