As India’s investment scenario matures, with investors now looking to put money in more serious, long-term businesses, SaaS enterprise platforms are the ones to have scored a lot of deals. Another fresh example to the same, is SirionLabs, a SaaS platform which is focusing on post-signature management of service contracts. The startup has closed a massive $12.25 million in Series B round.
The funding round was led by Sequoia India. Along with Sequoia, other investors who poured in money in the current round includes QualGro ASEAN Fund and Canopy Ventures.
As a part of this deal, Sanish Mondkar, former E-VP and CPO at SAP, has joined its Board of Directors. He will work closely with company’s product and engineering teams to further accelerate the pace of innovation and product delivery.
Commenting about the use of the funds, Ajay Agrawal, said,
The primary focus will be on go-to-market. We are now at the 3.0 version of the product and we need to accelerate our marketing approach. Some of the funds will be used to build out our product marketing and the marketing function in general.
With the help of this new capital, the company will now be focusing on deepening its research and development, product lines and market expansions. It will also hire strong people in the leadership roles.
SirionLabs was founded in 2012 by Ajay Agrawal. Its embedded workflows facilitate real-world buyer-supplier interactions within the system by dissecting the contractual obligations. Earlier in January 2014, the company had raised a funding round from Sequoia Capital.
The company currently has $2.7 billion worth of contracts stored on it and more than 10,000 suppliers on the platform. While the company has already setup its office in London, it is currently looking at centralising US offices to Silicion Valley to open headquarters there.
SirionLabs is now looking to expand its marketing and sales functionalities. As per Ajay Agrawal, many leading consulting firms have approached SirionLabs to form strategic alliances. If that’s true, then this funding will also help in taking these alliances to the next level.
With time, it is planning to migrate from a direct sales to a distribution based model. SirionLabs is also looking to go deeper into artificial intelligence mining of contract, performance and invoice data. For this, it has partnered with Stanford University Natural Language Processing Laboratory, led by Prof. Christopher Manning.
With the launch of its beta product in 2013, it got its first customer – Western Union. Now the company has more than 20 large enterprise customers, including MasterCard, Vodafone, etc. It is targeting to reach 40 customers by end of the current financial year.
Commenting about the business, Ajay Agrawal, founder of SirionLabs, said,
We are present in the core of the enterprise, navigating their relationship with the most strategic suppliers. Unlike most bottom-up SaaS players, our average ticket size or initial deal size is close to $245,000, which goes beyond a million dollars with time.
As per Venture Intelligence, VC deals in start-ups fell to $634 million in the first half of 2016 compared with $958 in the year earlier. While the VC funding is witnessing a slowdown in India, software companies — and SaaS platforms in particular — are getting investor attention. Recently, we reported that investors are keen to invest in Freshdesk at a $500 million valuation.
