What happens when David and Goliath work together
Whenever we talk to people around, a few generic questions have always popped up. The most prominent being “How’s the journey been so far?” And more often than not, people have worked closely with us in all their possible capacities after hearing it out. This one is just an effort to put it out in the open.
Our Story — Introduction
The founding team’s love story with the idea dates back four years when a bunch of us participated in a competition called ICICI Trinity in 2013, a competition organized by ICICI bank to drive banking innovation. As college students, we were tired of browsing for coupons online. The idea was simply to develop an engine for the bank to personalize offers sent to customers by anonymously analyzing the bank’s transactional data. Little did we know the journey is going to be this long and eventful.
After a year of ideation and prototyping, we won the competition and received INR 15 lacs in cash prize from the bank. We talked to investors but nobody would touch a bunch of college graduates entering the enterprise SaaS space. Starting up with such little capital in the Fintech industry looked scary because of the speed at which the industry generally operates and the campus placements were a bit too cushiony to ignore. But then the nudge to complete the undone couldn’t hold back for long. In 2015, a year after working at our respective placement companies, we incorporated a company under the name Connaizen.
In line with the idea pitched at ICICI Trinity, Connaizen was going to analyze transaction data available with banks to provide insights and targeting capabilities to marketers. On top of this, to avoid any kind of spamming to the customer, we were creating a personalized list of offers for each customer depending on their interests. This seemed like a wonderful solution solving problems for both the banks and the marketers. Our clients loved the script but much needed to be done.
The Beginning — Rising Action
The year 2016 started off with a bang. In January, Connaizen won the ET Power of Ideas and got its first term sheet. In April 2016, we were off to Singapore to be a part of the 2016 cohort of Startupbootcamp (SBC) Fintech Singapore. By the end of July, Connaizen had its second term sheet.
Climax
In August 2016, we rejected our first term sheet. With the end of the year in December and demonetisation taking a hit at all major Indian banks internally, we were faced with a last minute rejection, from the first bank that was supposed to go live with us. Right at the brink, on the last week of closing the deal, things also got rocky with the investors for a second term sheet after a solid six months of detailed due diligence. By January 2017, the firm declined to invest.
Falling Action
As Alfred would put it “Why do we fall sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
And so we did. Six months down and Connaizen is now all set to go big. An association with three major financial institutions, over 90 merchant partners, a customer reach of 42 million+ with our first revenues trickling in, it’s getting exciting with each passing day. It has taken us a while to reach here. Four years from the conception of the idea to be precise. It’s never been easy, we know it’ll never be but one thing is for sure that we at Connaizen are hungry for more. Much more. And the plan is simple. Just continue doing what we’ve been doing thus far. Refuse to give up and let our results do the talking.
From a founding team collapse to a redesign from scratch, turning down term sheets to embracing rejections ourselves, from losing our first client to signing up one of the biggest names in the industry, we like to believe we’ve seen quite a bit over the course of 2 years of our existence.
Resolution
We’ve woken up fighting every thought of shutting down the shutters and crawling to the next milestone we set for ourselves. With no fancy MBA degrees and those decades of experience on our resume, we know we’ll always be the David working with Goliaths (banks and nationwide retail brands) in the FinTech-MarTech SaaS space. And just as the tale goes, this only makes more ruthless, swift and innovative with whatever we try to do. We know our work inside out and that’s what we do best.
We are proud that we have not been alone in this magnificent journey. We so far have seen the financial backing of an ex-Citigroup MD, an ex-group COO of Kotak Mahindra group, a machine learning expert and a leading Fintech professional.
Be it time, skill or money, we all invest in journeys. Tell us how you’d like to be a part of Connaizen’s journey. Write to us at contact@connaizen.com