Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Plai.
Performance reviews (aka performance appraisal, or employee evaluation) is a process to evaluate the employee’s job performance during a particular period of time and has been proven to be much of worth. Monitoring the employee performances, obtaining the reviews of the employees, and working on them is integral to a company regardless of the place or the industry that it belongs from. Staying in a loop of continuous feedback process not helps people feel valued, engaged, empowered, and encouraged to grow, it also helps them fairly evaluated and compensated, which in turn, helps the company grow, while retaining the best of the workforce.
When done right, one-on-one meetings and collaborations, aligning teams with OKRs, 360-degree feedback and reviews, appraisals, feedbacks, and appraisals provide endless benefits for the company along with making the team stronger and helping the management build better relationships with the team members. All of them and more are now offered by Plai, which helps entrepreneurs, business leaders, and managers encourage healthy and happy offices.
Plai is a people and performance management software for forward-thinking companies. Read this article to know about Plai, how Plai works, services, products, founders, business model, logo, plai coupon code, plai promo code, revenue, funding, investors, plain logo, startup launch, growth, advisors and mentors, growth, achievements and more.
Plai is a simplified performance management software. It helps early-stage companies grow and create high-performing teams with OKRs, performance/360° reviews, real-time feedback and recognition, weekly 1:1s, and check-ins. The company is on a mission to help organizations align, stay in sync, and perform better together.
Plai is free and easier to use than spreadsheets. Compared to complex enterprise solutions, teams adopt Plai from day one and employees are willing to use it. Customers say that Plai is “just the perfect match of features to roll out OKRs and reviews in the organization”.
The combination of the feature set, the pricing, and monthly billing makes Plai ideal for early-stage companies. The startup’s goal is to build Workday for SMB.
Features of Plai Products and Services
Some of the main features and services offered by Plai are:
Feedback – Provide constructive feedback regularly to the employees to watch your team grow.
Integrations – Maximise employee engagement with effective notifications and tips directly from the Slack and MS Teams.
Plai Features
Plai – Target Market Size
Grand View Research previously estimate that the HR Management Software market was worth $14.68 Bn in 2018, and Employee Collaboration, Engagement, and Talent Management (our field) – is $2.44 B. This market is expected to grow 11% annually by 2035.
Exclusive for our readers: Use the promo code “plai-startuptalky-15” to get a 15% discount for the first year for Plai Pro subscription. Email at hello@plai.team to redeem the code for your workspace.
How was Plai Started?
While working at their previous company (Uptech), founders Andriy Bas, Sasha Chepurnoi, and Oleh Kryvytskyi faced the need to align the team around common goals (OKRs), share feedback, conduct performance reviews, etc. They didn’t find any suitable solutions to meet their needs. Almost all performance management software is designed for enterprises (with annual contracts) and is too complicated and too expensive for smaller companies. And most importantly – employees don’t use them unless forced to.
So, Andriy, Sasha, and Oleh bootstrapped a solution for their needs with the combination of Google Docs/Spreadsheets/Notion. And this gave them the idea for Plai. They did some research, and over 20+ companies confirmed their hypothesis. Most early-stage companies have similar problems with performance management and struggle the way the co-founders did.
Andriy, Sasha, and Oleh quickly created a landing page and launched it in 2 weeks. They posted about it on social, BetaList, BetaPage. After receiving positive feedback and 500+ beta sign-ups, they started working on the solution.
Andriy Bas (CEO), Sasha Chepurnoi (CTO), and Oleh Kryvytskyi (Product Designer) are co-founders of Plai.
Founders of Plai
Andriy and Sasha worked on multiple projects at work together and have known each other since 2016. Oleh also worked in the same company as Andriy and Sasha since 2018, and they all 3 worked on several projects.
Andriy Bas
Andriy is a Bachelor of Science graduate from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. He has been the CEO of Plai since July 2019. Starting as a Lifeguard at Kalahari Resorts & Conventions, Andriy has served numerous designations like Software Engineer and Senior iOS/Android Developer at many different companies like Netspace, Explain Inc. and Softermii. Bas has also been the Cofounder and Team Lead of Uptech. He was then the Co-founder and CPO of Teamroom, after which he founded Plai. Andri is currently also the Cofounder of No Code, No Problem.
Sasha Chepurnoi
Sasha has a Master’s degree in ML and is currently operating as the CTO at Plai. He is also a part-time, backend engineer at Uptech. He was also a student at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Sasha was earlier a professional soccer player, who started off his career on the field, but unfortunately had to leave the sport after a serious injury that he suffered.
Oleh Kryvytskyi
Oleh is the Cofounder and Product Designer at Plai. He was previously the UX/UI designer at Uptech, where he worked with Andriy.
They’re a small team, and it’s kind of easy to split the responsibilities. Andriy is the CEO, defines the product vision, and does partly sales/marketing. Oleh is responsible for the product and the UI. Sasha is responsible for the technical implementation, the tech stack, stability, and availability of Plai.
“We believe that Plai is a path forward for small teams to become successful companies. We didn’t argue much about the name, nor did we have long meetings to agree on the name. It was one of the options that we came up with initially, it was short and concise, there was no much competition on the internet for this short name, all the team liked it, so we adopted it from the beginning”, says Andriy Bas, CEO of Plai, about the selection of the name.
Plai – Business Model and Revenue Model
Plai offers a freemiumbusiness model (like Slack). Customers can use the Free package which includes OKRs, teams, Dashboard, and Slack integrations. Pro plan (that includes 1:1s, reviews, praise, feedback) — is a monthly user-based subscription for $7/user/month. Here’s a look at all the available subscription packages for Plai:
Free – $0 | Supports up to 5 users
Starter – $55 | Supports up to 30 users
Pro – $4 / user per month | Supports unlimited users
Plai launched the landing page in July 2019 before any product development. By promoting the product idea on BetaList/BetaPage websites and social media, the team collected over 500 beta sign-ups. These were the original users. Then, as they started working on the product, they were writing regular blog posts, and the traffic was also attracting subscribers and early users.
That way, by the time the startup launched in October 2019, it had over 2000 email lists to notify. These were the users of the free version of the product. By March 2020, when Plai launched the Pro version of the product, it managed to convert 5 users to paying subscribers. And have been growing almost 50% month-over-month in MRR ever since.
Plai – Startup Challenges
One of the first major challenges — was to identify what exactly customers need, and thus how the product should look like. To understand that — the founders launched very fast, gave their product in the hands of users, and asked for feedback. Based on that, they iterated many times and every time gave a better and better understanding of what the customers needed.
For example, the team initially planned to build the “Reviews” feature last. But customers were asking for this feature almost immediately and were willing to pay for it. Thus, Plai prioritized it and delivered it much faster than it initially planned to.
Plai started in 2019 and has come a long way now in terms of popularity and user acquisitions. The user base of Plai boasts of 300+ companies that are using Plai software and services. The one thing that has supported PLai all the way is its freemium model, which gives the users a chance to explore the software and see what difference it makes for free.
The users are from almost all countries in the world. In total, they have over 5,000 registered users. In terms of MRR, the startup is growing almost 50% since March 2020 (when launched the paying plan).
