Ideas and Innovative Products

Acquiring Customers

Virgin Airlines, Expedia, Jet Airways and MakeMyTrip are taking the help of Bangalore-based startup Vizury to analyse massive volumes of digital data on the web and target potential customers.

The four year-old firm is expecting to clock revenue of $ 10 million to $ 12million  this year. However, it has not been an easy journey for the founders—Chetan Kulkarni, Gourav Chindlur and Vikram Nayak—who once worked at US-based Trilogy Software.

It was while chatting over lunch at Trilogy that they decided to quit their jobs and set up Vizury in 2008. They pooled in their savings of $ 2000 and converting Chindlur's bedroom into their office. They ran out of funds after 17 venture capital firms rejected their proposal to develop customer behavior analytics products.

"My wife was expecting and Vikram had to pay a huge lease for the apartment he had bought," says Kulkarni. They almost decided to shut down operations. That is when eight friends and angels came to their rescue, with crowd-sourced funding of $150,000 (Rs 80 lakh now) in 2009, which was used to develop a customer analytics product.