Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 5)

Manmeet Singh: Those four years were a struggle for me. Generally, entrepreneurs don’t last four or five years of struggle. There was no money and very little revenue. The VCs weren’t spending money and enterprise business was not looked upon as a good business. That’s the reason why I was out every week raising money.

Sramana Mitra: It’s amazing. The story that you told of being out raising money – $5 million worth of convertible note. I’ve never heard that before.

Manmeet Singh: I know nobody has done that before because I thought this was the norm when I was doing it. I didn’t get guidance. Now I do. At that point, I did not have that much exposure.

Sramana Mitra: You said you were operating in this mode for four to five years?

Manmeet Singh: In 2011, we started getting into regular stuff. Then we got Samsung interested in 2012. Samsung said we had to find a lead funder and then they’ll be following. Samsung gave it me in writing. They really liked my story. Samsung also wanted to be a customer. It lasted until 2012. Thing started looking good for us in 2013.

Sramana Mitra: How much revenue did you bring in in 2011 and 2012?

Manmeet Singh: At that point, I was touching around $1.5 million a year.

Sramana Mitra: In 2013?

Manmeet Singh: 2011 and 2012.

Sramana Mitra: How many people were in the company?

Manmeet Singh: At that point, we were very little. The problem was with the lack of money, I had to set up a back-end office in Chandigarh. We had about 25 to 30 people there but we only had 15 people in US. Now, we have about 65 to 70 people in the US. For the first four to five years, I had no more than 10 people in US and about 25 to 30 in India.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise
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