On Friday, based on an Economic Times report, we reported that Pune-based enterprise backup software provider Druva has received $10 million in funding from Nexus VP. Unfortunately this news appears to be inaccurate.
Here is a comment from Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva:
Thanks Navin, but this news is not very accurate. This was unethically leaked and then misreported by Peerzada (abrar.shz@timesgroup.com) of ET for some cheap thrills.
Not sure when would people this these grow up and stop screwing lives of entrepreneurs who are already fighting against all the odds.
You have been a great supporter and I would give you a call sometime next week to give accurate information and some more good news.
Basically, Druva is indeed in an advanced stage in their second round funding process, but it is not done yet, and they cannot talk about the details of the amount or the investors involved. The details that came out in the ET report are inaccurate.
We wish Druva luck, and hope to hear the official good news sometime soon.
Druva is a purely homegrown startup. This is not a company started by someone in the US setting up a development center in India.
Druva is a product startup. It is not a services company. Hence, it has a potential for exponential growth and returns.
Druva is not done by serial entrepreneurs. The co-founders are all first-time entrepreneurs who quit their big-company jobs to start Druva. This should give hope to all the first-time entrepreneurs in Pune.
Druva has been one of PuneTech’s favorite startups and we have covered it extensively in the past, so, frankly, there isn’t much new that we’ll be able to say about it. Instead, we’ll simply point readers to the older articles:
Technology Overview – Druva Continuous Data Protection – An article about Continuous Data Protection, the first product that Druva came out with. As far as we understand, Druva is no longer selling this product. This is an interesting lesson on how software startups have to ‘pivot’ and change their product line in response to market demands, and how things can go in a completely different direction than what founders originally envisaged
We wish Druva luck, and although getting another round of VC funding is not as good an indicator of success as an IPO or an acquisition, we would still like to repeat what we said in April 2010:
We now have in our midst a startup success story that will hopefully inspire a 100 new software product startups in Pune.
Over time, we hope to ‘Change’ the way, Indian parents buy, so that they can be at home to spend more quality time with their ‘Little ones’ and family.
FirstCry.com receives 10,000 daily visitors and has over 15400 fans on Facebook. It has initiated various contests for parents on Facebook. The firm, which delivers to 25,000 cities and towns in India, expects to do 1000 transactions per day in next three months.
Supam Maheshwari had earlier co-founded Brainvisa in Pune, which was sold to Indecomm Global Services in 2007. Amitava Saha was a Senior Vice President at Brainvisa and had been with the company from 2003.
The Indian Angel Network (IAN) is the oldest angel network in India - and it has just recently started Pune operations. Click on the logo to see other PuneTech articles that reference IAN
A few days back, we reported that Startup Saturday this month features Ganesh Natarajan and the Indian Angels Network, and will be on Saturday, 11th, 3pm to 6pm. Note, however, that there has been a last minute shift in venue for this event from the usual Startup Saturday location to Yashada on Baner Road. The event will now be held in MDC Conference hall No V. This is on the 1st floor of the auditorium building (first building after you enter the gate, next to parking).
The event is free for all to attend. See the original announcement for all other details, including registration information.
What: “Financing Your Startup” Startup Saturday Pune event with Indian Angels Network and Ganesh Natarajan When: Saturday, Sept 11, 3pm-6pm Where: MDC Hall V. 1st floor, Auditorium Building, YASHADA, Baner Road. Registration & Fees: This event is free for all. Register here
Financing your venture – with Ganesh Natarajan / IAN
The Indian Angel Network (IAN) is the oldest angel network in India - and it has just recently started Pune operations. Click on the logo to see other PuneTech articles that reference IAN
Financing your venture is the most challenging tasks for a start-up. Itâs easy to get customers, employees, technologies but finance is tricky. 10 years ago, you could have gone to a VC. Today that is not an option. So how do you finance your start-up?
Thankfully there are lots of other options. Funds are available from friends and family, angel investors, government bodies like MSME, SIBRI, NMITLI, incubators and angel Investorâs networks.
To throw light on this subject, we are getting veterans who have been there, done that for Startup Saturday Pune 10. Mr. Ganesh Natrajan, Chairman of NASSCOM and Global CEO, Zensar, will give the keynote address. He wears various hats. Here he will represent the Pune chapter of “Indian Angel Network”
Tentative Agenda
3:00 – 3:15 Introduction
3:15 to 3:45 Key Note address by Mr Ganesh Natrajan, Chairman of Nasscom and Global CEO of Zensar Technologies.
