Ragy Thomas (pronounced like Rajiv without the V) is incredibly amiable and pleasant. Even when he explains that Sprinklr delayed their entrance into the Indian market because they were super focused on mature markets like the US, which to date still is their largest market.
“Frankly we didn’t want to spend that time educating a whole market on the importance of digital marketing. That time was best invested in markets that already were believers of social media marketing,” Ragy explained with a smile.
Ragy Thomas, once from Kerala is now a true blue Yankee living in New York City. He moved to the US in 1996 when he was 21.
21 years later he is back in India to announce that his company named Sprinklr will be opening for business with Indian enterprises starting this year (although he won’t be going to Kerala this time).
What is Sprinklr?“Sprinklr is the most complete and comprehensive social media management platform for an enterprise.”
Some of the biggest corporations use Sprinklr including Nike, Microsoft and Samsung. Most of their clients are giant enterprises like these with presence in 100 to 200 countries.
In a nutshell here’s what Sprinklr does for, say Nike: “On the marketing side we will be the moderator for all the content published on each of the Nike websites across the world. On the advertising end, a company like Nike can decide what ads and when to buy them from which social media network. On the insights end, Sprinklr will provide insight from an ocean of 354 million websites (Sprinkly buys this data and makes sense of it for their client) – the insights will be on anything from what Nike categories sell well to what color of sneakers women prefer.
That’s an over simplification, even Ragy’s pat answers to what is Sprinklr belie a paradigm shift in how businesses market to consumers.
“The purpose of Sprinklr is to help businesses interact and engage with their consumers as two humans would,” said Ragy, a little less smilingly and little more seriously.
That’s a profound statement, to think that Sprinklr will help the companies do this in a digital, virtual world made of zeros and ones. And the investors are buying into this vision. The company, based in New York and founded in 2009 is having a promising run. Sprinklr has raised 239 million dollars to date from a set of investors Ragy says with conviction are "amazing" and "supportive" (he learned a lot about what investors are right for him from his previous bouts of starting up) and now has a valuation of 1.8 billion dollars. Not bad considering digital media marketing which started with Email in the late 90s cost only about 3 cents an email at the time. In US currency i.e.
Ragy is brimming with positivity for what Sprinklr’s journey in India could be as well. Since January 2017 they have already signed on two Indian enterprise clients. “It’s a natural part of the progression of our expansion plans and it fits in perfectly with how fast internet penetration is taking place in India.
Can’t wait to see how things go here.” Ragy said in conclusion, the megawatt smile back in place.
BW Reporters
Regina is a reporter for BW Businessworld. In her previous assignments, she has worked with Independent television Network as a news anchor and reporter in Sri Lanka
