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ZineOne, a real-time interactive platform for connecting brands to customers, needs to partner with more Indian companies, writes Shameen Alauddin
You need a bank loan. It’s the last day to fill the online application. You start the process but doing an errand diverts your attention. Thus, you miss the last chance to get that loan at the best interest rate.
Now, imagine getting a push notification, reminding you of your pending work and redirecting you to the same page where you left. That’s ZineOne for you.
The digital interaction hub’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Debjani Deb, takes a leaf out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a 1960s novel, where HAL 9000 was a sentient computer that could control your surroundings, communicate, interpret emotions and recognise faces. The MIT and Stanford graduate draws parallels with that computer to ZineOne, calling it “the brain” behind an enterprise’s brand-to-customer and machine interactions.
Founded in 2014, by Debjani Deb, Arnab Mukherjee and Manish Malhotra in Califronia’s Silicon Valley, the start-up recently raised $2.5 million in funding from New York-based Golden Seeds Angels and Indiabased Hyderabad Angels, among others. HDFC Bank, with a customer base of 40 million, also partnered with ZineOne to provide banking experiences across all its digital channels, including PayZapp, Loan Assist and HDFC Securities. Concept ZineOne absorbs real-time activity of a user, such as starting of a loan application and past searches, integrating both to formulate a pattern in the user’s requirements. Using this intelligence, it displays to the user the information that could be pertinent to him at that particular time.
The real-time processing platform, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, stores customer trends in its brain and connects a customer back-and-forth to his tasks. This is done with messaging through an e-mail, SMS or push notifications.
If the user chooses the option to not be reminded about his incomplete task, the system will remember his preference across devices and platforms, not bustle the user.
“Customers expect and demand a digital responsive relationship with brands. Our stream processing stack is designed to process the massive volumes of incoming customer activity data and provide sub-second responses within every customer’s immediate context,” says Deb. Opportunity The company claims that digitally focused enterprises need to connect users’ isolated pool of data and correlate activity to help them perform promptly on decisions. This gap is sought to be filled by ZineOne. Where existing systems connect customers to brands after they have left their digital property, the company claims to elicit faster and positive responses through immediate streaming of interactions.
They peg the global market share from the existing customer experience market and automation market at $5.5 billion and $4.7 billion, respectively. Of this, they aim to grab above $2 billion.
“I invested in ZineOne because it seeks to build a product to address a very real enterprise need,” says Sangita Joshi, co-founder, Malgharia Capital Advisors.
Having seen the evolution of ZineOne since inception, she adds, “I believe over a few iterations, they now have the right product that meets customers and investors expectations.” Revenue Following an SaaS (software as a service) business model, it has customer spread across retail, financial services and the education technology sector in the US and India. These pay monthly subscriptions on contracts of one to three years. The method of doing so is threefold:
| Annual cloud subscription, based on number of unique users and number of events
| Annual subscription for usage, based on number of ad mins of the system
| Professional services based on number of application endpoints and consulting
Although the company is yet to reach break-even, it says the race is to grow at a faster face. Since gross margins for cloud businesses as ZineOne are at least 75 per cent, it reaps immediate profits and converts most of its incomes into further investment.
It is investing in research and development, and sales and marketing, with “an eye towards 5x revenue growth each year”. The company refused to reveal the revenue in FY17-18, but says it was in millions of dollars. Founded: 2014 in Silicon Valley, US Area of business: Real-time brand-touser engagement Co-founders: Debjani Deb, Arnab Mukherjee and Manish Malhotra
$2.5 million
Funding: from Hyderabad Angels, Golden Seed Angels in New York Presence: 7 customers in India and US Ahead The biggest milestone for ZineOne is to earn recognition as a leader in the cloud-based stream processing market. While reinvesting, it is focusing on building up internet protocols in its real-time machine-learned intelligence product. “The market, especially the banking and retail sectors, going through digital transformation is a great fit for our product,” says Deb.