3:45 to 4:00 Funding schemes from Government of India, by Kaushik Gala, NCL Venture Center 4:00 to 4:15 Crowd funding as an option by Satish Kataria, Grow VC
4:15 – 4:30 Lightening pitches from three promising startups
4:45 – 5:00 Closing Remarks
5:00 – 6:00 Networking and Snacks (On the House)
About IAN – Indian Angel Network
The Indian Angel Network(IAN) is India’s first angel investment network and looks to invest up to US$ 1 mn, though their sweet spot is between US$ 200K to 400K. Apart from funding, the Network also seeks to provide mentoring, strategic thought leadership and leverage the Network’s network for the investee companies. The Network has met with early successes and has already invested in 22 companies across multiple sectors.
Indian Angel Network(IAN) currently has over 125 members drawn from across the country and some from overseas, including leading lights from diverse sectors . Members include people such as Jerry Rao, Saurabh Srivastava, Pramod Bhasin, Raman Roy, Rajiv Luthra, Pradeep Gupta, Sunil Munjal, Arvind Singhal and institutions such as IBM, SIDBI, Spice Televentures, Intel, etc.
Startup Saturday Pune is a once a month meeting where startups pitch to a panel of experts and investors. Anybody can attend these meetings. Click on the logo to see info about previous Startup Saturday meets
About Startup Saturday
Startup Saturday, Pune, is a forum aimed at deepening the skills of startup community in Pune to make more successful startups coming out of the city through creation of a vibrant innovation ecosystem. As with other cities, SS Pune will also be held on second Saturdays of the month.
A SS session is about rich-discussions on topics of interest to startups in the city. A typical session would have only about 25% of time devoted to talk/presentation and rest of the time time dedicated to freewheeling discussion as that is where, in our experience, the audience makes the best use of the available expert.
InnovizeTech is a Pune-based startup that builds employee productivity measurement software. Click on the logo to go to Innovize Tech's website.
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.
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.
What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on how to pitch your startup, by serial entrepreneur Samir Patel. When: Saturday, May 1, 5:30pm Where: e-Zest Office Terrace, 2nd Floor, Anand Nilay Business Center, Near Karve Statue, Karve Road, Kothrud. Map (thanks Hetal) Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.
POCC is an informal group of the Pune Startup ecosystem. It contains more than 2300 people who either have their own startups, or want to start one, or provide some service (or funding) to startups. Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about the POCC
Samir Patel is a New York based serial entrepreneur, who is visiting Pune and we have arranged a talk by him about how to pitch your startup, and why you need to fine-tune your pitch (the investor pitch, the high concept pitch, the elevator pitch). Some of you might remember Samir from a POCC presentation last November.
Samir is the Founder of Prudent.ly, a social marketplace designed for connecting customers with questions to their social network, reviewers and sellers in the context of a question. Earlier, he co-founded SearchForce that helps manage search marketing campaigns in a burgeoning $6 billion yearly market with its algorithmic trading platform. At iPIN, later acquired by Valista for $50+ million, he designed the world’s first open scalable mobile payments platform. Samir also crafted the go-to-market strategy for eBay’s apparel division, which is now a $500 million business unit and growing. He architected efficient systems for Stanford Graduate School of Business in the area of analytics, courseware management and security. Much quoted in CNN, BusinessWeek, Reuters and Mercury News, Samir has a B.S. in Computer Science and an MBA in Brand Marketing from Cornell University.
During his 2009 sabbatical, he walked solo for 1000 kilometers in the wild Himalayas and circumambulated the Narmada river just with two pairs of clothes and little money. He also serves as a volunteer at ManavSadhna and Gramshree at Gandhi Ashram and has started http://www.maareva.org for the long term sustenance of Mother Narmada.
Outline of the Talk
Investors donât invest in businesses. They invest in stories about businesses. If you want to raise money on favorable terms, you need multiple investment offers. How do you get multiple offers? Tell a good story to several investors at the same time. A good story can’t sell a pile of garbage, but it will keep a gem from going unnoticed. You can tell a story in a sentence; you can tell a story in a paragraph; and you can tell a story in a 20-minute pitch. Startups need to do all three.
We now have in our midst a startup success story that will hopefully inspire a 100 new software product startups in Pune.
