Marketing automation platform Betaout raises $1.5m in pre-Series A

Betaout, a customer intelligence and marketing automation platform for E-commerce, has raised $1.5 million in pre-Series A funding.

The funding round was led by Beenext, Stanford Angels, Letsventure, Chennai Angels, Hyderabad Angels, and Mumbai Angels. Previous investor Sam Yagan, former CEO of Match Group and Founder of Coarzon Capital, also participated in this round.

Launched in October 2014, Betaout will use the funds for customer acquisition in the Indian market, and expand to other Asian geographies. The funds will also be used to hire professionals in realms of technology, marketing, and account management. The company will also focus on developing its mobile offering, and other features on its platform such as machine learning, conversation-commerce, etc.

Delhi-based Betaout raised their seed round of $5,00,000 from founders of Snapdeal, Paytm, Groupon India, Freshdesk, Redbus, Slideshare, Goibibio, Shaadi, in August last year.

The company was founded by Mayank Dhingra, Raghubir Thakur, Arjun Maheshwari, Nandini Rathi, along with Ankit Maheshwari.

Speaking about the investment, Ankit Maheshwari, CEO, said

This round of funding, by respected and reputed names in the investor community, has energised us to pursue our business objectives with focus and clarity. This would be an absolute necessity given the pace at which the E-commerce and B2C market, which we serve, is growing in India. Our plans for 2016 include growing our existing customer base in the Indian market and expanding to other Asian markets including Indonesia and Malaysia.

The platform is essentially a SaaS-based offering for B2C/E-commerce companies, providing customers:

• Real time big-data analysis
• Segmentation based on business rules and machine learning
• Omni channel personalisation, reaching customers with personalised marketing via push, email, SMS.
• Re-targeting, in-app, in-web, etc.

Further, the company’s revenue model is based on a monthly recurring subscription that is determined by the number of addressable contacts and messages sent.

Commenting on the growth of Betaout, Sam said,

“Looking at the progress Betaout has made in India in a short span of time, made us invest again. Their product is used by some of the big names in the E-commerce space, validating the value they offer for more engagement and conversion across all channels.”

In an earlier interaction with YourStory, Ankit said that marketers resort to blanket marketing, that is, sending the same marketing messages across all channels to their customers. Looking at this untargeted marketing lower ROIs and even lower conversions made the founding team start a DIY, targeting platform.

The industry speak

Indian SaaS companies are expected to reach $10 billion revenue mark in 2025, according to a report released by search major Google and early-stage investor Accel Partners.

At present, India has over 500 SaaS startups earning a revenue of $600 million. Much of this can be attributed to the cost advantage that Indian SaaS companies offer.

The same report also identifies relationship management, data visualisation, and marketing to be one of the sectors with the largest opportunities in the near future.

Therefore, the time is absolutely right for businesses like Betaout. Moreover, their Asian market expansion is an obvious step to their growth as seen in the case of Knowlarity and RateGain, who have offices across South East Asia.

Website: www.betaout.com