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October - 2014 - issue > Startup of the Year - Enterprise Software Product

Aissel Technologies: Pioneering Healthcare Thought Leader Analytics

Sumant Hebballi
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Sumant Hebballi
The tremendous growth that the life science sector is now witnessing has opened a door of wide range of opportunities for new ventures. The industry, especially in analytics and content area, reflects huge potential with scope of business in every aspect of it. Focusing on these openings offered by the industry, Aissel Technologies was founded. Aissel is a Software Technology Solutions and Business Research company specializing in Healthcare Thought Leader analytics. -The vision behind starting this company was create significant value to users by providing accurate content on their customers at very low costs. Based on the traction involved in this industry, we focused on providing services to pharma, medical device and biotech companies,- explains Prasad Patil, CEO, of Aissel Technologies, who was earlier working for a company in Bangalore. In order to capitalize on this market, Prasad decided to partner with Mahesh Grampurohit, who was working as the Chief Architect, then, at a Pune based company. The huge potential and growth opportunity in the space attracted the attention of the duo who then decided to quit their respective jobs and cofounded Aissel in 2010 which is headquartered in Hubli.

"Every startup has to go through two major challenges. The first is to build the right team and second is to find your first customer," says Prasad. The success of any startup company is based on these two parameters. "Since, being a startup, the work load and responsibility is enormous, the team employed should be capable enough to handle them easily. Secondly, it is very difficult to signup your first customer as companies do not easily trust that a startup can execute their critical work. There is a lot of convincing that goes into persuading customers to buy our product. From the development side, being a product company, you don't get requirements from customers. You have to be imaginative and design features based on your research and market understanding" he further adds. Predicting the market needs and flow, and making course corrections was yet another challenge faced by the duo as they were the new entrants into the world of entrepreneurship.

With a fair understanding about the market and thorough research on the product they were developing, the company began its journey with their product KOLM. "It took around five months to build the demo version of the product. And then we began marketing it," says Prasad. Although there were several hurdles faced by the team, their marketing team struck gold when they roped in their first client, a U.S. based pharma company. This pharma company happened to be one of the top 5 life science companies which added credibility to Aissel's portfolio in the market thus making it much easier for them in finding subsequent companies. Aissel currently boasts of several top pharma and medical device companies as their clients and also has increased its employee strength to over 45 people. Aissel has throttled its growth since its beginning and owes the success to its two strengths: software development and content curation. Under the software development area, they have product development team which develops KOL Management Suite, the company's flagship cloud application. KOLM is an enterprise-class web-based application built on robust technology platform. It offers the complete set of features needed for KOL management. KOLM simplifies most of the time-consuming activities around curating and analyzing the KOL activities. The company is also into supporting their other customers in outsourced product development. Their life science team helps their customers identify and discover right medical expects across different therapeutic areas and specialties.

Aissel is now gearing up for the launch of Sales force app which is going to be the only stand alone app which the existing Sales force users can integrate. Apart from that, the company aims to make this into the most cost effective enterprise software product which can provide rich and accurate content on the thought leaders. It is also focusing on supporting more companies on the product development side in the outsourced product development model.

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