A mighty ‘James Bond’ status update from WizRocket
I was in Mumbai about a week ago. On a typical humid and hectic June afternoon in the city of dreams, I got down the local at Goregaon West and walked upto Filmistan Studio. I thought about venturing inside but I had a meeting scheduled with a friendly face from Twitter with whom I had multiple conversations over the past year but hadn’t met. The man I’m talking about is Anand Jain, the Co-founder of Burrp! which was acquired by Network18.
Burrp! has also spawned an impressive startup mafia. Anand has had a long street smart career where he has done multiple things ranging from selling assembled computers to working in the valley for pedigreed technology companies.
I entered their office on the fifth floor where I first met Francis, the operations man at WizRocket. We chatted up a bit before Anand walked out from a meeting and we were served chai by the office admin who is very much a part of the WizRocket team and he has been with Anand through his previous ventures.
Wizrocket is a technology company that Anand has co-founded along with Sunil Thomas (Ex Network18, Infospace and Microsoft) and Suresh Kondamudi (IIT-M, Ex Network18, and Ji Grahak)
The James Bond Pitch
Imagine a hotel where James Bond is going to stay. He walks through the door and the management knows exactly what needs to be done -- his suite is ready, his favourite drink will reach him as soon as he is ready and his Aston Martin is available whenever he wants it.
But this does not happen in the online world.
WizRocket’s pitch is that every business should treat a person coming to their site like a James Bond. A business should be in a position to know what the person wants and offer it to him or her without being obtrusive. And how does WizRocket do that?
People Analytics
WizRocket as a product has a very wide scope -- it deals with segmentation, analytics and targeting. The analytics piece is ready as of now and WizRocket is already implemented with 25 companies. Anand showed me the demo and I was left awestruck at how powerful the product is. Their technology is robust enough to analyse more than a 250 million events in less than a second.
The tool can tell you exactly who is on your site at this very moment and can give a drill down of every event that has happened -- how much time that person has spent on the site, how many times he or she has gone to the payment page, etc. Once the targeting piece is ready, business owners will also be able to directly chop and dice the data set and offer appropriate messages to different segments via web messaging, push notifications, in-app messaging and even through SMS or Email.
What’s more?
WizRocket is a 10-member team at the moment and already has a few feathers on its hat. The company was one of the very few that made it to the interview round for YCombinator. They didn’t make it but it did not deter their spirits in any way. They’ve successfully raised $1.6 million in seed funding from Accel Partners which came as a humble status update recently (we anyways had WizRocket in our top 5 Mumbai based companies to watch out for in 2014).
The immediate roadmap for the product is the completion of the targeting piece. Once the full product is ready, it’d be deployed onto the existing customers and more to try it out. After the beta phase, the product will be ready for a public launch globally.
Website: WizRocket
