BackSoftware firm SquadRun raises $2.1 million
SquadRun will use fresh funds to invest in technology, product and data science functions, and expand its sale team in the US
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New Delhi: Enterprise software maker SquadRun Inc has raised $2.1 million from investors, Blume Ventures that participated in the funding round said on Wednesday. The company makes Squad, a workflow automation platform.
Contrarian Capital, 91springboard, Emergent Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Anthill Ventures and Axilor Ventures also participated in the round, apart from some independent angel investors.
SquadRun uses artificial intelligence and its own workforce of independent contractors to manage data-intensive operations for enterprises.
The company will use fresh funds to invest in technology, product and data science functions, and expand its sale team in the US.
Squad is used primarily by digital commerce firms like Uber Inc, Flipkart Group, beauty products retailers Sephora, Tata Group, Rocket Internet Group and US-based apparel e-tailer Teespring.
The platform, offered as a Saas-based (software as a service) product, delivers distributed workforce and automation for various processes. For example, Squad is used by e-commerce clients to curate products on their platform, while a financial service firm may use it to validate and arrange data from forms.
Squad has contract workers who are paid for completing simple tasks (which are broken down from the larger business process) like tagging images, giving feedback on apps, categorizing products or even calling restaurants to collect information.
A volunteer user on Squad, which completes these tasks on his or her smartphone, is paid in SquadCoins that can be converted to cash in PayU or Paytm wallet or transferred to the bank account. The company claims to have on-boarded 75,000 users (workforce) across India, Philippines, Malaysia, Uganda, and Kenya.
Some of the other use cases of Squad are: content moderation, data tagging, categorization, crowd-sourced content, user experience testing, surveys and sentiment analysis.
“We are excited by the disruption Squad is bringing to the outsourcing industry with its distributed workforce model. Their AI powered digital platform which can manage customer workflows at large scale will help global services companies improve responsiveness and bring down costs," S.D. Shibulal, co-founder Axilor Ventures said in a statement.
SquadRun was started in June 2014 by Apurv Agrawal, Kanika Jain and Vikas Gulati. Agrawal is a member of the founding team of 91springboard, a start-up that operates shared office spaces, while Jain used to work as a hub manager. Gulati was earlier a software engineer with Josh Technology Group.
In February 2015, the start-up raised a seed round from Amit Ranjan of Slideshare, Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato, Zishaan Hayath, founder of Toppr and Girish Khera, co-founder at Scientific Animations.
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