Last week, Pune-based product startup Innovize Tech announced that it has received funding of $350k from the Indian Angel Network. (Note: Indian Angel Network had also invested in another Pune-based startup Druva.)

Innovize Tech has built a software product, called Sapience, that helps companies measure the exact amount of time spent by employees in various work related activities.

LiveMint has a nice article explaining the Sapience product:

For example, an investment banker working on a deal will use several applications, such as MS Excel to do financial analysis and modelling of companies, and MS PowerPoint and various in-house databases to obtain information and do analysis.

Sapience will be customized to register these applications as work applications, and will calculate how much time the banker spent on them at the end of the day.

This would help his managers know how many hours the investment banker actually spent working, out of the time he was in office. They can also find out if the banker was spending too much time on some aspects of the work.

The article further points out that:

The software can be installed at company data centres. Smaller firms without a data centre can operate it from a so-called cloud server managed by InnovizeTech.

Its target consumers are software firms, banks, insurance firms and other firms whose employees use computers to deliver their output.

The key USP of Sapience is that it is a highly automated method of accounting for time spent by employees on different software packages (and hence different activities). While information can be manually fed, Sapience has an API that encouranges programmatic sourcing of this information. Further, nit uses learning and rules based intelligence, to increasingly automate this activity. Further, it can handle various difficult cases, like different employees sharing the same PC, or the same employee using different machines, or an employee logging in remotely to a server. They have applied for a global patent on their technology.

It then aggregates the per-employee information at team, project, and other company levels and locations. The product’s analytics and trend engine then provides insightful information that helps senior management to enhance overall business efficiency, and individual and teams to improve their own productivity.

Sapience is priced on per-user basis. The per-user permanent license fee is equivalent to a few hours of average per-employee cost to company. They point out, on their website that they demonstrate savings of several hours of productivity within the first 30 days of deployment. Therefore, Return on Investment (ROI) period is typically one month.

Innovize tech was started last year by Swati Deodhar, Shirish Deodhar, Hemant Joshi and Madhukar Bhatia. The Pune startup community will remember that Shirish, Hemant and Madhukar were also the people behind nFactorial software, the Startup Mentoring company. nFactorial has not been accepting any new mentorship engagements for a while now, and the founders are now primarily focusing on Innovize Tech. For more details on the executive team of Innovize Tech is on their About Us page.