US-Indian Big Data Firm Axtria Lands $30M To Help Businesses Make Better Decisions

Axtria, a big data company that helps business make better, more informed decisions, has closed a $30 million Series C funding round to expand its services into new verticals and grow its customer base.

The round was led by Helion Ventures, which put in $15 million from its new $300 million fund for India which invested via its existing third fund, and included participation from Silicon Valley-based ‘Desh’ Deshpande and existing backers Amar Sawhney, Rick Braddock and Fred Khosravi. Sanjeev Aggarwal, co-founder and senior managing director at Helion, is joining Axtria’s board.

Axtria, which is headquartered in New Jersey with an office in Gurgaon, India, offers a series of data analytics applications and services in the cloud. It counts over 10,000 individual users from more than sixty clients. That roster is based in the U.S., and spans a range of industries including pharmaceuticals, banking, healthcare, financial services and high-tech.

“We’re trying to solve a number of different problems,” Axtria CEO and co-founder Jassi Chadha told TechCrunch in an interview. “Data is exploding — lots is trapped in corporate systems and coming from new areas like internet-of-things (IOT) — and it can be used for better decision making.

“We embed analytics into operations to help run businesses in a more effective manner. Software has moved to cloud so data will follow soon, too. We see that happening now, and help customers manage data from business apps in the cloud.”

Chadha, who founded the company in 2010, said that the new funding will be put to use developing new products — he’s particularly bullish about the data potential about IOT, for example applied to insurance or personal health, and mobile apps — while there are plans to grow Axtria’s headcount from 400 people to 5,000-10,000. Many of those new hires will be sales and marketing staff brought on to help expand the client base into new geographies worldwide and different market segments.

One of the new products in the pipeline is an upcoming sales analytics service inside Salesforce.com.

“It’s early days for data analytics companies, but we have an opportunity to build a $1 billion revenue business,” Chadha said. The Axtria CEO added that the company may raise from institutional sources in the future should it need additional funding, but his goal is to “scale the company profitably.”

Helion’s newest fund has a portion assigned to taking Indian companies global, and Aggarwal previously told TechCrunch that data analytics startups — a space where he believes India is excelling — are very much the kind that it is keen to be involved with.

“India has been known for IT services and then human-intensive BPO, the third wave is analytically powered high-end intellectually driven data services that use India’s statistical expertise,” the Helion co-founder added. “Axtria sits at the cusp of this revolution in analytics, with a unique blend of industry and functional domain, technology, analytics and services capabilities.”

( Techcrunch.com)