With $4M In Fresh Funding From Amex Ventures, Capillary Wants to be Salesforce Of Social CRM

Capillary Technologies, the social CRM startup based in Bangalore, has raised additional funding of around $4 million from American Express Ventures. The startup plans to expand into the U.S., Middle East, China and Australia with this fresh funding, which takes the total capital raised so far to around $20 million.

Norwest Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Qualcomm Ventures are among other existing investors in the startup.

The funding from American Express Ventures follows a marketing alliance with the bank signed by Capillary last month, which will offer the startup’s SaaS-based CRM to small and medium businesses in the U.S. Amex and Capillary did a similar pilot in Singapore over past one year.

Capillary is among a small, but promising breed of Indian software product firms that are beginning to make a mark globally. Capillary for instance, has around 100 million customers on its cloud CRM for over 150 brands, and across 10,000 stores globally. The startup still gets nearly half of its revenues from India market, which could change with growth in other markets as more customers from the U.S. and Europe adopt Capillary’s simpler solution.

The startup competes with bigger enterprise vendors such as Oracle, Salesforce and SAP on one hand, and smaller, niche startups including Mobiquest, Swiply and Punchd at the other end. Its product — InTouch — gathers real time customer data, applies predictive analysis, and helps retailers such as Nike, Puma, Marks & Spencer and Nokia contact potential customers with personalized offers on-the-go.

“We would want to be best Retail Customer Engagement solution targetting mid sized retailers ($500m in revenues) developed markets like US, UK, Europe and be leaders across retailer sizes in developing markets like Asia and Africa – in one line we want to the Salesforce.com for retail CRM’s,” Aneesh Reddy, one of the co-founders told me. Reddy, along with his IIT batch mates Krishna Mehra and Ajay Modani, launched Caoillary with a round $3,500 in seed funding from their college.

Since then, the startup has come a long way, now being seen as one of the truly India-made enterprise products.

“We are not yet profitable thanks to the investments being made in the newer markets. We should be cash positive and continue to grow at a 100%+ CAGR in the next 12 months,” Reddy added.

Capillary’s story is of an emerging market solution built for SMS environment and low-cost cloud networks, which is now beginning to make sense globally. In one such early customer example, Indian clothing retailer Raymond, used Capillary’s product to build a mobile-first loyalty program for 1.6 million of its customers. Now, it’s gaining adoption among several high-end, retailers selling products in some of the developed markets. This HBR Blog captures Capillary’s journey and why it’s among the startups to watch out for.