Beaconstac receives a $25 million investment for its platform for managing QR codes

By Team Startupcity  |  Wednesday, 18 January 2023, 09:19 IST

Beaconstac receives a $25 million investment for its platform for managing QR codes
Beaconstac, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startup that uses Quick Response (QR) codes, has raised $25 million in its first outside fundraising round, termed Series A, which was headed by Telescope Partners of San Francisco. According to a statement from the company, Accel India also took part in the round. The business, which has offices in New York and Bengaluru, generates and manages QR codes for customers.
The parent company of Beaconstac, Uniqode Phygital, was established in early 2022, but the technology product has been around since 2019 under a different parent company, Mobilemotion Technologies, which ran Mobstac from 2009 to 2019. Mobstac is a product that aids publishers in creating and managing their mobile websites and apps. Cisco and Accel were a couple of Mobstac's backers.
Along with Ravi Pratap, an IIT-Madras alumni and boyhood friend of Sharat Potharaju, they co-founded the companies Mobstac and Beaconstac. The founders of Mobilemotion Technologies have now dissolved the company. Beaconstac, whose gross margin was 85%, increased revenue by 300% between 2020 and 2022 and 200% between 2021 and 2022, according to Potharaju, the company's CEO.
The company has been profitable since inception, he added. Beaconstac has 75 employees across offices in New York and Bengaluru and plans to increase headcount by 200% this year. Over the past 12 months, Beaconstac has created and tracked 1.8 million QR codes that were scanned over 150 million times by consumers, the company said. Over 93% of its revenues currently is from North America, Potharaju added.
“All of our large enterprise clients are first-time adopters… sitting in India, we are building a unique SaaS platform which is the first of its kind across the world. This category itself has fructified over the last three years, and we are market leaders,” he said.
Beaconstac’s clientele of 25,000 paying customers includes 1% of enterprise clients such as food and beverages company Nestle, cosmetics company Revlon, shipping giant FedEx and hospitality chain Marriott.
“While Beaconstac’s revenue growth has been impressive, what makes them unique in my mind is how rapidly they’ve been able to scale to the mid-market and enterprise segments with a product-led growth model,” Accel partner Shekhar Kirani said.
On the Beaconstac website, the cost for active plans ranges from $8 to $99 per month. Customers are either charged based on the number of deployed QR codes or the number of people who use them. Other businesses in the sector include New York-based Flowcode and Germany-based Egoditor, which was acquired by hyperlink management firm Bitly in 2021.

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