Nu Street, a Bangalore-based cloudware startup focusing on providing simple applications on the cloud to small and medium businesses (SMBs), is in the process of raising $10 million (approximately Rs 45 crore) venture capital fund shortly to support its go-to-market drive and product development, according to its chairman and chief executive S Parthasarathy (Partha).
Partha, former chairman of Aztech Software and Technology Limited, which was merged with Mindtree Consulting recently, told Business Standard that SMB was a monster market, which was not easy to crack and was not very well served by big software products players. “Nu Street saw this as a big opportunity.”
“An SMB owner today is highly-pressed for time, constantly on the move and often single-handedly managing all aspects of his growing business. He needs information on his finger-tips on how his business is performing. And, not all SMBs are alike, and have within themselves different micro-vertical clusters. Hence, we are building ‘mini products’ for each of these micro-vertical clusters,” he added.
The two-and-a-half-year-old company, self-funded by Partha, had worked with beta customers for two years and is now gearing up to enter the market with its first set of products in the next couple of months.
“Built on the Microsof’s Azure platform, we now have six micro-vertical products for small and medium hospitals, standalone pathology labs, yarn spinning mills, forging companies, engineering workshops and metal fabrication units, which will be rolled out by the end of this month. Products for foundries, knitting and automobile retail are under development, which we plan to launch by the end of this financial year,” he said.
Stating that there are over 10 million SMBs in India and given the low-value and high-volume business that the company is entering via software-as-a-service and cloud models, Partha said the company was talking to several partners to go to the market. Eventually, Nu Street’s focus is on the global market, which has SMBs upwards of 80 million. However, our Phase-I penetration will be in india, he said.
Quoting a recent Gartner report which states that about 40 per cent of the world's computing revenues will be on the cloud by 2014, Partha said the company will initially address half-a-million of the total SMBs in the country and expected to have over 1,000 customers within a year.
“Winning about 100,000 SMB customers can actually realise our dream of achieving $100 million (about Rs 450 crore) in revenues in the next five years,” he said, adding that the company will enter developing countries like East Asia and Latin America through partners within the next 12 months, before foraying into the US.
