1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2014: Saigun Technologies, New Delhi, India

EmpXtrack, the flagship product of Saigun Technologies, is a comprehensive human resource management product that is multi-geography compliant and integrates the entire gamut of activities in a human resources department. Its main value proposition is its unique engineering design that allows multiple compliance engines to co-exist and provide a complete HR automation platform to any company across the world – all on the cloud.

Saigun Technologies was founded in 2002 by Tushar Bhatia with a mission to provide HR automation for small and medium businesses. Tushar has a master’s degree in computer and mathematics from IIT Delhi and has worked with several Fortune 500 companies in the US including Hewitt Associates (now AON Hewitt), Discover Financials, Moen, Abbott, and Spencer Stuart, primarily in product development, re-engineering, integration, and migration to web platforms.

While working as a consultant for Hewitt, Tushar had done significant HR automation work and identified it as an area of opportunity. His father, Major General BK Bhatia, has significant knowledge and expertise in strategic HR, competency management, interviewing skills, and other HR related areas. He had joined a Tata group company as the head of HR after retiring from the army. Tushar convinced his father to be the Director HR Product at Saigun. Together, they built a small team to enter the HR product space.

EmpXtrack was released in 2004 and initially focused on companies with a larger percentage of white collar employees and a number of technology and finance companies became its initial customers.

EmpXtrack is currently being used by more than 200 companies, some have as few as 10 employees and some have as many as 15,000 employees. Its top target segment is companies with 50 to 500 employees in the IT, consultancy, BFSI sectors. Its geographic focus is on the US East coast, UAE, and India, especially Mumbai, Bangalore, and New Delhi. They have also found significant success in selling to larger companies, which have procured ERPs such as SAP, PeopleSoft, or Oracle but are not satisfied with the capabilities of these ERPs. About 30% of their enterprise customers are SAP users.

The main value proposition of EmpXtrack is that it not only helps organizations cut down costs but also provides a simple, intuitive interface to help employees, managers, and management quickly access data and take immediate decisions. Their capability to customize their product, their services focus, and their lower cost are their key differentiating factors. They typically competed with companies such as SuccessFactors, Halogen, and Vurv. After consolidation in the industry, Workday is their largest competitor.

They offer a free trial of EmpXtrack through their site. They are generating about 350 new enrolments a month. They have also started offering monthly credit card billing and are seeing a 0.5% conversion. The site has about 14,000 visitors every month. They use Google Adwords, Capterra, and a few other paid channels for advertising and attend conferences and networking events fairly regularly in India.

Their pricing is geography-specific. They allow the users to configure the choice of modules and the number of employees to identify the exact pricing. Further, after enrolment, the customers can choose their modules, setup the employees, and setup a recurring payment schedule. Automatic billing is available from Stripe and Paypal.

Current revenues at Saigun are about $850,000. They have a healthy EBIDTA of $250,000 and maintain positive cash-flows.

According to their research based on 2011 surveys in the US, there are about 450,000 companies with 25-500 employees and about 17,000 companies with more than 500 employees. Together, these companies employ about 90 million employees in the US. In the Middle East and India, there are additional 300,000 companies employing 21 million permanent employees. At an average cost of $3 per employee per month, they estimate the potential market size in these three markets to be $3.9 billion. Gartner estimates the size of the HR solutions market to be about $10 billion and growing at 7% annually. Further, SaaS solutions in this space are growing at twice this rate.

The company is 100% bootstrapped and continues to bootstrap to this day. The profits from their services business have been reinvested into product development and marketing. They are looking at aggressive customer acquisitions to grow their revenues over time.

Tushar says their ideal investor would have significant experience in funding HR Tech companies such as SuccessFactors, Taleo, and Workday in this space and would be able to guide them in their growth plans. His dream is to build a multibillion dollar company. He believes the opportunity exists and that their technology can get them there. He is currently not thinking about an exit.

This segment is a part in the series : 1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2014