PuneTech and the Pune Open Coffee Club both started about 2 years ago, and the steadily increasing memberships and vitality of these communities points to a very strong startup community in Pune. However, throughout those two years, one question always cast a doubt on the long-term potential of this startup ecosystem. And that question was: Where are the success stories?
Druva Software is a Pune-based backup software product startup. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about backup software (mostly about Druva)
Druva software (previously known as Druvaa) which just closed a $5 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital answers that question. Of course, getting a round of VC funding is not as good an indicator of success as an IPO or an acquisition. And of course, there have been other successes in the past. But still this news is great, for the following reasons:
Druva is a purely homegrown startup. This is not a company started by someone in the US setting up a development center in India.
Druva is a product startup. It is not a services company. Hence, it has a potential for exponential growth and returns.
Druva is not done by serial entrepreneurs. The co-founders are all first-time entrepreneurs who quit their big-company jobs to start Druva. This should give hope to all the first-time entrepreneurs in Pune.
There haven’t been many high-profile successes in recent times, and this one comes as a breath of fresh air.
Druva has been one of PuneTech’s favorite startups. With 5 different PuneTech articles, this is probably the company that has received maximum coverage from us. And a quick look at the articles gives hints as to why:
It is a product company, which is always more interesting than a services company; it’s especially interesting to watch the product evolve over time.
It requires some very complex technology, not something that any company could easily build. Plus, they are happy to write detailed technical articles about the technology that underlies their products.
It has repeatedly featured in high profile startup events in India, from proto.in to the NASSCOM summit
PuneTech spoke to Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva, over the phone, and here are some quick notes based on this conversation. There are a number of unique features here that other Pune entrepreneurs would do well to take note of.
On the current state of the company
Druva has $2.5 million revenue run rate, coming from about 400+ customer deployments. Most of this is from their flagship product, the inSync remote laptop disk-to-disk backup solution. Recently they also introduced Phoenix a remote server disk-to-disk backup solution. They have about 23 employees, most of them in Pune, with a few sales people elsewhere. The product is developed entirely in Pune.
How do they manage enterprise support for 400 customers with such a small employee base?
Although supporting their customers is a very high priority for Druva, one of the things they focus on very hard is to make the product very easy to use and very easy to support – so that to a large extent, most of their customers don’t really require any support. They have a “release often” philosophy which ensures that customers always have the latest, bug-fixed, version of the software.
Another area that they put a lot of effort in, is in ensuring that the product is easy to install. A lot of their customer testimonials speak of how easy it was to self-install the software. By contrast, the comparable software from the more established players in the market requires professional services help for installation.
How do they manage sales without a strong US/Europe presence?
Instead of the tradition of hand-holding that is a common feature of enterprise sales in this domain, Druva decided to go a different route. They made their software freely downloadable from the web, and made it easy to install and try. As a result, most of their customers approach them after having first tried the product out via the website. And many of their sales, even large ones, have happened over skype/email, with no in-person customer visits.
How do they compete with the large MNCs, the established players in this market?
We were very surprised to learn that Druva does not try to compete with the incumbents on cost. Jaspreet told us that in fact the average Druva sale tends to be 3x more expensive than the comparative offering from the established players. Druva scores on ease of use, simplicity, and most imporantly, the technology.
Jaspreet points out that one of Druva’s strong points is the easy-to-use source-level de-duplication. Which means that when backing up a laptop, they can ignore duplicate content even before the data is sent to the remote backup server. Specifically consider the gigabytes of windows operating system files on your laptop. Most of these files are likely to be identical across all laptops of a company. Druva’s software would know beforehand that there is a copy of those files on the backup server, and would never send it across. Such optimizations ensure that backing up 15 TeraBytes of data from a number of different laptops just results in about 2 or 3 TeraBytes being send across the network. This results in an increase in speed, reduction in network bandwidth consumed, and in disk-space consumed.
By contrast, traditional backup systems do de-duplication at the destination. Which means that all the data is sent to the server over the network, and only then is the server able to remove duplicate content. This means that the speed and network bandwidth improvements are lost.
Also, claims Jaspreet, Druva’s backups are fully searchable – a feature that is not available with most competitors.
What is their primary challenge currently?
Jaspreet says that they want to build a high-quality, world-class product, and for that he needs lots of high-quality, world-class people. While they’ve obviously managed to build a team like that which got them so far, they need many more such people in the coming days, and that’s a significant challenge. He says that it is difficult, if not impossible to find “readymade” world-class talent here (even when “world-class” salary and/or equity is offered!). Instead, he feels that the only approach that works is to find individuals (whether freshers or industry veterans) who have the right attitude and potential and then nurture them into the required shape.
