Bengaluru, March 22, 2016:
1. Tell us about SpiderGin a nutshell.How and when the idea about SpiderGcame to your mind?
SpiderG is a platform for businesses where they can electronically transact and communicate with their vendors/suppliers and customers, and get actionable information about business and their supply chain.
Our parent company Gladiris Technology was started in December 2013 and started selling an open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to Small and Medium Businesses.
Company was successful in ERP implementation in over a dozen companies but working with these companies and interaction with entrepreneurs revealed that their certain problems were left unaddressed. It was soon realized that key issues faced by SMEs cannot be solved only through an ERP software alone and after deep research of 6 months we came up with an idea of SpiderG in early 2015.
2. What has been the inspiration behind launching SpiderG?
According to a study, Indian companies deal with approximately 11 billion invoices in a year. The receiving, approval, and reconciliation processes creates a paper trail of invoices that are passed from one department to the other for approvals and clearances. Owing to the massive number of invoices and manual processes, businesses constantly face issues with lost bills, double payments, missing credits, miscalculations of overall expenditure, storage of thousands of invoices and the uncertainty of whether an invoice has been paid or not.
This leads to the inception of SpiderG which streamlines external and internal communication, helps better track and manage receivable and payables.
3. Tell us about the founders/team of SpiderG?
The idea of SpiderG, an e-invoicing technology provider for SMEs was born in early 2015, out of the need to solve problems of Indian SMEs related to their invoicing. This start-up was founded by a team of 3 youngsters – AshwaniRathore, Prakash Nair and HarshalIngale with the common aim of bringing about a change in the way big or small organizations conduct business with each other.
Details of Team SpiderG
· AshwaniRathore, CEO & Co-Founder, SpiderG:
After completing B.Tech from National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Allahabad and MBA in Finance from Asian Institute of Management, Manila, Ashwani started his career in 2005. He worked with IT major Cognizant, and then a product company Talentica Software. It was there that he got tempted to the prospect of being in absolute control of his life. In 2007, this idea came into reality and “Moms Kitchen”, a food e-commerce and aggregator venture got formed. He successfully ran it for three years and sold it off before starting with SpiderG
· HarshalIngale, CTO & Co-Founder, SpiderG
Harshal is an Electronics Engineer from VIT Pune University, and was in 2nd year of engineering, where he researched in VLSI microprocessor designs that produced one of the few working asynchronous microprocessors in the world. 5 patents are in process for the work done.Prior to SpiderG as a Co-Founder, he started Abstracte Technologies, a semiconductor startup focused on research and commercialization of advanced VLSI design techniques. With over 9 years of experience in software and design techniques, a large part of his experience is involved in identifying and providing unique technologies for the SME’s.
4. In which year SpiderG was launched?What is the current team size?Who are your target audience?
SpiderG was launched in early 2015. Current team size at SpiderG is of 20employees and currently office is located in Pune. Our target audience is SME sector across the India.
5. SpiderG has recently launched an e-invoicing app for SMEs. Tell us more about it and how is it going to help Indian SMEs?
SpiderG App is a one stop solution for businesses to electronically transact and communicate with their vendors/suppliers, get information about receivables, payables, and other business activities within the organization, while seamlessly integrating with the existing ERP or accounting software. Users can share all transaction data with their owners, general managers, accountants, purchase and finance teams, ensuring clean reconciliation of all transactions. E-Transactions, Doc-Chat, Cash-Cal, Activity stream, Expense Recorder, Dashboard are the key features of the app that a user can access.
Most companies in India are hassled with processing paper invoices that led us to develop SpiderG, an app to simplify invoicing for SMEs. As mobile devices become more and more integral in our users’ everyday lives, our app enables them to exchange invoices, purchase orders and other documents with vendors and relevant stakeholders. Our aim is to provide SMEs with a seamless network to help them in improving cash visibility and management. Our product is unique and user friendly, integrating the technology used with existing systems like Tally.
Keeping in mind the sensitivity of the issues faced in monitoring accounts, the app brings to its users a transparent medium of managing their transactions and allocating resources accordingly.
6. What is the USP ofSpiderG? How is it different from other tech start-ups in the country?
USPs of the SpiderG
1. Cash visibility via CashCal
2. Compatibility with existing systems like Tally, SAP
3. Allows user to chat over transacting documents like Invoice
4. One user per company always free.
5. Provides visibility on the go through Activity stream.
7. Did you receive any seed funding or raise money to go really big? Are you considering any such things?
Yes we have secured an angel investment round of $ 40 K in April 2015. In this year we are also looking to raise venture capital of around $ 5 million
8. What do you feel about the current start-up ecosystem in India?Where is it heading to?
Current start-up ecosystem in India is going in a right direction with the appropriate initiatives taken by the Government.
We are delighted with the announcements made by our Government towards the start-up India, Stand-up India initiative. This government initiative will certainly give necessary thrust to the Indian start-up ecosystem and will add to the ease of doing business in India. Liberal and friendly economic policies pertaining to taxes, registration and foreign investment proposal will help businesses. This initiative will definitely give acceptance to start-up culture.
The ecosystem in general has become a lot more conducive to the ‘start-up culture’ and this will definitely continue into 2016. Media played a vital role by covering start-ups which caught the attention of people outside the start-up system. 2016 is expected to witness a good number of entrepreneurs entering the enterprise space. Introduction of GST could see many start-ups entering the enterprise space since taxation rules would be a lot easier to understand and incorporate in the application. We would see more start-ups coming up with easy to use ERP, CRM & accounting software.
9. What are your marketing strategies to promote your company? What kind of branding activities you are doing?
Currently we are very much active on our social media platforms like twitter, Facebook and our website. We are also part of various Pune based start-up communities for the networking purpose.
For enterprise software start-up like SpiderG, freemium is a potent marketing tool that allows us to scale and attract a user base without spending too much on ad campaigns and deploying a tradition direct sales force. Freemium model allows user to experience the product basic features and compel them to convert to paying subscriber to access premium feature. Startups needs to convey their free customers what they would gain by upgrading. Free “satisfied” users also act as product evangelist as they refer other to your product and drive traffic.
We are also planning to use chartered accountants as influencers who can convince new companies to get on board, while building a network of connected companies on its platform.
10. What are your immediate plans to expand and grow?
· Raise Venture capital of around $ 5 million
· We will also have plugins for Oracle and SAP like Tally four months down the line
· Most small American companies use QuickBooks as an accounting software. We are planning to roll out a plugin for that by August
· We are planning 20 roadshows in India
· We are trying to get close to 10000 SME customers on-board by the end of this year
Corporate Comm India (CCI Newswire)