“We plan to attract 100 paying customers by the end of the year 2020. Our long-term goal is to be #1 People and Performance management solution for small and medium companies all over the world”, says CEO Andriy Bas about future plans.
Plai – Funding and Investors
Plai didn’t raise any external funding and is self-funded for now. It is going the bootstrap style.
Plai – Advisors and Mentors
The company doesn’t have any formal advisors or mentors. However, many of the co-founders’ friends share their valuable advice and suggestions.
Plai – Recognition and Achievements
Plai became a winner and takes part in the online accelerator Pioneer.app.
Also, Plai was invited to the final stage of the YC Winter 2020 batch, for the on-site interview in Mountain View. But they were not invited to the batch.
FAQs
What is Plai?
Plai is a people and performance management software that helps companies and individuals track and monitor the performance of the employees, smoothen the workflow and empower and acknowledge the employees to help better the work culture.
Who are the founders of Plai?
The Plai founders are Andriy Bas (CEO), Sasha Chepurnoi (CTO), Oleh Kryvytskyi (Product Designer).
How many employees work with Plai?
Plai has around 11-50 employees working with it now.
When was Plai founded?
Plai was founded in 2019.
Where are the Plai headquarters?
Plai headquarters are located in Los Angeles, USA.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved byuKnowva.
Be it a small, medium scale, or large organization, all types of businesses need HRMS software to manage their workforce efficiently. HRMS facilitates employee satisfaction and productivity and helps the Human Resource department with all the employee details and their activity tracks. As entrepreneurship is evolving with advancements in technology, the need for HRMS software is also increasing. Human Resources Management Software (HRMS) Market is estimated to hit 33.57 Billion by 2030. Different Businesses need different software to manage, develop and engage their workforce. uKnowva HRMS provides a holistic HRMS to systematically acquire, manage, develop, and engage your employees. It has all the advanced features like dashboard and analytics, E-recruitment, automated payroll & appraisal management, and more. It can be fully customized according to your business needs.
Read the startup story of uKnowva, its founders, product, growth, and more about it.
uKnowva is a cloud-based HRMS that offers a secure and private platform to employees for engaging in seamless communication and networking, knowledge-sharing and utilising the capabilities of high-yielding tools to attain increased productivity and accelerated growth.
Their vision is to become the world’s SMARTEST HR platform. SMART means 360 degree HRMS software that is easy to use and administer, cost-effective and highly intelligent.
There are nearly 3 billion employees/workers across the globe as per the World Bank Data, which makes the overall market size to be around 24 billion USD per year. The HRMS market is gaining significant traction. HRMS provides digital solutions to manage human and material resources with versatility. Using HRMS results in increased efficiency through minimal errors due to automation of manual HR activities and assists HR departments to analyze the organization’s operational trends. Also, the rapidly evolving IoT and wireless technology have a positive impact on the market value. According to a report by Market Research Future (MRFR), the HRMS market is forecasted to reach USD 33.57 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 12.2%.
Additionally, the cloud-based HRMS segment is anticipated to gain more traction during the forecast period.
Vicky Jain, Priyanka Jain, and Abhay Talekar have founded uKnowva in 2012.
After completing his engineering and MBA, Vicky Jain started to learn languages like Java, Oracle and Applets. It was when his cousin asked him to develop a certain software, life took him to a new course. His work was well appreciated and he got a complete assignment to build a website for his cousin’s company. Vicky along with Priyanka Jain, who also completed her engineering at the same college, worked on this project. As work started to come in, they decided to set up a company, Convergence Services. Since they started off as a service company they had to go through numerous challenges while developing their first flagship product, uKnowva. Vicky, Priyanka and Abhay Talekar (also co-founder of Convergence Services) started uKnowva back in 2012. While they all have individual roles to play within the organisation, they all come together to make sure that the business operates smoothly. It takes plenty of time and energy to juggle everything involved. Startup founders need to be self-motivated to keep up with the challenges at all times.
uKnowva – The Idea and Startup Story
uKnowva initially started off as a web development company. They created a few tools for better collaboration and people management, internally. When some customers approached them with similar requirements, they came to realize that this could be developed as a product and offered to consumers. They then tweaked some of its features and gave it to a few customers like Prime focus technologies, Capital first, etc., and the response was awesome. That gave them the confidence to take this initiative to a whole new level to develop uKnowva HRMS.
uKnowva – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Vicky Jain and Priyanka were in Lonavala, Maharashtra just brainstorming on the ideas to keep an apt name for the start-up. Their main objective was to have the letters U, V and W in the name as some renowned numerologists had suggested keeping U, V and W in the startup name to attract good growth. And after hours of brainstorming, they decided upon the name uKnowva. The logo was designed by Priyanka who is the creative director and the tagline of extending collaboration was adopted over a period of time.
uKnowva – Product
uKnowva HRMS
uKnowva HRMS has every core component of Human Resource Management starting from an employee directory to a self-service portal to automated payroll to leave management and work reports to a special disability feature to virtual biometrics and much more that employees and HRs love to use. By adopting uKnowva’s HRMS, one can step up productivity and manage everyday activities much more efficiently. The Employee Payroll system automatically calculates salary from the data available i.e. leaves, investment declarations, holidays, tax deductions etc. Virtual attendance management allows employees to punch in and out from any device. Also, uKnowva is the first HR tech company in India to launch the disability feature within uKnowva HRMS for visually challenged employees.
Easy to use, Cost-effective, Intelligent and Flexible are some of the major USPs of their product. In general, cloud-based HRMS are developed to be intuitive and user-friendly to those who need to access or use them. That’s why uKnowva’s HRMS has been designed keeping the end-user in mind, based on the requests/suggestions of real HR and payroll administrators.
Our’s is a SaaS based product and the pricing model is simple with per user per month pricing, which starts at USD 2 per user per month.
uKnowva – Customer Acquisition
uKnowva had a few customers who appreciated uKnowva product and the word of mouth also proved to be beneficial. They tried to onboard their existing customers initially. Other than that, they focused their efforts on building their website and enhanced their SEO efforts to reach out to more customers. This significantly helped them to expand their customer base and strengthen their efforts to maintain business continuity.
Over the years, while they have invested in increasing their reach and making more businesses aware of what they do and how uKnowva can help, a good product and support system has helped them retain their customers. So far, attracting new customers has worked best via referral channels.
uKnowva – Challenges Faced
While they were transforming from a “Service” company to a “Product” company, the major challenge was changing the mindset of the people involved. Initially it was like they visited the customers and asked them about their requirements and then built a product based on their needs or preferences. But, while transforming into a “product” company, things changed completely as they needed to ask themselves what would customers need and then build it and sell it to the customers. This entire process actually involved a change in the mindset of the entire team which was the biggest challenge. They overcame it through regular sessions with the team and made them understand how to think like a product owner.
uKnowva – Marketing
When it comes to content and social media, their main focus is on brand awareness and organic visibility. uKnowva is mostly active on Linkedin and they don’t promote and/or boost their posts or campaigns as such. It’s all organic and for brand awareness predominantly.
They had done a campaign called #InsideuKnowva where they introduced relevant topical memes featuring Shark Tank India. The memes garnered good impressions.
