Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about how you got into the market? So you have this idea that you were going to do something quite different in the contact center world. How did you get this off the ground? Did you build something and started getting customers or did you raise money right away? What was your path to getting your idea to fruition?

Anand Janefalkar: Very good question. Right away, I wanted to make sure that I was building something that is real, that can be demonstrated, and can truthfully measure how this would make an impact on customer satisfaction. I worked with a couple of contractors and built an MVP.

Sramana Mitra: What was in the MVP? What did you decide what’s needed to be in the MVP given what you were trying to prove out?

Anand Janefalkar: That’s very important. The first baby step towards all of this is, I decided the verification part. I think it’s very straightforward than when you’re originating that caller chat from the same app that you logged into. With touch ID, face ID, or pattern on Android, it should be the same way when you get on a call or chat with an agent. They should be able to click a button and verify you. Obviously, you can’t build everything with an extremely limited budget and invent payrolls running from your checking account.

That’s what I dealt with the couple of contractors and showed that to a few industry experts as well as to some investors. At the same time, I was showing this to potential customers. These are companies that I have worked with before that had support centers. I wanted to see how they would react as opposed to an investor or subject matter reacting. I got a lot of valuable data and got some early believers. I used all of that together to raise the first round in October 2015, which was led by Jason Krikorian who was the Co-Founder of Sling and also General Partner at DCM.

Sramana Mitra: How much was that first round?

Anand Janefalkar: We raised the first round in two steps. It was extremely relationship based. I wanted to make sure that I’m not rushing into raising. I wanted to raise with the right people. The first step of that was, it was a $2.6 million round. It was followed by a $4 million round. That $4 million round was led by Raanan Bar-Cohen from Resolute Ventures.

Raanan was an extremely successful operator. I believe he is one of the early employees at WordPress. I really wanted that representation of how someone would sell it to enterprises. He was a person that had taken care of a lot of the VIP clients for WordPress. With Jason and Raanan, that was just a terrific combination.

Sramana Mitra: Through this process and through the time that you were raising these two rounds of financing, can you step us through what was happening on the customer side?

Anand Janefalkar: We had a few key customers. They weren’t huge. Fitibit was one of my early customers. This wasn’t for their main contact center. This was just for a small group of 40 agents. Their tier-III support. There were a few others that we signed up. The fundraising wasn’t too much of a belabored process. That wasn’t entirely what I was focusing on. I was mainly focusing on building a platform.

Even though we had these early customers, we knew what we had to build. I didn’t just want to build a voice platform. I didn’t believe that channel is the right strategy because that’s not how people communicate. People don’t like, “I’m going to place a voice call to this particular person.” It’s just based on what your social surroundings are, what your time constraints are, and all of that. So I didn’t want to be restricted to a channel.

I’ve, very early on, found out that the way to architect this is that the urgency and complexity of the issue should dictate the channel and not the other way around. I spent a lot of time with the team to build a platform that does voice, chat, can do video, and can share screenshots. That’s what I was planning while the fundraising was happening.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar
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