Techweek Elevator: LOFT Analytics

Mission
LOFT was spun out of Guild Capital in 2012 to provide a platform to rapidly scale portfolio investments from Guild. We quickly realized that high-quality strategy and outsourced services was very difficult to source for most internet based companies. While traditional outsourcing companies target large accounts with hard-wired solution sets, LOFT takes a much more internet-first, modern outlook on how tech companies should interact with customers and scale data and content requirements. Internet companies love us because we are an extension to their culture of innovation.

Market
The SMB sector especially internet business are significantly under-served with many companies scaling support & analytics teams in-house to support their growth. This contributes anywhere from 10–40% of revenue for most start-ups. There is an increasing need for higher capital efficiency with increasing growth. By optimizing high volume transactions or communication channels for a business, the workforce is able to scale its core product design and customer acquisition engines much more efficiently. In addition, with high (>30% annual) growth in the SMB sector, fueled by the high inflow of investments in the sector, LOFT’s target market looks extremely attractive.

Model
We primarily provide internet-based companies a scalable outsourced engine in India driving content, customer experience or data for them. We work closely with companies to build differentiated services that address their most growth-correlated, repeatable, predictable work. Clients manage LOFT’s services through a dashboard-based platform while our “tip of the spear” strategy team identifies potential for driving greater ROI.

Most recently, we have made significant breakthrough in driving an omni-channel customer support solution designed to factor in customer & product behavior in individual customer interactions. We’re excited to release our multi-language chat-first approach to a larger client set soon.

Additionally, we are also building a sophisticated dual-shore content generation and moderation model that delivers original or aggregated research content at high volume, delivering high CPMs, RPMs and SEO ranking for our clients.

Management
LOFT was founded by Iain Shovlin as a spin-off of Guild Capital, a hybrid VC based out Chicago. Iain currently acts as the Chairman of LOFT while day-to-day operations are led by Mike Paik (Managing Director, US) and Sailesh Mohapatra (Managing Director, India). We have built a stellar, dual-shore team of ex-management consultants and bankers, who are actually closet geeks and nerds on a mission to optimize the planet. This incredibly talented team helps clients push their thinking on how services are delivered.

Momentum
The business is doing ~$5.5M revenue run-rate and has grown by over 50% y-o-y. We hope to continue our steep trajectory and are looking for a new massive playground in Pune after just having launched our new office in Mumbai. Currently, we are on a mission to 10x our customer experience clients this year especially with our newest solution.