Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 2)

Anji Maram: It triggered a need in me to do something – create a company and employment. I started thinking the way he thought. However, I was not able to figure out how to do all these things.

I always believe that once you want to do something, you figure out a way to do it. I realized that I need some experience in this business ecosystem. So, I joined another organization to build practice projects. I gained some experience there in terms of how to build practice and how to help customers scale up.

Although it was not a successful journey, I learned a lot – more of what not to do rather than what to do. At that time, I realized that my strength was in genuinely helping customers. My strength was being genuine. My strength was being honest with the customers. That was what made the customers like me.

I just wanted to bank on that strength. So, after that venture, we realized we can actually start this company. We started a company with a services scope, and scaled it big.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this realization?

Anji Maram: It was in the 2013 timeframe. We started the entity registration of Critical River in 2014. I was joined by my friend Chandra. He’s also a BITS Pilani graduate. By that time, he had completed his MBA. He’s pretty strong in the finance operations area, which was not my strong area.

I thought maybe using my strengths and his strengths, we can start this company. So, we started this journey at that time. I also realized that I need to have a formal business education, and I joined MBA in UCLA in parallel with the company. The first one and a half year, I was busy learning in MBA. We didn’t do a lot of business development in 2014 and 2015. It was at the end of fifteen when we started taking this more seriously.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of consulting work were you planning to do in this 2014-15 timeframe when you were starting CriticalRiver and beefing up your business education? You must have thought about some positioning for your services business, yes?

Anji Maram: Yes. Whenever we start something like this, it always starts with the founder’s capabilities. My capability was ERP application consulting. I worked on a niche – channel and partner applications.

Sramana Mitra:  When you say channel applications and partner applications in the context of ERP, can you elaborate a bit more? What were the problems that were coming up and the use cases that you wanted to solve?

Anji Maram: In typical ERP discussions, the focus is often on financial applications and the supply chain, as these are the most common areas. However, for manufacturers, whether in high-tech or consumer goods, there is a significant aspect of sales through channels. This can involve a two-layer channel or distributors. When sales occur through distributors and retailers, there are specific compliance requirements in financials, such as revenue recognition. Additionally, there is a returns process, special pricing, chargebacks, and deductions. Many backend activities are involved when partners and distributors are part of the process. These are the business processes I focused on solving.

Typically, most companies know how to handle financials and supply chain. However, the area I mentioned is one where most companies lack expertise. These are the products I helped build at Oracle Corporation. My experience includes implementing and enabling these applications for customers. We believed this was a niche area to start with, and we began with that niche and provided assistance.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver
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