Indian analytics, global clients: Axtria straddles two worlds to offer ‘everything as a service’

Mu Sigma, Fractal Analytics, Manthan… the list of data analytics startups leveraging Indian tech wizardry to serve global companies is growing longer. It’s a natural extension of India’s IT services and outsourcing (BPO) boom in the nineties, which created a large pool of talent, especially in data analytics.

Axtria, founded in India and now headquartered in the US, is a case in point. With bases in Gurgaon and New Jersey, it has over 60 clients in the US. Today it announced US$30 million series C funding led by Helion Venture Partners to extend its cloud-based services in Europe.

Axtria offers what it dubs “everything as a service,” from improving customer metrics to finding new business opportunities. Last year, it was ranked 32 in the Inc 500 list of the fastest growing companies in the US. It was number two in the IT services category.

Helion backing to scale up

Jassi Chadha and Navi Chadha founded Axtria in 2010 with the backing of private investors. Now it has brought in an institutional VC to scale faster. Helion co-founder and senior managing director Sanjeev Aggarwal is joining the Axtria board. “We’ll benefit from the expertise of Sanjeev and other Helion team members in scaling business and managing growth,” says Jassi Chadha.

The Chadha duo previously founded MarketRx, a data analytics startup focused on life sciences, which got acquired by Cognizant in 2007. Axtria has a wider range of verticals, including healthcare, banking, retail, and high tech.

The funding boost will help it to enter more verticals with its proprietary analytical applications such as SalesIQ, MarketingIQ, and RiskIQ. These applications get embedded in customer platforms to provide insights at the decision-making point.

A $121 billion playground

It’s a boom time for analytics with companies in every industry trying to improve their customer focus with smarter metrics and faster response times. Global data is estimated to be doubling every 12 to 15 months, which presents both opportunities and challenges. By 2016, the global analytics market is estimated to climb from US$96 billion in 2014 to reach US$121 billion, according to a report from Indian IT industry association Nasscom. Services constitute a big chunk of this market.

Sanjeev Aggarwal of Helion says: