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With new funding PK4 gears up to take on likes of Salesforce.com
By Eureka Bharali, SiliconIndia
Bangalore: "Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, in most cases," said Kishore Mandyam, the CEO of PK4 Software, a CRM solutions provider, when his team recently raised an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Moonbeam Capitals. Quite an achievement for the firm, as everyone can see the CRM gorilla, salesforce.com still ruling the space. With the investment, Moonbeam got a minority stake in PK4.
"If you look at the past experiences of the founders, the only real 'job' we had, was some years ago in Infosys. We?re what you?d call 'serial entrepreneurs', so we've never had the luxury of a 'secured job'. That's mostly because we?ve not looked for one," he says. Kishore has been in the software industry for over 22 years. As a developer at Infosys, he built software systems on IBM mainframes in the U.S. He later co-founded Ampersand, a software services company, and leveraged both organic growth and acquisitions to grow annual sales to over $8 million. In 2005, he co-founded PK4.
Growth in the software division is understood, but why in the CRM realm where they could already see biggie raking the entire moolah and Mandyam readily answers, "When we decided on working in the Indian market, we were very clear that we did not want to get into an evangelical sales mode with our product. We did not have the capital nor the patience to go through weeks selling the idea of our solution and then sell our solution again. Also our core interest was to target the SMB space. We wanted to bring our past experiences of building large CRM solutions for U.S. customers to be used for India. And that's when we saw the 'hole' in the CRM space, where Indian companies were forced to use Western CRM solutions that did not really fit the Indian 'sales culture'. So, CRM was the obvious choice."
The company's focus is on the non-Western markets. Today, the non-American SaaS market is over $10 billion while the Indian SaaS market is about $156 million and it is the fastest-growing SaaS markets in the world, growing at about 77 percent every year. And off late to make a mark in this big market, the PK4 is the competing against Salesforce, Sage and to some extent Zoho. It is to deal with the competitive market, the company has to gear up for aggressive sales and marketing and their latest round of funding is for the same.
