568th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Abinash Saikia, EnCloudEn (Part 1)

Abinash Saikia, Co-founder of EnCloudEn and former 1Mby1M Premium member, has successfully bootstrapped his venture to an exit and discusses the process in great depth.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the premise of EnCloudEn.

Abinash Saikia: I have had a pretty good education from IIT Chennai and, subsequently, an MBA from IIM Bangalore. I worked for a couple of years but the entrepreneurial bug was always there. I could not continue for much longer. I left my job and started a company called SmartBuildings. I was at that company for about three years. It was mostly an IoT-based energy conservation solution.

We were early to market. We saw some traction, but it was not going like we wanted. In 2015, we figured that it was not the time to pursue this right now. One of the co-founders is my batchmate. We met in IIT Chennai. We started another company called EnCloudEn. EnCloudEn is into creating private clouds for different organizations. It’s a B2B product.

We, basically, build cloud-based infrastructure for organizations. Most of you are probably aware of AWS or GCP. If you look at the growth trajectory of these platforms, smaller companies don’t have a choice but go for these providers. Larger companies have their own data centers and want to set up their own private cloud. We had a software product with which companies could deploy a private cloud.

The use cases were both on the application side as well as the desktop side. That’s the product that we had built. We had sold to 25 customers in India. We also had a third co-founder who joined us later after we raised our first angel round. Towards the end of the year, we got acquired by a NASDAQ-listed company called Quantum. They are pretty large as well. They found our product to fit well in the strategies that the company is taking forward. Now I’m part of Quantum.

Sramana Mitra: I want to double-click down on a few of the things that you said here. You have done this for about five to six years. You did it with a small amount of angel financing. What was the total capital you infused?

Abinash Saikia: We did not have funds on our own. We were very lucky to have a set of angel investors. We had the perfect set of investors. There were seven angels who are technology leaders. They have meaningful roles in technology companies. We had a set of these guys who had invested in us first in 2016. We raised about $300,000. They had doubled their investment a couple of years later. There was a small local fund that put in some money as well. The total money we raised was about a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: Angel investors that you ended up working with, did you know any of them beforehand?

Abinash Saikia: Some of these people, I have known. One of the investors played the role of being the lead investor to start with. The other guys were colleagues of theirs.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 568th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Abinash Saikia, EnCloudEn
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