Mumbai: Vserv Digital Services, which sources data on mobile customer usage trends, is looking to raise $10-15 million by the end of the current fiscal year to finance its expansion, Dippak Khurana, the company’s founder, said.
The Mumbai-based company started operations in 2010 with ₹ 30 lakh from angel investor Ajay Adiseshann, founder of PayMate India Pvt. Ltd, a mobile payment company. It raised $3 million in the first-round of funding from IDG Ventures in 2011 and $4 million in the second round from IDG Ventures and Epiphany Ventures in 2012.
The company has tied up with Southeast Asian telecom firms including Globe Telecom in the Philippines, Indosat in Indonesia and MobiFone in Vietnam. It also claims to have tie-ups with 10 global telecom companies including Airtel, Vodafone and Aircel in India and Airtel in Sri Lanka.
Vserv gathers data from mobile users and builds a user profile by relating it with other data. The company is looking to clock revenues worth $100 million by 2016.
Founded in 2010, the company has expanded its business operations from being a mobile advertising exchange to a mobile marketing platform. “We have over 500 million unique user profiles, which we further augment by connecting with multiple sources like telcos, apps, offline data partners, etc., which enables us to deliver sharper results for marketers, app developers and telecom operators,” said Khurana.
“There are 3-5 companies that start up in the mobile big data space every month. These companies find small areas of specialisation and add value using low-cost technology. These companies would typically partner or get acquired by larger firms after operating for 2-3 years,” said Amit Khanna, partner, analytics at KPMG India over the phone.
Vserv is looking at gathering data for over 1.2 billion users by the end of December 2016. Khurana also states that the mobile data market is estimated to be a $260 million industry.
According to a report by software sector lobby Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies), major Indian telecom service providers have been early adopters of Big Data tools and technologies. Bharti Airtel Ltd creates 5,000 targeted campaigns a day using data from customer usage, billing and sales details, according to the report. The report also states that Big Data allows telecom companies to carry out network planning, improve service quality, manage customer attrition and in product and price customization.
Other start-ups in India’s Big Data space include AbsolutData Research and Analytics Pvt. Ltd, DataWeave Software Pvt. Ltd, Flutura Business Solutions Pvt. Ltd and Mu Sigma Inc.
The story has been updated to correct the company name.
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