Companies to Watch

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Agility and innovation are the two enablers for business growth this year. With digital transformation and cloud, adoption businesses are trying to stay ahead of competitors. Investment in vendor solutions that promise enhanced business operation is a top priority across industries. From AI-driven customer engagement solutions to an innovative CRM model, here are a few companies with immense potential to modernise MarTech stacks.  

Vernacular AI

Founded: 2016

Founder: Akshay Deshraj, Manoj Sarda, Sourabh Gupta

Segment: AI-first SaaS

Meet VIVA. It understands over ten languages, over 160 dialects, and it is expanding its services to other multilingual countries such as Indonesia. Vernacular.ai, the AI-first SaaS business, is all about enhancing customer experience through intelligent voice conversations. Their central technological innovation, VIVA, holds over 100,000 hours of training data and helps accelerate engagement strategy using speech recognition and NLU technology. The company promises around a 50 per cent reduction in average handling time and a 97 per cent approval rate for smart suggestions. The company created VIVA with four core technological elements — idiolectic layer, automated speech recognition, contextual conversation clustering (C3), and conversation monitoring. Their proprietary technology, C3, demonstrates immense future potential of virtual AI assistants that enhance banking and other business industries that are accelerating towards a complete digital transformation. Apart from helping companies achieve high customer LTV, their mission is to become the leading Voice AI platform in the world. Their existing customers include Axis Bank, Barbeque Nation, and Porter. 

Scopernia

Founded: 2011 

Founder: Jo Caudron, Dado Van Peteghem

Segment: Business Management Consultancy

Although launched in 2011, it relaunched in 2020 with a new style of consulting that involved a broader social scope. Specialising in innovative transformation strategies, Scopernia created transformation strategies for over 150 companies, including Pepsico, Volvo, and Perrigo. A client, Aliaxis, stated that tangible results began to appear within nine months of Scopernia’s services. Recently, Scopernia launched a gaming consultancy practice in the Middle East. Their mission is to enable companies to grow by drawing from the learnings of the gaming industry and apply best practices into their operations for higher levels of efficiency and productivity. With a core focus on value creation, societa, and digital disruptions, the company aspires to build a solution for permanent trend watching and translate the insights into innovations and opportunities. According to a study, gamification increases customer activity online by an average of 68 per cent, and social sharing jumps by 22 per cent.  With gamification being an all-time sought after marketing strategy, Scopernia’s new venture can help businesses reach new heights in customer engagement. 

Also Read: Company Closeup: CleverTap – The Platform For Any Mobile App

DevRev

Founded: 2021 

Founder: Dheeraj Pandey and Manoj Agarwal 

Segment: Developer Customer Relationship Management

Nutanix’s former CEO and industry leader Dheeraj Pandey and executive Manoj Agarwal quit their jobs to build a Developer Customer Relationship Management platform that enables developers and customers to communicate and collaborate socially and in real-time. With a $50 million seed funding, the company will lead their offered solutions with an API-first dev-centric CRM that leverages data, design and machine intelligence to empower developers. Driven by a design-first, API-first and Machine Learning culture, the company goal is to make its CRM-based product available by 2022. With their focused goals and the strategy to remove the bureaucracy between the developers and customers with an opinionated consumer model, the company shows great promise for customer-conscious businesses.

Also Read: Is the Creator Economy Coming of Age?

Shogun

Founded: 2015 

Founder: Nick Raushenbush, Finbarr Taylor, Damien Kan

Segment: eCommerce 

They believe that the shopping experience on Amazon is pretty bad and marketplaces are not for everyone. With a mission to help brands create unique experiences and optimise online stores through direct relationships, Shogun offers over 30 technology products and series, including HTML 5, Google Analytics, and jQuery. Supported by brands like Salesforce and Shopify, the company is focused on achieving headless commerce. Their products Shogun Builder and Shogun Frontend have helped over 18,000 customers. Last year, they witnessed a 182 per cent growth and recently succeeded in acquiring $67.5 million in funding. Their existing clients include FILA, K-SWISS, and Nomad. ECommerce is the business ecosystem of the digital era, and Shogun’s vision to empower every individual company without depending on the marketplaces makes it one of the promising companies. 

Specright 

Founded: 2014 

Founder: Matthew Wright, Erik Rannala

Segment: Cloud-based Specification Management Platform & Supply Chain Data Management Software 

After spending 20 difficult years in the packaging industry, founder Wright recognised the need for a Specification Management solution. Specright’s platform enables companies across industries to digitise specification data that is typically found in spreadsheets or PDFs. The company’s patented many-to-many data framework enables SKU consolidation and visibility into specification relationships. In addition, the platform allows companies to do intelligent costing, run impact analyses, and create traceability as well. With built-in intelligence, the company enables better collaboration with suppliers. Last year, Gartner named Specright a Cool Vendor in Supply Chain. To provide value-enhancing services with their management products, the company’s ultimate purpose puts them front in line for the must-have technology in every Fortune 500 company’s martech stack. Specright is also working on their latest venture Specright Network, powered by blockchain.