Also on Quora, they have crossed 65,000 views within a span of 2 months. Their polls do extremely well and garner good impressions on LinkedIn.
uKnowva – Growth
As technology continues to be at the forefront of a transforming business environment, there are vast opportunities for growth for HR tech companies. So far, their journey has been satisfactory and uKnowva is doing pretty well in terms of growth, innovation, and extending its footprint. They have more than 75+ customers with a doubling ARR per year. uKnowva is all set for further developments in the future.
These are the people who mentor/advise the startup:
Ganesh Sankaran: COO and Business Head-WUBS & New Initiatives at Weizmann Forex Ltd
Deepak Agarwal: Cofounder and CEO at TurboHire
Krishna Kabra: Head of Major Service Center, Orange Business Services
Ranu Parwal: COO & Business Head at Weizmann Forex Ltd.
uKnowva – Acquisitions
uKnowva acquired a company called Apptroid which is a digital agency helping businesses of all size get a better return from online activities like Website Design, Mobile Apps Development , SEO, etc.
uKnowva – Competitors
Following are some of the top competitors of uKnowva:
uKnowva recently received the “Entrepreneurial Company of the Year” award from Frost & Sullivan. The award recognises the efforts in keeping growth and innovation at the forefront of their vision while effectively addressing upcoming new opportunities and challenges for their business. In the Product Excellence Matrix Report in 2014 by Nasscom in association with Frost and Sullivan, uKnowva was featured in the “Unified Communication And Collaboration” category.
uKnowva – Future Plans
Currently, they are focused on increasing its footprints in India and the MENA region. The MENA region has huge potential for Indian technology start-ups as the region has a highly diverse, tech-savvy and distributed workforce whose priorities are flexibility and ease of access in their flow of work. The countries they are basically targeting include KSA, UAE, and Egypt to start and then we’ll cover the complete gulf region. Few customers they have onboarded in the MENA region are Ravin, Masdar, Khansaheb, Puregroup, etc.
FAQs
Who is the founder of uKnowva?
Vicky Jain, Priyanka Jain, and Abhay Talekar are the founders of uKnowva.
When was uKnowva founded?
uKnowva was founded in 2012.
What is uKnowva HRMS?
uKnowva HRMS is Human Resource Management tool that offers employee directory, automated payroll, leave management, work reports, and more employee management features.
India is one of the youngest nations in the world with a large chunk of its population, under the age of 35. So, if India wants to be at the pinnacle of success, this population must be employed. Every year crores of students graduate from colleges with an aim to earn and live their dreams.
Earlier, it was an easy shot for companies to find their candidates during college recruitment as the population was less and so was the competition. But today in this era of cut-throat competition, it becomes difficult for the hiring team to find the perfect guy for their company!
Every Computer Science graduate burns the midnight oil to get placed at Google or Microsoft while an Electrical/Electronics engineer wants to work with Texas instruments. So, the selection process too became complex and difficult.
Since companies can’t spend a lot of money and time on recruitment, they have found a better way to do that i.e. to just give the task to an HR company! So some other firm would do the task for you. So, let’s find out about this new venture and whether it will stabilize for the long run in the market! So, let us see the complete story behind the top HR Tech Startups in India:
Launched in 2014 by BITS Pilani alumnus Vijay Sharma. Belong is a predictive hiring platform to discover and engage high-impact talent through data science and predictive analytics. They are considered as one of the top HR-Tech companies in India.
Currently, Belong works with Amazon, Reliance Jio, Cisco, and ThoughtWorks. Belong’s machine learning algorithms help businesses discover and target high-fit talent, engage candidates through personalized interactions, and accelerate hiring cycles at scale. In 2019, the firm raised $10 million.
Darwinbox
Darwinbox Website
Established in 2015 by Jayant Paleti, Chaitanya Peddi, and Rohit Chennamaneni. Darwinbox is a cloud-based HR solutions firm. An end-to-end HR platform, Darwinbox offers solutions for recruitment, core HR processes, employee engagement, performance management, employee movement, and others.
The platform’s AI engine allows a recruiter to analyze a job description and employee profile picking up keywords to arrive at a certain ranking metric. So, if there are 400 applicants for a job, the system will shortlist about 10-15 applicants for the recruiter to talk to, which saves time, increases productivity, reduces costs, and results in better talent acquisition. The three-year-old firm serves over 100 clients, including Paytm, Ekart, Spencer’s, Delhivery, and others.
Started in 2012 by Arjun Pratap, EdGE Networks provides a suite of AI-powered products that not only auto-source, auto-screen, auto-engages the best candidates and employees for a role, but also recommend the best career path and draw up a personalized learning path for each employee.
Over six years, the team at EdGE Networks has developed productivity tools that leverage AI to help businesses address challenges in the areas of talent acquisition, workforce optimization, talent transformation, and workforce planning. The company has three enterprise solutions –Talent Analytics, Workforce Optimisation, and HIREalchemy – that cover a gamut of HR requirements.
Launched in 2014 by Abhijit Kashyape, Monjin is an on-demand interview platform that uses digital and video assessment to let candidates showcase their skills and personality, and help corporations find the right hire. On Monjin, assessments are not done by technology. Senior industry individuals review prospective employees for a company.
The interviewers and candidates are matched on the Monjin engine through AI for an interview. The clients have access to a video interview where they see the interviewer and the candidate both in the frame, the interview is indexed, rated, tagged by skill, and subskills, by behaviour and by competency. There is also a summary video as a part of an assessment, which is delivered by the expert.
Mettl
Mettl Website
Mettl’s journey began in 2009 when Co-founders Ketan Kapoor and Tonmoy Shingal came together with a common vision: leveraging technology for hiring practices in Indian and Global companies. Mettl offers recruitment assessment, programming tests, psychometric tests, aptitude tests, a pre-built test library of 200-plus tests, an interview app, vocational skills assessment, remote proctoring, deep analytics in performance management, and certification platform, among others. With a presence across 100 countries, the Gurugram-based HR tech firm has over 1,800 clients across the world.
So, this completes our list of top hr tech companies in India. If you are looking for HR startups in India, then give these startups a go! It’ll save you a lot of money and energy and find you the right candidate for your company.
FAQ
What does an HR do?
An HR or Human Resources manager looks into the well-being of the employees in the company specifically in strategic management, recruitment and training, policy formulation, risk management, labour relations, and alike.
What are some HR startups in India?
Some HR startups in India are DarwinBox, Belong, Monjin, Mettl, and EdGe Networks.
Is it compulsory to have an HR in your company?
It depends on the size of the company, if it is a small startup usually the founder takes on the responsibilities of HR as well. But for bigger established companies a separate person for HR is a must to function smoothly.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Zimyo.
Zimyo is a one-stop solution to all HR needs that helps organizations build a 2X more productive, engaged, and satisfied workforce. It provides cloud-based HR solutions to businesses of all sizes. It offers comprehensive smart HR solutions – Payroll and Expense Management, Performance Management System, Employee Engagement, Employee Benefits, Time and Attendance, and Onboarding and Recruitment solutions.
In just 3 years since its inception in 2018, Zimyo is serving more than 500 organizations with 100,000+ active users! StartupTalky interviewed the Co-founder of Zimyo, Mr, Ajay Kadyan to know the startup story of Zimyo. In this article, you’ll get an insight into how Zimyo was started, its business model, founders’ profile, and more.