(As an aside, we’d like to point out that is a pattern. Pretty much every startup we talk to mentions hiring of high-quality people as one of their primary challenges. This is a problem that needs a solution, and I’m hoping that some entrepreneur in Pune is looking at this as an opportunity.)
Parting thoughts: In the Druva co-founders, we have people who have been through the entire process, from zero to VC-funding, in Pune, recently. And they are nice guys. Pune entrepreneurs should take advantage of this, and flock to them for guidance, advice and mentorship.
The VC Circle blog has just posted information about a new venture capital fund launched by a Pune based association – Indian STEP and Business Incubators Association (ISBA). ISBA is an association of startup/business incubators, incubatee startups, and other people interested in this ecosystem.
The fund will focus on sector-agnostic investments in companies with no proven track record.
Arihant Group, a company engaged in steel manufacturing in Pune, has contributed a major chunk to this fund while the other investor in the fund is Mumbai-based Adventa Infratructure Pvt Ltd.
[…]
The fund looks at an average investment of Rs 2.5 crore, and expects equity stake somewhere between 5% and 30% in investee companie
The ISBA was set up in 2004 and aims to promote business incubation activities in the country through exchange of information, sharing of experience, and other networking assistance among Indian Business Incubators, Science and Technology Entrepreneurs Parks (STEPs) and other related organizations engaged in the promotion of start-up enterprises.
These are the planned activities of ISBA:
»
Provide advice on finding out the requirements and conditions for starting an incubator, creating business plan, recruiting incubator managers, and incubator development issues;
»
Maintain and update a data base containing the contact information of business incubation experts;
»
Lobby for Indian incubators at national and international levels;
»
To organize workshops, conferences, seminars, or training services;
»
Publish a newsletter;
»
To organize media conferences and other activities to create awareness about the incubator programme and get public participation;
What: POCC & MVP (Morpheus Venture Partners) bring Startup Roadies program to Pune When: Saturday, 21st Feb. Book a slot anytime between 10am to 7pm Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map. Registration and Fees: Send an e-mail to nandini [at] morpheusventure [dot] com with a short (less than 300 words) intro of your startup. Please mention your preferred time slot.
Sameer Guglani and Nandini Hirianniah are the founding partners @ MVP. Both of them are serial entrepenuers and started their first venture Madhouse Media in 2004. Madhouse was one of the first organized movie rentals players. They successfully exited the venture with the acquisition by Seventymm in July 2007. More Info
The Startup Roadies Program
We absolutely love to meet passionate entrepreneurs whose ventures are in idea stage (not started, but want to really start) or 1-12 months into the operation. The interaction will be completely informal. Formal dresses are not a must, we want to see you as your natural self, no need to bring any presentations or any financial projections. Just come have a chat with us. Get a demo if possible, get all members of your founding team. Just ensure that you arrive on time as per the allocated slot 😉
The goal of the exercise is to together explore solutions to some of the “tough business problems” you are dealing with. We could do that by offering advice and potential solutions based on our experience. We would also love to introduce you to relevant folks in our network who can add value – potential partners, experienced people in similar domain, potential investors etc.
At our end we are just excited to get an opportunity to meet you and learn from your experience and ideas. Each session will be conducted in the below mentioned structure
Where are we?(Get on the same page, understand the current status of the venture / idea)
Team introduction
Understanding your idea, market size, the problem your solving, how is your product/service different that current available solutions
Figure out the current status of the venture – in development, alpha, beta, launched
How much money is available to the team
Where do we want to go?(what are we looking to accomplish in the coming future)
Discuss, debate and get clarity on the goals & milestones for
Short term: 3 months
Medium term: 1 year
Long term: 3-5 years
How do we get there?(the most critical part where we together come up with the clear and measurable steps which will be taken to achieve the goals/milestones)
Given the current status and various goals, what is the best strategy to get there
How to proceed with execution
Best way to raise funding
Who are the folks to partner with
Make a list of action items out of the interaction
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=d273be18-e833-4382-a7d9-9cc357b7c48d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=d1ca606d-fe9c-40fc-8e96-f96069defbaa)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=fb7fba18-4862-4db3-9b63-320aa2ec3046)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=fa5e9fe1-8420-44af-b3ac-c753868f7e2f)