Building a multi-million venture from a small town in Kerala: Corporate360 story

Corporate360 offers SaaS based Marketing Data & Analytics software for B2B marketers. Headquartered in Singapore with subsidiary offices in the US, the UK, Philippines and India, the company offers innovative marketing data & sales analytics solutions for global markets through a disruptive, low cost Data-as-a-Service model.

“The idea behind launching this was to innovate data solutions help B2B marketers identify best-fit target audience for sales & marketing campaigns,” says Varun Chandran, Founder, Corporate360.

The idea for Corporate360 was born when Varun was working for a large technology company in Singapore. He was working in a sales role where his ex-boss and a colleague initiated the idea of developing a sales intelligence and analytics data platform to help them sell better.

Varun took the lead on getting the idea off the ground and startup while the other two colleagues decided to continue with their full time jobs due to security reasons. With their encouragement, Varun bootstrapped and launched Corporate360 with a couple of hundred dollars from his bed room.

Building global venture from a small town in Kerala

Corporate360 is the first international startup in India to start operations in a tier-3 town in Kerala, employing 20 engineers thereby creating jobs in rural India. The company is also a big supporter of women empowerment campaign, 75% of the present workforce of Corporate360 is women.

The company's Founder Varun started from a humble background. Born in a small farming village in Kerala, he was a national footballer, captained Kerala University and Youth football teams. A college dropout, he went on to work for some of the world's largest tech companies such as SAP, Oracle, and Dell in 3 countries before founding Corporate360.

Read: How a Farmer’s son and College-dropout became a Tech Millionaire

For the first three quarters, he was a one-man company and generated $250k in revenue. He re-invested the revenue back into the business to hire and build teams in Singapore, Manila and India. “At first it was challenging to attract talent especially in Kerala, when he bought his own company building and started the operations instead of renting a space in an IT park. People were hesitant because the company was a non-funded -startup and was not very famously operating out of any technology park,” adds Varun.

Differentiators and USPs

The B2B marketplace is crowded with legacy data re-sellers. There is a huge gap of BigData innovations in this space corresponding to lack of relevancy, accuracy, analytics and data maintenance in the old fashioned model. “Companies end up spending millions of dollars repeatedly to source data sets for their marketing campaigns from expensive, generic data re-sellers. B2B marketers are increasingly looking for insight driven marketing campaigns and switching from the legacy model of generic marketing blast approach,” points out Varun.

Corporate360 solutions are designed to leverage BigData to provide insight driven campaign data and sales analytics. The company is the first in Asia to offer a SaaS based B2B marketing data platform for global markets.

It offers a comprehensive, one-of-a-kind and the most complete marketing data software suite available today. The platform covers company profile, contact intelligence, organisation charts, tech install info, competitive intelligence, predictive analytics, sales triggers & social data through a low cost Data-as-a-Service model. Corporate360 DaaS model is unique and innovative delivering high value for customers, ensuring highest level of data accuracy, ongoing data maintenance and real-time updates.

How Corporate360 works for startups?

B2B marketers and agencies use Corporate360 solutions to access insight driven campaign data such as target companies, contacts, social intelligence, competitive intelligence & sales triggers. They use our platform to retrieve actionable data to design targeted campaigns with tailored messaging.

At present, the company has 900 plus clients ranging from startups to ‘Forbes’ listed corporations. A large portion of revenue comes from international markets such as the US & Europe. Corporate360 clients include HP, Dell, Oracle, and Google etc. The company offers exclusive, low-cost data subscription plans for B2B startups to get them started on their marketing campaigns.

Corporate360 is gaining good traction in global markets with their data driven & structured knowledge discovery solutions for B2B sales and marketers.

Journey from zero to multi-million dollar venture in three years

Corporate360 grew into a multi-million dollar business within three years as a bootstrapped venture. The company is profitable with operations in 5 countries with a team size of 29 executives. Profitable from inception, the company grew from revenue (first year) of $250k to a million dollar mark in just three years, presently forecasted to cross multi-million in revenue this year.

Plans for scaling up

The company is scaling up its offerings with innovative data solutions for marketers. The company is scheduled to formally launch three new cool data applications to their SaaS platform like:

PeeP: A social profiling widget of target audience to help learn more about the background of target prospects.

DataStudio - A comprehensive data service model to refresh & maintain internal data accuracy, leverage external data sets, create predictive data modelling, run accurate sales analytics, and integrate into CRM tools.

SmartWorker - A crowdsource data platform leveraging millions of online workers to perform data tasks at any scale to deliver real-time data updates.

By 2015, the company is aiming to cover 90% of total addressable enterprise market coverage in their data platform.

Road ahead

Corporate360 is expanding with local sales offices in the US, the UK and Singapore. The company is launching new data driven products for B2B marketers and has filed for four patents. “We are also in discussions with some prominent VCs to explore capital raising to accelerate our sales and marketing expansions in global markets,” says Varun.

Acquisition on the card

Corporate360 is in final discussions with a BigData startup company from India for a potential acquisition. The total team size is expected to grow from 29 to 50 this year, primarily expanding Data Scientist teams in India and Sales team in the US.

Website : Corporate360