Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: IT service desk, from a software point of view, it’s ServiceNow. Now you’re talking about agents. Isn’t that being done by these BPO service providers?

Gaurav Rewari: That’s a very good question. It’s still being put into ServiceNow. The need for analytics, I would argue, is even greater when you have outsourced part of that body of work to a BPO or some other MSP. Typically, what you do is you set out service level agreements but you want to understand how you’re doing against those service level agreements. These are not resources that you manage directly.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you penetrate the market? You got a lot of resonance from the ServiceNow customers and you felt like there’s a market. Who were your anchor customers?

Gaurav Rewari: The early customers included the likes of Netflix, University of San Francisco, and Aruba Networks. We launched our product in the middle of 2014. We already have double digit customers and many more in the process of evaluating. It’s been a pretty sharp uptake.

Sramana Mitra; Let’s go back to the very beginning of your coming out of Oracle.

Gaurav Rewari: I co-founded it with a couple of colleagues from Oracle and someone who’s from IBM. Very early on, we decided to have an additional R&D team in India as well. We set up an office in Bangalore. We started work on that platform even before we chose the functional domain of IT service management. We raised our first round of financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners. They have a lot of investment in the BI ETL [Business Intelligence Extract Transform & Load] data management space in general. That was in the fall of 2012. We raised a total of $8.25 million.

Sramana Mitra: That was concept financing.

Gaurav Rewari: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have a prior relationship with Lightspeed?

Gaurav Rewari: I’ve been in conversations with one of their partners, Bipul. We had a lot of conversations and had a connect. We really felt that pre-built BI application in the cloud had come. In many ways, I would describe him as a founding investor. He was very much a part of the process. In that sense, I was very fortunate to have someone like that to work with and shape the ideas.

Sramana Mitra: Was it only Lightspeed in the first round?

Gaurav Rewari: Yes, and a few angel investors. After $8.25 million, Lightspeed put in $7.5 million. After the product was launched at the end of April 2014, we raised our Series B with Sequoia Capital leading and Doug Leone. He’s on our board as well, in addition to Bipul. That round closed in the summer. They’ve been fabulous investors.

Sramana Mitra: By that time, you had made the bet on ServiceNow and Doug was also an investor of ServiceNow.

Gaurav Rewari: Exactly. I really connected with Doug right away. What’s unique and distinctive about his background was not just the ServiceNow experience. He was also an early investor in Hyperion.

Sramana Mitra: He has a very strong enterprise software investment right now.

Gaurav Rewari: He understood the BI analytics world as well as the IT service management world.

Sramana Mitra: How do you price?

Gaurav Rewari: It’s an annual subscription model. Our customers typically do either one-year or three-year deals. The drivers of the pricing model are basically the size and scale of your service operations or asset management portfolio. So things like number of incidence and service requests per month. That’s a volumetric basis for how much data we would be analyzing and consequently, the value that we’d be providing back to the business. Those are the components of the pricing model. There’s a setup process upfront. Because of the underlying platform that I referred to earlier, we were able to get customers up and running anywhere between three to five weeks. When you stop to think about it, a typical data warehousing and BI initiative can often take 12 to 14 months.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify
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