US- and India-based Paperflite, a mobile-based enterprise content marketing platform, has raised $400,000 (Rs 2.55 crore) in a seed round of funding led by The Chennai Angels, a company statement said.
Other investors who participated in the round include Lakshmi Narayanan, former chief executive of Cognizant; Chennai-based Like Mind Ventures led by Krishnan Srinivasan; and a group of high-net-worth individuals led by Singapore-based Adrian Rusu. Srinivasan and Rusu will join PaperFlite’s board as observers, the statement added.
Girish Mathrubootham, founder of Freshworks; Mithun Sancheti, chief executive of Titan-acquired Caratlane; T R Santhanakrishnan, CEO of Datatracks and former chief financial officer of Sutherland Global Services participated in the round as a part of The Chennai Angels, the press note said.
The two-year-old startup will use the funds to scale up its marketing and sales globally, and expand its product offerings to suit multiple industries, Vinoth Kumar, co-founder and CEO, told VCCircle in a telephonic interaction.
“Sales and marketing are witnessing a massive digital transformation to enable businesses to create an engaging buying experience for their customers at every touchpoint,†Narayanan said in the statement.
Paperflite was founded in March 2016 by former Cognizant executives Kumar, Yega Kumarappan and Anant Bhat. The firm’s mobile platform creates marketing content that sales representatives can use in their pitches. Discrete sets of content in the form of power point presentations, PDF documents, blogs, etc. are presented as a single collection to clients.
Besides, sales teams can also track how a prospect is engaging with the shared content and who they share it with internally. This, in turn, helps a sales team adopt the best follow-up action
“The instances of salespersons being met with averse responses during a sales pitch is on the rise. Hence, a lot of businesses are moving towards content as a way of articulating their business and products better,†Kumar told VCCircle.
Going forward, the company hopes to foray and expand its operations in the US and Europe. “From an industry perspective, we are looking to get into technology, financial services, and life sciences, pharmaceutical and medical devices,†Kumar added.
Headquartered in New York, the company operates through a wholly-owned subsidiary in Chennai, which houses an engineering and a sales and marketing team.
The company has on-boarded over 20 enterprise clients from across the US, Australia and Europe. In India, it counts Freshworks and Data Track among its customer base.
An engineer and management graduate, Kumar spent a little over four years at Nasdaq-listed IT services major Cognizant prior to starting up. Besides Cognizant, he has worked at Daimler AG in sales and marketing. A mechanical engineer by qualification, co-founder Kumarappan had a 15-year stint at Cognizant before founding Paperflite. Bhat, the third co-founder, also a mechanical engineering, spent his entire professional stint at Cognizant prior to taking the entrepreneurial route.
In the broader SaaS space, a few ventures have secured funding in recent times. Earlier this month, e-commerce enabler KartRocket.com raised Rs 26.64 crore ($4.1 million) from existing investors Bertelsmann India Investments, Nirvana Digital India Fund, Nirvana Digital Investment Holding Co Ltd and Singapore-based Beenext.
Mobile app analytics startup CleverTap raised an undisclosed sum from Japan-based diversified consumer and business services provider Recruit Holdings Co along with existing investors Sequoia and Accel.
IDfy.com, an online human resources analytics platform that provides background verification services, also raised Rs 19.50 crore ($3 million) in a fresh round of funding from new and existing investors.