Incepted in 2018, Zimyo is one of the fastest-growing unified HCM platforms in the HR tech space that automates tedious HR processes, eliminates payroll errors, and enhances employee experiences. It is a one-stop solution to all HR needs that helps organizations build a 2X more productive, engaged, and satisfied workforce. Furthermore, its intuitive HR solutions help employer organizations to drive improved data-driven decision-making and get better business outcomes.
Zimyo is a one-of-a-kind platform that uses smart technology to provide smarter experiences. The company’s philosophy is purely inclined towards a human-centric design that leverages the power of Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning to build highly efficient products. The platform boasts a voice-user interface to simplify complex tasks using speech to enhance user experience.
Zimyo Logo
The platform features a broad spectrum of modules (over 40+) to offer flexibility to its users. Around 95 percent of Zimyo’s partners find it the easiest platform to switch and set up their complex processes in no time. Further, the platform processes the entire payroll in less than 2 minutes for over 1000 employees in just 3 easy clicks. Its robust analytics-driven employee intelligence system increases team retention by 3X and enables leaders proactively with the power of on-demand data and insights to make quick and informed decisions.
Zimyo’s embedded finance solution enables employee-centric organizations to offer a one-of-a-kind employee engagement experience with benefits like advance salary, employee loans, insurance, and investments. With this solution, Zimyo intends to make financial services more accessible for employees across SMBs. This can help companies attract and retain customers while providing hassle-free financial services.
The Backstory of Zimyo – How it Started?
Kumar Mayank, CEO of Zimyo, has a background in microfinance. It is during his stint with the industry that he realized the absence of “formal credit” for employees. These employees who worked all their lives in factories with a PF account and investments to show had no bank willing to lend them credit when they needed it. Kumar analyzed this gap and decided to create a way to make credit easily accessible to these employees.
There was a need for identifying the mechanism of establishing if there was actual salary transferred, which brought the HR and Payroll of an organization into the picture. That’s how the journey began as Zimyo started an innovation drive that merged FinTech with HRTech from an employee-first perspective.
Along with co-founder Ajay Kadan, who has extensive experience of over 10 years in product development, system architecture, and data analytics, Zimyo plans to bridge the gap between the credit market and SMB employees with their innovative solutions.
Ajay Kadyan and Kumar Mayank (CEO) are the founders of Zimyo.
Ajay Kadyan | Co-founder, Zimyo
Ajay Kadyan – Zimyo Co-founder
Ajay has extensive experience of over 10 years in product development, system architecture, and data analytics. He has helped several organizations in the HR Tech, EdTech, and E-commerce space to build robust products. With his strategic leadership skills and critical thinking, Ajay has successfully built a highly efficient and collaborative team.
Presently, Ajay works as the Co-Founder of Zimyo and spearheads the business with his deep comprehensive industry knowledge. He is currently focused on positioning Zimyo as one of the most preferred brands in the HR tech space. Besides, he works closely with the marketing team to improve Zimyo’s brand visibility and outreach. In addition to this, Zimyo has also joined forces with the sales team to increase client acquisition and improve conversion rate, while working closely with the product team to strengthen the product portfolio.
With his technical and functional knowledge, Ajay envisions empowering leaders and organizations across the world to offer true ‘employee experience’ to their employees, help them get the best out of their workforce, drive higher engagement, and build a differentiating human capital advantage.
Kumar Mayank | Co-founder & CEO, Zimyo
Kumar Myanak’s role as Zimyo’s Founder involves connecting with growth-focused organizations and helping them build a great organizational culture with the help of Zimyo’s product suite. He did his BA Hons in Economics from Delhi University and is an alum of IIM – Lucknow. Before starting Zimyo, Kumar Mayank was associated with well-known companies like Equitas Small Finance Bank, ING Vyasa Bank, and Janalakshmi Financial Services.
With an extensive background in Microfinance, Kumar realized the lack of “formal credit” for employees. These Employees who worked in factories for their entire lives with PF accounts and investments to show for their work could not get credit from banks when needed. Kumar studied this gap and devised a way to make credit easily accessible to these employees.
Zimyo – Business Model and Revenue Model
Zimyo provides cloud-based HR solutions to businesses of all sizes. It offers comprehensive smart HR solutions – Payroll and Expense Management, Performance Management System, Employee Engagement, Employee Benefits, Time and Attendance, and Onboarding and Recruitment solutions. The platform charges a monthly fee from employers based on their needs and the number of employees. The basic package starts from INR 5999/PM/100 employees that can be customized as per their employer’s needs.
From the HR tech space, Zimyo has also entered into the embedded finance segment. It has extended its services to offer employee benefits, tax-saving solutions, retirement plans, and financial assessments. Besides this, the platform has also integrated with other job portals to ensure an efficient hiring process.
In such a short span, the platform has onboarded prominent clients with Zimyo including Bajaj Capital, Hillson Shoes, 88 Pictures, iMocha, Yethi, M2P, TheData Team, Fleetx, Riskcovry, and many among others. Apart from this, Zimyo’s direct integration with other job portals makes the hiring processes more efficient by eliminating the need for manual data entry on multiple sites and removing the need to check back in on job posts.
Given the exacerbating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, physical & mental wellness, financial stability and job security have become top concerns for employees. To handle the crisis well, Zimyo is bringing employee wellness to the forefront. Being a people-centric company, Zimyo is emphasizing on “Employee First” culture by adopting policies such as group health insurance, reimbursement for COVID vaccinations, paid leave for vaccinations, paid medical leave for COVID positive employees, mental wellness & engagement sessions, and additional insurance cover for oxygen concentrators & medical emergency.
In addition to this, Zimyo also supports its partner organizations in building a positive and productive work culture. It has partnered with various integrators to provide Benefits such as Insurance, Tax Saving Investment Options, Wealth Management Solutions, Expense/Credit Cards, and much more.
Currently, Zimyo is serving more than 500 organizations with 100,000+ active users. Along with HRMS & other modules, Zimyo’s ‘Benefits’ module has also seen a high user adoption rate. A bunch of Zimyo’s existing partners have opted for Zimyo benefits and are very happy with the offerings under this newly launched module.
It has also designed a bilingual mobile app to further ensure a seamless employee experience. The platform has received avg. 4.2+ ratings from its users on various platforms. Recently, Zimyo has been also recognized by G2 as a “High Performer” in the HRMS, Payroll, and Time & Attendance Software categories – earning a total of 7 accolades.
In such a short span, the platform has onboarded prominent clients with Zimyo including Bajaj Capital, Hillson Shoes, 88 Pictures, iMocha, Yethi, M2P, TheData Team, Fleetx, Riskcovry, and many among others.
Zimyo is one of the fastest-growing unified HCM platforms in the HR tech space that automates tedious HR processes, eliminates payroll errors, and enhances employee experiences.
Who are the founders of Zimyo?
Ajay Kadyan and Kumar Mayank (CEO) are the founders of Zimyo.
How Zimyo makes money?
Zimyo provides cloud-based HR solutions to businesses of all sizes. The platform charges a monthly feefrom employers based on their needs and the number of employees. The basic package starts from INR 5999/PM/100 employees that can be customized as per their employer’s needs.
