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| What makes Sapience different from all the other Enterprise Effort and Time Productivity products in the market? |
| Sapience is a patent-pending software product to measure and analyze Enterprise Effort and Time Productivity –effortlessly! Companies whose staff works on computers extensively have no clue about how employees and teams are working towards achieving their scheduled goals. |
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| Trends show that 20% of employees are working at less than 50% capacity, either because they have not been assigned sufficient tasks, or are spending time on personal work. On the other hand, more than 1/3 of teams are significantly over-worked for long stretches, pointing to poor estimation of effort. Most managers often realize that the team could have done things differently after the job is almost done. What if you had the visibility into activitiesin progress every step of the way? |
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| Sapience, from InnovizeTech Software (www.innovizetech.com), measures and analyzes Enterprise Effort and Time Productivity – effortlessly! It helps companies to boost revenue/profit by at least 20% through higher people efficiency from the existing team. It delivers deep insights into Time Hygiene (work and private hours, on-PC and away from PC time), Work Patterns (top activities and apps, time breakup across projects and modules) and Capacity Analysis (under/over utilization, actual and calendar effort). Trends are available both for the employee and management, through which work efficiency can be enhanced. Sapience combines a local client on each user PC with a SaaS (cloud based) or on-premise server. |
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| We have no known competition in Enterprise space. There are some players that measure Time Utilization for individuals and small teams, but none that is an enterprise class product, which maps time to usage towards business goals. Our SaaS and on-premise options enables us to target a much bigger universe of customers. |
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| How has the experience of fund raising been? |
| Since the co-founders have been part of successfully acquired companies earlier, we were not really looking for funding at early stage. However, when we were contacted by IAN, we really liked the tremendous network of contacts that they bring to start-ups. We also appreciated the fact that they promised to review our business plan and confirm their decision within 30 days. In fact, we signed the term sheet within 12 days of our first presentation to them. |
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| Could you describe how you got started and the hurdles you had to cross? |
| All early stage companies face similar problems. For example: Make sure that we are building the right product. We did our validation through early betas at 3-4 prospects who liked the concept enough to support us. Based on their inputs, we dropped the most project management component on which we had spent lot of time. We did this because project management feature tended to dilute the impact of our core USP (which was automated time and effort capture and analytics). Get a strong engineering team since product development cannot be easily done with inexperienced team. Due to our leadership roles at previous companies, a few senior people joined us from there. We gave them a combination of salary and equity. |
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| Manage expenses while building the product and initiating sales. In our case, no salary was paid to the four cofounders for 1.5 years. The investment from Indian Angel Network in July has helped. |
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| Learn from prospects on what they want from the product and focus on what the market demands rather than "cool" features. We listen to all the inputs, and debate them internally on which ones to include and when. However, this is an area that we are still learning to balance. |
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| How do you plan to utilise the funds received from investors? |
| Since this is seed funding, it is primarily being used for engineering and early sales. Funding helped us focus on building a robust product and not taking short cuts. Similarly, on sales front, we are concentrating on early marquee customers who can help us validate and refine our product. Revenue is important, but less so than making sure that our early clients are satisfied and ramping up on number of users. |
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| What role did IAN play apart from connecting you to financial investors? |
| IAN has helped us on multiple fronts. First, their association provides us with tremendous credibility. IAN has helped us get speaker slot and presence at the Expo at the recent NASSCOM Product Conclave. We got introduced to SramanaMitra, a well known Bay area strategist, who subsequently profiled InnovizeTech on her 2010 Incubation Radar of companies to watch out for. |
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| Individual investors are introducing us to companies they know. Couple of them have given us the opportunity to initiate trials in their organizations. We have Harish Mehta who has joined us on the Board of Directors, and Rehan and Anand on the Advisory Board. We consult them on major decisions. |
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| Before a start-up sets out to seek funds, what would you recommend they do? |
| Investors are putting in money based on their confidence in the founders and their vision for the product and market. Hence, the following are important: |
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Founder team that has credibility, domain expertise, and appear to be capable of building a business |
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A good product idea that has been converted into a reasonably solid prototype |
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Initial prospects who have begun to try out the product and are ready to pay money if the product is delivered
as promised |
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Founders should be able to show how the market is reasonably large, their plans to sign up customers, how
they are differentiated from the competition and how they can maintain their lead |
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| What aspect of your team do you believe helped you cross this milestone? |
| InnovizeTech has been founded by four serial entrepreneurs, with a strong product DNA. We have built over 50 products in the past ten years for global companies. We also have good business experience. After our previous two companies were acquired, we scaled VERITAS India and Symphony Pune operations to 600+ employees each and rapid revenue growth. |
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| The founding team’s past experience of managing large services teams gave us the idea for the product. We were able to clearly see what the potential was, and how to be differentiated in terms of product positioning and features. We have kept our engineering team relatively small but highly experienced. So everyone is responsible and good at their work. To save costs, early stage companies often hire inexperienced engineers, but that leads to lot of re-work and delays which ultimately costs the company much more. |
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| About InnovizeTech Software – www.innovizetech.com |
Founded in early 2009, InnovizeTech Software is an exciting new player in India's emerging software product story. Our unique
patent-pending product, Sapience, delivers a first of its kind solution to measure and analyze Enterprise Effort and Time Productivity – effortlessly! |
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| Sapience delivers significant value to today’s organizations whose staff depends on computers to deliver their services and products, and who are looking to maintain profitability in an environment of rapid cost escalations, especially in employee compensation. |
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| Sapience caters to the vital business need of people efficiency, by measuring and improving Time and Effort delivered by teams and individual employees. |
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InnovizeTech Software Pvt. Ltd.
6, Shivkashi Apartments (2nd Floor), Bapusaheb Purandhare Lane, Shivajinagar, Pune 411004. India |
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