Building a platform for potential, rather than performance: Giggr CEO

Subbu Iyer’s vision for the future of India’s workforce is nothing if not lofty.

“I want to see an India where the aspirations of people is to work for the greater good rather than themselves,” Iyer, the co-founder and CEO of Giggr Technologies, stated at the outset of a fireside chat with YourStory Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma.

The session—the second of the day at TechSparks 2024, YourStory’s flagship startup conclave—saw Iyer expound on how he believes the Indian economy should strive to develop, and how his nascent platform Giggr can enable this growth. 

Iyer describes Giggr, which was founded in 2021, as a 100% cloud native digital platform created to enable the pursuit of excellence for individuals, industries, and institutions. 

“We are in the process of building an intelligent platform—a digitally intelligent platform—as service,” Iyer said. The platform, he said, would help local entrepreneurs find a global audience. “Essentially, the platform that we are building is one that is designing for potential first, rather than performance.”

If that description seems broad, it’s likely because Iyer’s vision for Giggr seems boundless. As he told the audience, Giggr’s platform-as-a-service offering will not only provide individuals and startups with learning modules but also help with product conceptualisation, engineering, product-market fit, go-to-market strategy and client discovery. 

Ultimately, Giggr aims to be an all-in-one platform which will have some of the functionalities of LinkedIn, Salesforce, and ChatGPT, guiding users at every step of the way in their professional journey. The bootstrapped, Bengaluru-based company is planning to go live with its platform in 2025. As of now, the startup claims to be working with Marriott Group, which is exploring the setting up of a global capabilities centre (GCC) in India.  

In a report on the future of work, which Iyer shared during the session, Giggr lays out the need for such a platform. “We find ourselves at a strategic inflection opint (SIC) on our planet, transitioning from an age of Information to one of Intelligence. This shift requires us to focus on creating new solutions rather than merely extending the existing status quo, as the future will be vastly different from the past we have experienced,” the report’s foreword read.

Though Giggr appears to have set itself a daunting problem statement, Iyer comes armed with extensive experience in developing products and has worked across some of the largest corporations from across the globe.

Across a 35-year-long career, he has developed products and platforms for the likes of American Express, Maersk, P&O Nedlloyd, and SAP. Giggr also isn’t his first tryst with entrepreneurship, having founded IT and services companies Nihilent Technologies and Nandaki Systems in the past. His Co-founder Siddharth Patel, meanwhile, is a techie who specialises in data science and machine learning.  

This experience will be crucial if Giggr is to succeed in its bold attempt to reshape India's workforce for a future where innovation and impact are the driving forces of progress.