When was Zimyo started?
Zimyo was launched in 2018.
How much funding has Zimyo raised?
Zimyo raised seed funding of $1.5 million led by BEENEXT in September 2020.
Employees make or break your company. Hiring the right employee for a position is a constructive process. As a recruiter for an esteemed position, you may only hope that you can sort through the hundreds of employees through traditional means.
Breezy HR is an end-to-end recruiting software that has been built to make the employee hiring process less tedious. Breezy is a platform complete with the necessary tools to advertise, interact, sort, and hire employees.
Breezy with its automation tools, make sure you have the chance to assess all your candidates before making a decision. The platform was built to simplify the recruiting process while also making it better.
The UI of any software service has to be pleasing especially if it’s in production. Breezy HR has a fine UI with easy and configurable options. It’s meant to be a platform to help ease the recruiting process and it’s built with tools that reflect the same. It’s clear why some of the biggest businesses like Loreal, docebo and Opera rely on Breezy. Some of the excellent features of the platform include:
Breezy will automatically post the job on more than 50+ free job boards at the same time. Breezy also supports posting to regional sites that support your job title. This means your targeted candidates can be local as well as international. This ensures that recruiters won’t have to hop from site to site to advertise positions.
Breezy also lets you post to premium job boards while saving you 40% off. This is sure to be a pleasant feature for recruiters looking for the best candidates.
The analytics dashboard shows you stats that matter
The analytics dashboard gives recruiters precise information, allowing them to make better decisions for the hiring process. The dates for scheduling interviews with the candidates can be obtained based on the analytics.
The panel enables you to track your sources, ad clicks, candidate profiles, and more. Besides statistics on incoming candidates, you can also view the full details of how a candidate is performing including their obtained scores.
Performance metrics are an easy way of analyzing the eligibility of a candidate. The panel maintains a record of information such as:
Candidates applied
Candidates sourced
Candidates referred
Candidates disqualified
Candidates hired
Built-in Site Creator
Breezy has a built-in page creator so that you have a webpage with your own branding to be used as a career or referral page. A simple and beautiful page that lets candidates directly apply for your listed jobs.
The webpage is fully optimized for mobile and supports customization. The website is embeddable and an API is provided for those who wish to further enhance its functionality. Employee referral pages are a great way to hire fresh, trusted employees that get referred.
Breezy lets you fire up an employee referral page in a few seconds. The site also serves as a place to put up your EEO compliance surveys.
When you’re dealing with hundreds of candidates to sort, some automation is definitely appreciated. Breezy has options that allow you to manage candidates in groups. That means you can hire, disqualify and promote employees.
Processing qualified candidates quickly really speed up the hiring. Next thing you’ll know Breezy will set up interviews and then the final call will be up to you. Breezy also allows bulk management for sending emails and notifications so candidates remain updated and keep track of the recruiting chain.
Collaboration
Breezy allows all members of your team to share their opinion
The best decisions are made together and recruiting your next employee is one of them. Breezy has features to help you collaborate in real-time with your team through the entire hiring process. You can stay connected with your team and follow along even if you’re away with push notifications.
Breezy lets everyone assess candidates through a custom scorecard. Scorecard ratings leave less room for bias and heighten your chance of making a long-term hire. Breezy also supports integration with Slack, a popular business communication platform.
Although Breezy HR includes a free plan to their pricing, it’s more like a trial. You only get the option to use the platform for one single position or pool. When it comes to businesses this doesn’t cover many needs.
The monthly prices might be a bit higher than your SaaS tools demand starting at $171 a month for the Startup plan. The Growth Plan is priced at $299/month and the business plan at $479/month.
You have the choice to pay annually as well which grants 2 free months on all the paid plans. The platform also offers paid add-ons such as Talent search, which is a custom search engine for candidate profiles across various platforms. Further details on pricing as follows:
As a recruiter, you may already have the means to find, rate, and hire employees. Whether it’s through traditional means or through the use of modern-day software stacks, it’s probably worked for you in the past.
Although Breezy HR has a Startup plan, the platform is more likely targeted at businesses with a bigger scale with its pricing. It’s fully up to you and the affordability at your disposal to decide if Breezy is right for you. As with any new tool, you may try out the platform and decide if it’s worth making the switch or sticking to what you’re used to.
FAQ
What is Breezy HR?
Breezy HR is an end to end recruitment software that is designed for recruiters and HR mangers to streamline the hiring process.
Which Companies use Breezy HR
Scribe media, Pet Palace Resort, Pedalheads Bike Camps and MSI Credit Solution are some of the companies that use Breezy HR.
What is the pricing of Breezy HR?
The monthly prices of Breezy HR is $171 a month for the Startup plan. The Growth Plan is priced at $299/month and the business plan at $479/month.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Qandle.
Qandle is a young startup focused on re-engineering HR Technology from employees’ perspectives. Founded by Chayan Mukhopadhyay and Himanshu Aggarwal in 2016, Qandle aims to build connected, engaged, and empowered workplaces. It has launched an all-in-one cloud-based HR software solution that impacts the entire employee lifecycle from hire to retire and makes each step smooth and hassle-free.
StartupTalky interviewed Mr. Chayan Mukhopadyay, Co-founder & CEO of Qandle to get insights into the Startup Journey and Growth Story of Qandle. Know all about Qandle’s business model, How it Started, its funding details, marketing strategy future plans, tagline, and more.
All-In-One HR Platform – founded in 2016, is a young startup focused on re-engineering HR Technology from employees’ perspectives. The brand providesHR Tech solutions that ease the way HR departments operate in companies. It has created an array of different tech-based solutions to fill in the gaps in the usual HR operations.
The company’s vision is to build connected, engaged, and empowered workplaces. In the short term, the brand plans to continue growing sustainably and profitably, while in the long run, the startup aims at being a leading HR tech solution across the globe. The brand believes that with the right employee experience-focused technology implementation, there can be a sea-size transformation in the way the HR industry operates in India.
Qandle – HR Tech Industry Details
According to many credible industry reports such as People Matters, Bersin, IDC, etc. the size of the HR tech industry varies between$50-100Bn. It is growing at 10% CAGR.
When Chayan met Himanshu, who was proficient with tech, and discussed the idea, he already felt convinced. Himanshu himself had the same experience in terms of clunky HR tools at the organization. He was confident that this idea can be very successfully implemented through refined tech skills.
Chayan Mukhopadhyay | Co-founder & CEO, Qandle
Chayan is an MBA graduate from IIM Bangalore (2009-11). Before that, he completed his B.Tech in ECE from IEM (Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata). Chayan started his career in 2011, with American Express as Associate Manager.After working for 2 yrs with Amex, next Chayan switched to Jabong as Senior Manager- Operations. He gained good experience and rose to the designation of Deputy General Manager and Head – Marketplace Operations in 2015. He wanted to start building something of his own. That is when he started Perkkx, followed by Qandle, which is his HR Tech venture along with Himanshu.
Himanshu Aggarwal | Co-founder & CTO, Qandle
Himanshu is an alumnus of IIT Roorkee. He completed his Engineering in 2007 and started his career as a Software Engineer with Techkriti. After working there for 2 years, he had 2 years stints each with Ibibo Group and Naukri.com as well. Then he joined the founding team of a US-based Foodtech startup Munchado and worked there for about 4 years. He is a cybersecurity expert and has been a tech consultant to multiple growing companies including Shopclues and Askmebazaar. He started Qandle along with Chayan in 2016.
