Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This is a US–India model since Helion is involved?

Jaswinder Chadha: Yes. Two-thirds are in India and the rest are in the United States.

Sramana Mitra: Where in India is your operations?

Jaswinder Chadha: In Gurgaon.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in the story that you want to share?

Jaswinder Chadha: We feel that in the data analytics space, we might be one of the last companies to basically get to scale. In every industry, there’s always a window for opportunity. We built one of the first companies and we believe that we might be one of the last companies, so to speak, to get to scale. The primary reason for that is there has been a lot of demand for data analytics over the last 10 years or so since Big Data became a buzz word. Now, we are at a point where, basically, businesses are scaling.

Most of the people are focused on selling to Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 companies. By the nature of what the Fortune 1000 companies are, they tend to want to have a choice of multiple vendors or service providers. At the same time, once they think they have enough to close the door and with the whole advent of purchasing and procurement, I think the big companies have really done a disservice to themselves to allow startups to prosper in this kind of environment. They’ve created this very pervasive environment where the large companies have an advantage of scale and the small companies are shut out of the business.

We were very fortunate to come in at the right time. Now, we have over 50 customers where we have relationships and are scaling well. It remains to be seen whether this hypothesis is true or not. marketRx is still the benchmark – one of the largest acquisitions in the space even though it was eight or nine years ago. We have had an opportunity to build another business which might be the last companies to scale in this space.

Sramana Mitra: Even in the India–US mode, there are several competitors like LatentView. They are all doing really well in a somewhat similar space.

Jaswinder Chadha: LatentView is relatively younger. We don’t think they have grown in the last four of five years. They raised a lot of money. They haven’t really done much off the bat from a scale perspective. Most of the other companies that we talked about including LatentView and Fractal, they’re all older vintage. They’re not the four or five year vintage that I’ve talked about. None of those companies have been able to scale beyond $20 million to $30 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: But you’re also $30 million in revenue, right?

Jaswinder Chadha: Yes, with 100% growth rate.

Sramana Mitra: Very well. Let’s keep in touch and see how the space evolves.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha
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