The untold tale of a rare Indian startup who now powers ecommerce giants in China

Capability alone doesn’t ensure a startup’s success. It often hinges on strange coincidences. And ad retargeting firm Vizury had more than its fair share of them on its way to becoming a rare outsider to prise open the Chinese market, which even IT biggies from India had found impermeable.

The chance encounters began in Texas, USA, even before Vizury was born, when IIM grad Chetan Kulkarni was working with global software service company Trilogy. Ironically, for a company started by a Stanford dropout, Joe Liemandt, it had a program called Trilogy University. Young graduates were recruited from schools around the world and given real-world problems to solve. Kulkarni’s project was in China.

It was 2006, but the sheer size of the internet market there was already apparent and left an indelible impression on young Kulkarni. “That was one of the motivations for me to go back to China and try something there when we built Vizury,” he recalls now, suited up and seated across a large boardroom table at Vizury HQ in Bangalore.

But we’re getting ahead of the story. It would take a few more stars to align before Vizury’s Chinese connection.

The rule of three

The rule of three has a special meaning for Vizury. Its troika of founders – Chetan Kulkarni (CEO), Gourav Chindlur (COO), and Vikram Nayak (CTO) – met at Trilogy. When they quit their jobs in 2008 to startup, they had a one page business plan with a triangle on it – Data, Technology, Marketing.

“We wanted to do something within this triangle. All around us there was something interesting happening in and around this triangle,” says Kulkarni.

The problem was with their timing. It was mid-2008, Lehman had just shut, markets were crashing and businesses cutting back on budgets. Their IIT and Trilogy credentials cut no ice. “Everyone shut the door on us, including our current investor Inventus Capital, who said, ‘Go prove it and come back’,” says Kulkarni wryly.

They worked feverishly on their value proposition, 13 hours a day, 7 days a week, huddled in one of their homes in Bangalore. They were running through their savings, and Vikram Nayak’s EMI payments on his mortgaged house were piling up.

The pressure kept mounting but the triangle in their business plan kept them focused.

“It is like being lost in the forest: You need to know where the North Pole or South Pole or sea is – as long as you are heading in that direction, you believe you will get out of the forest eventually. The worst thing that can happen when you are lost is if you move in circles,” explains Kulkarni.

The pitch that clicked

The secret Chinese sauce

The triple play Vizury offers