On paper, Chayan looks at the business and the product side of things while Himanshu looks at the Tech side, but in reality, Chayan and Himanshu discuss everything and they both jointly look at all aspects of the business.
The current company size is about 40 employees. The team is intentionally kept lean. Work culture is – Get the work done. Qandle hires for just 3 things – attitude, ability, and willingness to learn.
Qandle History – How it started?
The idea was first conceived by Chayan. At his previous workplaces, he had experienced the challenge of working on clunky software solutions for different aspects of HR such as leave and attendance, performance, recruitment, reimbursements, etc. While he was working with American Express, it would take him over 30 minutes to submit his mobile bills. However, what struck him most was that organizations had to conduct training sessions for employees on how to use HR tools, which implied that the tools were not very user-friendly. Next, when Chayan worked with more companies, his experience with these tools was no different.
What further highlighted the lack of a perfect solution was that at least one of these tools would change every 6 months, and since these tools didn’t speak to each other, it would cause a lot of issues.
However, this alone was not the launchpad for Qandle. When Chayan first entered into entrepreneurship, he launched an employee benefits platform- Perkkx. However, when he met HRs to pitch it, he figured the true pain point – an end-to-end HR tool. They wanted to know if Perkkx could provide an HR tool that worked seamlessly. That is when Chayan saw the gap and decided to address the same by launching Qandle.
To explore the model Chayan and Himanshu connected serendipitously. Himanshu had been a techie all throughout his career. They discussed the idea with each other, realized they had complementary skills and decided to launch Qandle together.
Qandle leverages different technologies for various solutions depending on the relevant, expected impact, and affordability for the client. It has launched an all-in-one cloud-based HR software solution that impacts the entire employee lifecycle from hire to retire and makes each step smooth and hassle-free.
Qandle – Name, Tagline and Logo
The name is a play of letters on Candle. It signifies how we aim to spread light around us by enlightening companies about how to manage, engage, and empower their most valuable asset – employees.
Qandle’s logo looks like a magnifying glass, it is also a play on the letter Q, as the team named themselves Qandle because they didn’t get the domain candle.com. The logo signifies how companies need to look and listen closely to their employees in order to grow and win in the marketplace.
Qandle Logo and Tagline
The tagline – Smart HR for the Modern Workplace, signifies what Qandle stands for. Qandle wants to work with companies that care about their employees, organizations that want to create connected, engaged and empowered workplaces.
Qandle – Business Model and Revenue Model
Qandle follows a classic SaaS (Software as a Service) model where they charge the customers a subscription fee per employee per month. The amount depends on the modules subscribed, the number of employees, and the frequency of payment chosen (discounts are offered for quarterly or annual advance payments as opposed to monthly advance payments).
Qandle – Startup Launch
“We used our network and cold emails to get the first 20 customers. The journey of 20 to 100 was easy, as we ensured the initial 20 customers were happy, and then they recommended others” Says Chayan Mukhopadhyay, Co-founder & CEO, Qandle.
There are no growth hacks that work for the long term, except being customer-focused and ensuring customers are happy. That is the only thing Qandle does.
Qandle’s most successful campaign has been ‘word of mouth’. When happy customers recommend others, they purchase the solution without the company having to do much work. As mentioned earlier, keeping current customers happy and satisfied is Qandle’s only growth strategy.
Qandle – Growth
Qandle has been cash neutral since March 2020. It operates primarily in India, all across the country.
Notable clients of Qandle – Spinny, Quality Council of India, Shadowfax, Vidyamandir Classes among others.
Qandle – Funding and Investors
Qandle has raised total funding of USD $1.2 Mn to date.
Date
Stage
Amount
Investors
2018
Pre-seed
USD 1.2 Mn
Arun Chandramohan, Redwood Internet Ventures
Qandle – Advisors and Mentors
Multiple people including Arun Chandramohan (Ex MD and Founder of Jabong.com). We are part of 2 accelerators as well – Village Capital Future of Work India and Newchip.
Qandle – Competitors
“Our biggest competitor is paper and spreadsheet as most companies in India are using those, and these are error-prone, inefficient, difficult to archive and require a lot of manpower. Other companies who are trying to solve the same problem as we are, and who we admire are Darwinbox and SAP Successfactors” Chayan added.
Tools used by Qandle to run the startup
Its own software – Qandle, Google Workspace, and Whatsapp
Biggest achievement – being able to grow profitably since March 2020, i.e. when the pandemic struck. Managing cash flow is crucial for the survival of any company, and the team is proud that they have been able to do that so far.
Software Suggest Recognition awards 2021 in 5 categories:
1. Best support
2. Best value
3. Easiest to do business with
4. Fastest implementation
5. Best software
Software Suggest Recognition awards 2020 in 2 categories:
1. Most popular
2. Customers’ choice
Software Suggest Recognition awards 2019 in 2 categories:
1. Best usability
2. Highest quality
Techimply:
1. Top payroll software
2. Top HR software
Financesonline awards 2018 in 2 categories:
1. Great user experience
2. Rising star
CIO awards in 2 categories:
1. 10 most recommended employee management software solution providers 2019
2. 20 most promising HRMS solution providers 2018
Qandle – Future Plans
Qandle’s aim is to expand the number of clients they serve and make its solution even more intuitive and configurable.
Qandle – FAQs
What is Qandle?
Qandle is a startup focused on re-engineering HR Technology from employees’ perspectives. The brand provides HR Tech solutions that ease the way HR departments operate in companies.
Who founded Qandle?
Chayan Mukhopadhyay (CEO) and Himanshu Aggarwal (CTO) are the founders of Qandle.
Is Qandle an Indian Company?
Yes. Qandle is an Indian company headquartered in Gurugram.
How does Qandle make money?
Qandle follows a classic SaaS (Software as a Service) model where they charge the customers a subscription fee per employee per month.
Who are Qandle’s Investors?
Arun Chandramohan and Redwood Internet Ventures led the Pre-seed funding round of Qandle for USD $1.2 Mn.
What is the tagline of Qandle?
Qandle’s tagline is – ” Smart HR for the Modern Workplace”
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Scikey.ai
Akshay Sharma, Alok Kumar and Karunjit Kumar Dhir, the founders of SCIKEY had to go through the painful experience of dealing with multiple vendors and service providers for sourcing the required talent or even the right technology solutions & providers. Thereby leading them to start SCIKEY.
SCIKEY is a marketplace network for talent & technology solutions. On SCIKEY’s platform, the entire transaction – right from talent & technology sourcing to delivery happens online. The Asia HR Management industry is anticipated to be USD 40 Billion by 2027 growing @ CAGR of 11.7% (Grand View Research, Feb 2020).
StartupTalky interviewed Akshay Sharma (Co-founder of SCIKEY) to know about the Journey of SCIKEY, while also getting a glance on Scikey’s Business Model, Funding, Growth, Revenue Model, Products, How it started & more…
SCIKEY is a marketplace network for talent & technology solutions. It is essentially, how one may look up to it like the Amazon for talent & technology solutions with a touch of LinkedIn. SCIKEY is a digital platform for jobs, work & business solutions, supported by a Professional Network and an integrated Services Ecosystem. It aims to organize the talent & technology solutions marketplace online.
