What happens when two startup entrepreneurs meet? They brainstorm about their next big idea. That’s exactly how Balakrishnan Kavikkal and Ranjit Padmanabhan came up with the concept of Autonom8 (A8), a GenAI-enabled hyper automation start-up.
“Ranjit is based in the Bay area and I met him through a friend,” says Balakrishnan, CEO and co-founder of A8.“We had exited our earlier startups and started chatting about enterprise software, digitisation, cloud, AI.” They both wanted to return to the startup life and what helped was how well they complemented each other. “Ranjit is a hard-core techie and my experience is in strategy, sales, and marketing,” says Balakrishnan.
At its core, A8 is based on Balakrishnan’s own experience of implementing large software product solutions (such as CRM and ERP) in his earlier company Servion. “My experience led me to believe it was time to disrupt software delivery,” he says. Why? Because the entire ecosystem – consisting of customer, product, and consulting company – is not aligned. “In a typical process, the product company sells licences and leaves (and the customer starts paying even before the product is used),” says Balakrishnan.
“The customer thinks he knows everything but is actually going through the learning curve with a new product and the associated change management. Eventually, the customer is exhausted, starts accepting the product’s limitations, compromises on the original utopian vision, and is saddled with bills running into millions of dollars,” he says.
A8’s founders wanted to disrupt this model and make it nimble. “In the times we live in, where technology changes and new capabilities become available every week, any project that takes years to implement is anachronistic. What enterprises need is the ability to go live quickly with the core solution and the flexibility to make changes as the business needs evolve,” says Balakrishnan.
A solution that can hit the ground running and keep running even when the ground rules shift. This, he says, is a necessity in today’s fast-paced business environment.
“A8’s Low-Code-No-Code (LCNC) platform provides that, at a price point that doesn’t burn your pocket,” he says.
Founded in March 2017, A8 is yet to raise any external funding. The founders boot strapped the company with support from a “few friendly angels” including the likes of Rangarajan Madanagopalan, founder-director at Servion Global Solutions, Balakrishnan’s earlier venture.
“I know Balakrishnan from Servion (of which he was co-founder) and I am very invested in the potential of A8,” he says. While the founders of A8 did look at external funding about a year ago, they later decided to “remain focused on building the most comprehensive LCNC platform anywhere in the world,” says Balakrishnan. “So far, we have invested about Rs 30 crore into the business and we should be at break-even sometime during the current year,” he adds.
In seven years, A8’s footprint has grown with the company recently announcing a strategic partnership with Mahaveer Finance for its vehicle financing process. A8’s first client, a tier-1 bank, wanted to go live with the lending solution for a product. “We promised to show them a solution based on their requirements in two weeks,” says Balakrishnan.
The solution scaled up to handle more than 60,000 loan applications and another 1 lakh indirectly over the next few weeks and A8 was in business. Today, A8 operates at a different scale. “Last month, we handled more than 10 lakh process instances (loan origination, collections, KYC, etc.) and more than Rs 20,000 crore in loans went through the platform in June. In the process, we handled more than 60 lakh customer documents,” says Balakrishnan.
A8 still has a small team – 80 people now, 75 of them in engineering – but its vision is global. “We are currently the most comprehensive LCNC platform for the Indian BFSI (banking, financial services, insurance) industry,” he says. “Our revenue base is small but we are doubling our revenue each year.” A8, he adds, is in the advanced stages of signing up with some global systems integrators. And, the next three years will see it “increasing international footprint (especially in the US)”.
A serial entrepreneur with 20-plus years of experience in the B2B2C world, Balakrishnan has one critical advice for fellow entrepreneurs. “The product-market fit is never a one-time event,” he says. “It needs to evolve constantly as technologies and market cycles change so be nimble enough not to miss these signals.”
