Bootstrap the First Venture, Raise Money for the Second: cVidya CEO Alon Aginsky (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Other than the $400,000 that you got from the first investor, did you raise more money subsequently?

Alon Aginsky: No.

Sramana Mitra: You basically customer-financed the company, right?

Alon Aginsky: Yes, it was completely bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: So you finished college and then went to work for this company full-time.

Alon Aginsky: Yes. There was a good run in the US and also internationally. We had a few good markets that we opened in South Africa, New Zealand, and Germany. We reached roughly $17 million in revenues. Then, we went public in 1997 when the market was quite hot. We were pushed to go public. It was just before the bubble days.

Sramana Mitra: How much revenue did you say you have?

Alon Aginsky: $17 million.

Sramana Mitra: That’s really small to go public.

Alon Aginsky: Today. At that time, it was enough to go public. Don’t forget in those days, companies with no revenues went public.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, absolutely. It was really the bubble time. You went public. What happened? What kind of IPO valuation did you get?

Alon Aginsky: It was something around $100 million. You have to understand this was not a bubble company. This company, by the way, still exists. I’m no longer there for many years. It’s still traded on NASDAQ. They pivoted two times. There was a major chance to do it in New York.

Sramana Mitra: While you started it when still in college, you took it public. It was a great learning experience. You learned a tremendous amount doing something like that. It’s the best kind of business education you could have.

Alon Aginsky: Absolutely. I did not have time to do an MBA. At that time, I felt like I didn’t have anything to learn after doing this company.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay with the company after the IPO?

Alon Aginsky: I stayed for seven years. In 2011, I started cVidya.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the concept with the current company?

Alon Aginsky: The current company is around analytics for telecom especially around revenue assurance, which is the ability to detect abnormality between databases, billings, and networks. Operators today lose between 0.5% and 15% of their top line due to internal IT issues.

Another use case is fraud detection – helping telecom operators of all kinds to detect hackers that are trying to take over networks. We’re doing it with a very sophisticated and state-of-the-art fraud management solution that has a lot of algorithms that are predictive. It’s the most successful piece of software in this space.

The third use case is around marketing analytics where we identify areas where operators can sell bundled services and products that they don’t sell today, based on consumer behavior. Another area of analytics that is quite new but exciting is the ability to monetize the data so operators can sell aggregated data to third parties for the purpose of advertising, security, or planning. The telcos today are trying to reinvent themselves and not be a dumb pipe. We provide the analytics for them to be successful in that.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrap the First Venture, Raise Money for the Second: cVidya CEO Alon Aginsky
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