SCIKEY – Vision, Mission and Core Belief
SCIKEY’s Vision is to be the world’s most trusted company for providing customer-centric solutions by inspiring people, collaboration & performance.
SCIKEY’s Mission isto improve the lives of the people and enable businesses across the world by offering them best quality, value, insights & experience; through its marketplace network for talent & technology solutions. SCIKEY continues to invest in research & technology to fuel innovation and making people as well as businesses more productive, thereby becoming their trusted partner in this hyper-connected world.
Core belief: SCIKEY’s core values of Trust, Transparency & Excellence are the foundation of all the relationships, making those delightful and sustainable.
The global talent management software market size was valued at USD 6.26 billion in 2015 and is expected to witness a significant growth owing to its growing application scope in almost all the human capital-centric industries. The industry is undergoing a facelift with many new technologies disrupting the workforce management in organizations, of which cloud and data analytics are the most prominent ones.
A recent report published by McKinsey indicates that the digital talent marketplaces driving the so called “gig economy” could play a significant role in increasing global GDP by $2.7 Trillion by 2025.
Market Details:
Total addressable market: $100 bn +
Serviceable Available Market: $1 bn +
Serviceable Obtainable Market: $100 mn +
The geographical split of SCIKEY’s market is as follow:
India – 10%
North America – 30%
Europe – 20%
Asia (minus India) – 40%
HR Tech industry:
Asia HR Management industry is anticipated to be USD 40 Billion by 2027 growing @ CAGR – 11.7% (Grand View Research, Feb 2020)
Global HR Tech Marketplace – USD 400 Billion (Deloitte Reports)
HR Tech Market Size In Asia – USD 9 Billion (Grand View Research, Feb 2020)
Robotics / AI Based HR Tech Market – USD 6 Billion (People Matters)
Alok Kumar is the founder of SCIKEY. Akshay Sharma and Karunjit Kumar Dhir are the Co-founders of SCIKEY.
SCIKEY is the brain child of Alok Kumar. Shriram & Akshay had met & worked with Alok as a part of his team, before Alok moved out to build SCIKEY. Interestingly, Karunjit had first met Alok in 2007, when he was helping Alok as his customer to setup their offshore captive in India.
Since then, they built a great chemistry & mutual respect but Karun moved out of India in 2014 and so little did they know that they will again get to work some amazing stuff together until thatdinner invitation in 2018. Karun had moved out from his last corporate stint in Malaysia and was taking a short break to visit India to spend some time with his family. It was during this trip back home where Alok invited Karun for catchup over a dinner where he shared his vision of SCIKEY to Karun. Alok was inspired by some of Karun’s critical inputs & prior experience of building multiple technology businesses ground up in multiple global markets, thereby invited him to be a part of the Co-Founding team at SCIKEY; and the rest is history.
SCIKEY’s core team’s tasks –
Alok Kumar – Founder
Akshay Sharma– the owner of R&D & works closely with Alok & Karun on key business boosters like research, automation, growth hacking etc.,
Karunjit Kumar Dhir – owner for the branding, business development, revenue growth & global expansion, investors & fundraising, Finance
SCIKEY’s work culture is built around the core values of trust, transparency & excellence leading to mutual respect, happiness & sustainability.
SCIKEY’s hiring funda has an interesting framework, named ‘DISCO Framework’
D – Dependability (can I just talk to you once & be assured the job is done without any follow-ups or even better can you pro-actively get the job done?)
I – Integrity & Ethics (how much can I trust you & be assured that you will always do the right thing even when no one is watching you?)
S – Solution Mindset & an attitude of sharing (every business will have many problems to solve & so are you the one who will provide solutions or just restate the problems back to us? And, even when you solve problems, will you share the credit with your team or always fly solo?)
C – Curiosity (Can you challenge the Status Quo & imagine better? Are you good with ‘Why’ and ‘Why not’?)
O – Openness (Are you humble, open to feedback, correction, change, to Learn, Unlearn & Relearn?)
The Founders & Team section of the post already covered the part on how the Core team of SCIKEY was formed. Let’s see what else it took to start SCIKEY.
SCIKEY’s founding team have lead multiple companies in different roles (including CXO) as well as geographies and were mostly involved in building products, teams, delivery centers ground up etc., Therefore, quite often they found themselves in a situation where they had to go through the painful experience of dealing with multiple vendors and service providers for sourcing the required talent or even the right technology solutions & providers.
“It used to be a very time consuming & inefficient exercise with a direct negative impact on business and ROI” Says Akshay Sharma (Co-founder, SCIKEY)
Another big related parallel problem that they always encountered was the productivity issues of the teams or people who were sourced by their talent partners and the resulting losses for the company as an outcome of that. These prevalent issues motivated the team to seriously think of a solution that later took the shape of SCIKEY.
Even, other peers from the industry acknowledged the problem, but no one was trying to solve it with an effective workable solution. So most of the ideation happened internally. They collected feedback from the CXOs or top leaders in the industries who were directly responsible for building and running profitable companies of different shapes & sizes (right from funded start-ups to global fortune MNCs). This helped the SCIKEY team to learn the root-cause of the problem and by connecting the dots from personal experience + Inputs from leaders, they decided to build SCIKEY! Arobust platform and a business model that can be scaled to service the needs of a global audience.
The way this world moved from offline to online banking, offline retail to e-commerce, offline taxis to e-hailing and more. SCIKEY also started with taking the entire experience of sourcing talent & technology solutions online.
On SCIKEY’s platform, the entire transaction – right from talent & technology sourcing to delivery happens online. It aims to organize the talent & technology solutions marketplace online.
SCIKEY is primarily automating most of the mechanical things but going big on the human touch. It’s about helping the generally overloaded talent & technology sourcing teams, with a solution that eases their life and helps them add real value to the business by being a “business partner” in its true sense. It is about streamlining the process end-to-end (that is otherwise largely fragmented) not only to achieve exceptional business outcomes, but also offering a great user experience, that is missing generally.
And then came Covid19, which further disrupted & redefined the future of work and how the businesses look at getting their talent and technology solutions right. The Future of Work & Workforce is very different from what it has been all these years. We now live in a post-COVID world. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital, virtual as well as remote solutions but the large part of talent & technology solutions market is still serviced manually (via a handful of the tools that do not offer a complete end-to-end solution or assured outcomes).
Customers now expect a great Experience (Personalized), Convenience (Anywhere & Real-time access), Value (Ongoing), Choices (Faster Fulfilment) & Insights (that impact Business Outcomes). And this is where SCIKEY helps!
SCIKEY offers a digital, connected & intuitive experience over a secure cloud-based platform for best outcomes & productivity, leveraging technology, Crowdsourcing (Onsite, Offshore, Remote), Community & Automation to deliver best of the solution and insights that impact business outcomes.
Research & IP Focus – Patent filed for the SCIKEY MindMatch algorithm & research presented at the United Nations(Geneva) twice. Unique “Managed Marketplace” business model that leverages advanced tech enabled crowd-sourcing of talent & technology solutions in a single online platform making it highly elastic, scalable & cost-efficient.
