Building a Venture-Scale MarTech Company in Silicon Valley: Chaitanya Chandrasekhar, CEO of QuanticMind (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you started the company, that was 2011?

Chaitanya Chandrasekhar: 2012.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get it off the ground? What did you start with?

Chaitanya Chandrasekhar: Very early on, we made sure we had the right people. You can’t build everything yourself. I was getting my co-founders in place. The three of us met a few times. We’ve worked together in the past. >>>

Building a Venture-Scale MarTech Company in Silicon Valley: Chaitanya Chandrasekhar, CEO of QuanticMind (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What form did it take? What tools did you build? What did you enable customers to do that they couldn’t do before?

Chaitanya Chandrasekhar: We talked about search engines. We talked about social. The problem with all of this is that data is siloed. The marketing teams don’t have one dashboard to control and figure out what is working and what is not working. First thing is, we instrument and figure out what the customer journey looks like. Let’s take a hypothetical customer. You are an e-commerce website. You want to attract customers to buy whatever you are selling. You do that on an ongoing basis. Customer >>>

Building a Venture-Scale MarTech Company in Silicon Valley: Chaitanya Chandrasekhar, CEO of QuanticMind (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Trace the process of building QuanticMind till this point. Take us to the very beginning of what was going on in the industry. What signals were you picking up from the market that gave you the idea that there was an opportunity to do something like this?

Chaitanya Chandrasekhar: Let’s talk about the idea itself and the ideating process. Today’s digital world had its origins in the 2000’s. Google invented what is digital marketing. Before that, it was just display. Nothing really worked. Google changed the Internet. People were starting to pay for stuff. Advertisers and

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Udupi, Karnataka: Rohith Bhat’s Exhilarating Journey with Robosoft (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. That’s your big hit from the product company. You’ve built about $18 million worth of revenue across these three businesses. I believe you have raised some financing. Can you tell me a bit about the financing history about the company?

Rohith Bhat: We raised our first round in 2013 from Kalaari Capital. That was a $4 million round.

Sramana Mitra: What was the thinking behind raising money at that point? You were already revenue-

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Building a Venture-Scale MarTech Company in Silicon Valley: Chaitanya Chandrasekhar, CEO of QuanticMind (Part 1)

Chaitanya and his co-founders bootstrapped an MVP and then went on to raise $35 million in several rounds of funding. The company is now over $10 million in Annual Recurring Revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Chaitanya Chandrasekhar: I grew up in India in, what is today called, Chennai. I can’t get myself to call it that. I call it Madras. I >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Udupi, Karnataka: Rohith Bhat’s Exhilarating Journey with Robosoft (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Both of them were structured as subsidiaries of Robosoft?

Rohith Bhat: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You continued Robosoft with the regular format of doing services projects?

Rohith Bhat: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue level of Robosoft at this point when you launched these two companies? >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Udupi, Karnataka: Rohith Bhat’s Exhilarating Journey with Robosoft (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: These were projects that Apple gave you to build these apps?

Rohith Bhat: We had customers of our own. We built it for them. Apple gave us the SDK.

Sramana Mitra: This was very early. My question is how did you find clients to build products for the Apple App Store?

Rohith Bhat: Because it was new, some of our clients also felt that this might be something that might become big someday. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Udupi, Karnataka: Rohith Bhat’s Exhilarating Journey with Robosoft (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue levels were you operating at?

Rohith Bhat: We were still at a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: You were steady at a million dollars from 1998 to about 2002.

Rohith Bhat: In 1998, we were much smaller. By 2002 to 2003, we hit a million dollars in revenue. We were steady at that level for the next two years. >>>