Gurugram and New York-based InFeedo, a SaaS startup that offers employee analytics to enterprises, on Tuesday said it has raised USD 700,000 from Y Combinator as well as a clutch of Indian founders and CEOs.
Along with Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel, the investors who joined InFeedo’s cap table include Peyush Bansal, CEO at Lenskart, Ritesh Malik, co-founder at OYO-acquired co-working firm Innov8, Anand Chandrasekaran, angel investor and former product head at Snapdeal and ex-Facebook director, Anil Advani, CEO at Inventus Law, and 100x Entrepreneur Fund, among others.
The six-year-old company, which claims to be cash-flow positive, plans to strengthen its management team to expand its operations in Southeast Asia and generate USD 10 million in revenue.
“Our main aim to fundraise during the pandemic was to double down in Southeast Asia and build a leadership team that helps customers remotely connect with their employees better and come out of COVID-19 stronger than before,” Tanmaya Jain, CEO and founder, InFeedo, said in a statement.
The need for organizations to adopt the work-from-home culture and manage the workforce remotely due to the healthcare pandemic has opened up new opportunities for the company, which has helped it close the latest round.
Founded in 2013, the company has over 100 customers including Airtel, GE Healthcare, Nivea, Lenovo, Tata Group, Unilever, Puma, and Oyo. In 2016, InFeedo launched its AI-enabled employee experience chatbot Amber, which talks with employees to find out employees who are either unhappy, disengaged, or about to leave. Overall, Amber’s aim is to measure employee engagement, analyze individual employee and organizational sentiment, predict attrition, and highlight insights on culture. According to the startup, Amber has been able to double the average tenure from 1.5 years to 3.02 years across global BFSI organizations it serves.
“The future product roadmap includes enhanced capabilities to engage remote workforces, leadership and manager effectiveness, and ability to run pulse surveys,” the company said. “The long-term product vision however is to fill the employee wellness gap still prevalent across organizations by creating a pro-mental health AI-enabled solution.”
Prior to this round, InFeedo had raised a seed round from Dheeraj Jain, MD at UK-based Redcliffe Capital in 2016.
At a time when VCs are weighing every penny before putting into startups, InFeedo isn’t the only SaaS company to receive institutional funding. Last week, San Francisco- and Bengaluru-based SaaS company Hevo, which accumulates data stored in different departments of a company to one platform, raised USD 8 million in its Series A round led by Qualgro, a Singapore-based Venture Capital firm.
In June, Postman, an Indian SaaS startup that helps businesses build and test their application programming interfaces, shot to fame by landing into the unicorn club after raising USD 150 million in its Series C round.
According to a recent report by India’s tech lobby body Nasscom, SaaS industry in the country is growing almost 1.5 times faster than the global SaaS market. In the financial year 2020, growing at 30% CAGR, the collective revenue of SaaS companies reached USD 3.5 billion, with 75% of it coming from global sales, the report noted. Meanwhile, the global SaaS market, which was worth USD 100 billion in 2019, is growing at 22.6% CAGR.
Indian SaaS industry has six unicorns among over 1,000 companies. Of these, more than 150 firms generate an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of over USD 1 million. Nasscom predicts that Indian SaaS companies can grow 6X and garner revenues of USD 13-15 billion by 2025, making it a lucrative sector for VC firms, which like to operate in large market segments.