Solid founding team with decades of proven industry leadership experience selling large solutions & building high-growth business in multiple global markets from scratch; and prior experience of working together.
Deep domain as well as technical expertise.
Astute focus on unit economics and hence a cash-positive business already.
SCIKEY emerged from the combination of two important words that form the generis of the team’s approach behind building this platform –
Scientific (backed by research & data) + Key (of crucial importance) = SCIKEY
“We have always seen SCIKEY as a solution to some of the ‘key’ problems of our potential customers and we genuinely believe in the power of scientific input(data) in this hyper-connected world that we live in. and, that is how we decided to go with Sci + Key = SCIKEY” Says the team.
SCIKEY LOGO
It’s not only the SCIKEY name that has deep meaning and relevance but the colors represented in the SCIKEY logo also has notions behind it.
Colors convey emotions & evoke thoughts. The 6 colors in the SCIKEY’s logo convey the emotions of the brand. It represents the possibility of looking at a problem in 6 different ways to evaluate multiple potential solutions as well as personalities coming together to solve the problem.
Blue – A color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.
Green – Resembling nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety. Dark greenis also commonly associated with money.
Yellow – The most luminous of all the colorsof the spectrum. It’s the colorof happiness, and optimism, of enlightenment and creativity, sunshine and spring.
Orange – It combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation.
Red – A color of passion and adventure.
Grey – In colorpsychology, grey represents neutrality and balance.
SCIKEY – Business Model and Revenue Model
SCIKEY operates mainly on a SaaS model. SCIKEY’s revenue model is based on –
Transaction Fee – 15-30% of the sale value from the marketplace network
Micro-payments – $10 – $200 for various features, add-ons, reports, assessments monetized from its network
Subscription – for some of the ‘ABC-as-a-Service’ components & certain Premium Features for buyers as well as sellers on the platform
Managed Services & Consulting – especially for the Offshore & Remote Work solutions plus other premium offerings
Since beginning, SCIKEY was a research focused company. The team was already working with various professionals, businesses, institutions as well as universities/colleges on multiple research projects as well as pilots for some of the components of the platform. At start, it was not the same full-fledged platform like what one can see today, it was more of independent pieces or modules; largely to gather research data as well as user feedback.
For acquiring the first 100 customers , the team relied heavily upon customer referrals and LinkedIn. SCIKEY hasn’t been spending huge money on growth hacking as yet.
“We are a team that firmly believes in achieving an organic growth (even if it is slower initially) fueled by the thought leadership & brand authority as against burning big bucks to get quick hype. A quick hype is directly proportional to the burn-rate and tapers down as soon as the money fades away” added Akshay.
SCIKEY majorly focused on customer retention and repeat users. All they did was –
Listening to customers feedback, to incorporate it back in improving the product
Keeping its paid user acquisition burn to a minimum or zero
Continuously working towards improving the quality of experience & outcomes the customers/ users get from SCIKEY; as that makes us cash positive as well as sustainable.
SCIKEY founders are a big fan of frugal innovation & Zero cost marketing.
Whoever SCIKEY reached out to said this – “Hey, you guys have built such a great product. What progressive thinking, but how come we never heard of SCIKEY before? do you have any customer references? “
The major challenged faced by the team was that nobody knew SCIKEY in the market. It took a lot of effort and time to get even a demo booked (As per the sales team)
SCIKEY does not have a significant marketing budget & hence there is not much one can do. (As per all the Marketing Managers, Digital Marketing folks who applied for a role with SCIKEY but never joined)
This was one of our biggest challenges in the early days – Everyone we meet likes us (Team & product both) but as they have never heard of the brand before, they did not have much confidence to take the plunge & come on board as a paid customer – Said Akshay (Co-founder, SCIKEY)
This is what inspired SCIKEY’s team to get a lot more active on LinkedIn to create awareness and build engagement around the brand SCIKEY. Therefore, after 100s of posts, garnering 1,000s of cumulative views with an average of 2K+ and the highest of 10K+ views with many trending posts in multiple hashtags, a series of blogs and authored articles published; finally making it to the deal table and signing paid customers is what makes SCIKEY proud.
SCIKEY – Marketing Campaign/Strategies Adopted
SCIKEY’s 2 trending Marketing campaign –
Women’s day Campaign – #SheTakesTheLead
The idea was to promote women hiring for executive positions and challenge the status quo. Globally only 1 in 5 C -level Executives is a woman. This is because of displaced cultural norms. SCIKEY, with this campaign wanted to promote, from this women’s day that a woman will take the lead and the ecosystem should come together to support them.
To promote this idea. SCIKEY did a short ad film.
SCIKEY also acknowledged women leaders who broke the metaphorical glass ceiling, the society odds and has taken the lead in their own way. SCIKEY interviewed various women leaders to share their personal stories, how they overcame the gender challenges & despite of so many odds, how they succeeded to become what they are today.
SCIKEY Leader Speak Series
Under this initiative, SCIKEY interviewed Thought Leaders from the Business and HR space where they shared their perspective about the future of workforce, future of work, best strategies to lead the change & business. SCIKEY promoted these interviews on all of their social media channels, website & newsletters. Each leader further shared the interview in their own network. This has given SCIKEY a greater organic reach, trust, and credibility in decision makers fraternity.
SCIKEY was awarded the “Top 20 Most promising HR-Tech startups – 2020” by the CIOReview
AI powered platform with Research & IP focus – patent filed for the SCIKEY MindMatch algorithm that was presented at the United Nations(Geneva) also twice
Deloitte Technology fast 50 winner for 2020
SCIKEY – Competitors
Remote.com, Upwork and LinkedIn are the top competitors of SCIKEY.
Remote.com
Remote helps companies of all sizes hire top talent all over the world, in full compliance with local laws. It is a global platform for distributed teams. Remote makes it easy to onboard, pay, and delight remote employees and contractors.
Upwork
Upwork connects businesses of all sizes to freelancers, independent professionals, and agencies for all their hiring needs.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn platform is mainly used for professional networking, and allows job seekers to post their CVs and employers to post jobs.
Over the next 1-2 years, SCIKEY aims to grow the customer base by at least a 5x and the revenue by 2-3x. While growing its partners by 5x and member users to at least a few million. SCIKEY is also planning to venture into new markets like Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines and Australia.
SCIKEY – FAQs
What is SCIKEY.ai?
SCIKEY is a marketplace network for talent & technology solutions
What does the word ‘SCIKEY’ mean?
SCIKEY has emerged from the combination of two important words that form the generis of the team’s approach behind building this platform – Scientific (backed by research & data) + Key (of crucial importance) = SCIKEY
Who are the founders of SCIKEY?
Alok Kumar is the founder of SCIKEY. Akshay Sharma and Karunjit Kumar Dhir are the Co-founders of SCIKEY.
How much funding has SCIKEY raised?
SCIKEY had funding of USD 3.5 Million in 2016.
Who are the competitors of SCIKEY?
Remote.com, Upwork and LinkedIn are the top competitors of SCIKEY.
When was SCIKEY founded?
SCIKEY was founded in the year 2016 by Alok Kumar.
Yash Gupta
