Avaali was incorporated in late 2012 and started operations in January 2013. The company was founded by Srividya Kannan who comes with well-rounded experience in finance, IT sales, innovation, operations and legal. Avaali specializes in enabling large enterprises leverage digital to transform business processes and launch new business models. The company is one of the few boot strapped start-ups that is highly profitable and has marquee customers across Asia, Africa and Middle East. “Our focus segment is large enterprises, since we believe that they have the right maturity to adopt some of these solutions to make a real difference to their P&L and the way they run their business” says Ms. Kannan.
In an interaction with Sujata Sangwan of BWDisrupt, Srividya Kannan, Founder, Avaali shares journey of her venture.
About Avaali:Avaali is a consulting and professional services organization focused on supporting upper mid to large enterprises to create and execute their Digital roadmap. We are headquartered in Bangalore, India. We believe that Digital is going to be the biggest enabler of revenue to enterprises. We support our customers to maximize value from digital and help them translate this value in the form of innovative customer experience, highly engaging customers, internal process efficiencies, reduced costs and delivering your organization’s stated objective. Our customers are market leaders in their respective industries and are able to leverage these technologies to run their business more efficiently than before, generating better topline for their organization as well as manage their expenses in differentiated ways. We evaluate our success based on the extent to which our solutions have brought about the desired business outcomes to our customers. We’re an agile organization, completely focused on delivering results for our customers and partners.
We’ve worked with over 45+ enterprises in India, Singapore, Africa, Middle East and parts of US to support them in various initiatives including setting up / transforming their shared service center, digitalize processes and significantly bring down process cycle time and visibility. We take great pride in delivering results for our clients. It gives us immense pleasure when we hear about the kind of business benefits from them as a result of these implementations.
Why did you decide to get into entrepreneurship?In my previous corporate stints, I’ve interacted with over 500+ large enterprises, and it was interesting to note that even though they spend a lot on transactional applications, close to 80% of their business is done in a manual way since they leverage a lot of information in the form of emails, vendor invoices, HR data, marketing / sales documents etc., in undertaking their process. Typically, workflows are manual. They struggle with finding the information when they need it. What’s worse, they always have the risk that information may fall in the hands of unauthorized people. At the same time, the way digital is really shaping and changing the world is unprecedented. The opportunities and sheer possibilities with digital is immense. This opportunity was exciting.
Entrepreneurship and start-ups are about immense opportunities for innovation and learning – I doubt if any other kind of environment can give this kind of acceleration in learning. Building a start-up to success is the most exciting thing I’ve done so far. Every day, I get to interact and learn from my team, customers and partners. I’m blessed with some of the best minds in the industry who are a part of my team, and I can confidently say that this team delivers value to customers like none else. The sheer ability to influence the life of the customer organization in ways that are so immensely powerful continues to keep us motivated.
Funding and MonetizationAvaali is a completely boot strapped organization which is now also zero debt and extremely profitable. Unlike startups in e-commerce, we’re not only focused on revenues but also on profitability. End of the day, any organization delivers value to its ecosystem only when it makes real money, and profitability is certainly one of our key focus areas. More than the number of customers we acquire, we measure ourselves by the quality of work we do and value we deliver to our customers. End of day, it is not only about future earnings but also about how profitably can one run the current operations to build a decent balance sheet early. We’re quite conservative on our principles and believe that valuations are not only about discounted cash flows.
The first 12 months were really tough given that our target market is large enterprises who almost always never have a dearth of software service partners. However once we set our path in our customer’s minds to help them understand what differentiates us (given our specialization in digital), there was no looking back. We not only got incremental revenues from existing clients, but also were able to use the references of good work we did with them to quickly build incremental clients. End of day, it is all about customer trust and this is really non-negotiable.
Plans for the futureAvaali is building a very formidable set of offerings for shared services transformation. In addition to process automation, they are working towards solid set of offerings with robotics. In addition they are building strengths in consulting with a focus to augment their customer’s business with digital. We will help our customers reimagine their business and capture new opportunities with digital.
