GrowthEnabler uses AI to connect startups and companies, enables informed decision-making

With offices in London and Bengaluru, GrowthEnabler provides intelligence on tech innovation and disruptive business models to help technology leaders resolve business challenges. 

At a glance

Startup: GrowthEnabler

Founders: Rajeev Banduni and Aftab Malhotra

Year it was founded: 2015

Where it is based: London

The problem it solves: Help corporates connect with startups

Sector: Subscription-based intelligence platform 

In the fast-changing world of technology innovation, corporations are outpaced by nimble startups that disrupt industries. Many want to stay ahead of the technology curve by choosing to work with startups with domain expertise.

Enter GrowthEnabler, an AI-powered platform that connects companies with startups whose profile matches their needs. Founded by ex-Gartner colleagues Rajeev Banduni and Aftab Malhotra in 2015, GrowthEnabler tracks more than 500,000 global startups and has more than 15 global Fortune 500 CXOs who are using the platform to solve their business issues.

“I ran Gartner India for 10 years and realised that with digital and tech disruption coming from emerging players there was no intelligence available that allowed large corporations to understand how to handle disruption. Aftab and I were colleagues at Gartner and we felt there must be a way to solve these issues. We spoke to industry leaders and everyone wanted to have an understanding of the startup ecosystem from their industry and role perspective. When we probed further we came across a study from Yale University that was talking about the rapidly shrinking lifespan of S&P 500 companies,” Rajeev shares.

“The question every CXO asked us was, ‘How do we make sense of emerging startup economy and use it to our advantage to create a competitive differentiator?’. When we looked around, we realised the current approach of engagement with startups is either very manual (incubator, accelerators etc) or very database-driven where a platform is created to provide a list of startups,” he adds.

Enabling growth 

The founding duo believes that CXOs were looking for something that could solve business issues and enable decision-making with deep industry analysis.

“This is what we set out to do with GrowthEnabler,” Rajeev says.

GrowthEnabler uses AI and machine learning to collect and analyse information to provide intelligence based on the role or industry. They have developed robotic process automation for intelligence industry that can automate an analyst’s role with deep supervised learnings.

GrowthEnabler’s core product offering is GrowthEnabler Pii (Personalised Intelligence Interface). GrowthEnabler uses a combination of primary research, data collated directly from global startups, proprietary crawlers and extractors, and database such as Crunchbase and others, to collect and mine tonnes of valuable data.

Why do corporations want to work with startups?

“Based on a study over 85 percent of business leaders believe their industry will change substantially by 2020. Over 45 percent of future revenues will come from digital business and more than 75 percent of the S&P 500 is expected to churn and massively change by 2025. New brands, new companies that don't exist today will emerge, and many of names we know won't exist in the future. To compound this pressure, the global startup economy is growing rapidly as well - over 1.78 million startups in the world. This figure will mushroom as new startup markets and ecosystems grow in India and China. So, how will enterprise leaders buck this trend?” Rajeev says.

The new currency of business

He offers more evidence. “In just 3.5 years, 40 unicorns have grown to 300 with over $400 billion of venture capital investment in them. The most valuable companies in the world are tech disruptors and startups with a market cap of over $2.5 trillion. So how can large enterprises and their leaders think and act in a digital way? Like startups. How can they act with speed, the new currency of business?”

Startups can sign up on the platform to verify and update their data for free while corporates pay a subscription fee to access the platform. Corporate clients of GrowthEnabler include Verizon, Abbott, Viacom and Firstsource among others.

GrowthEnabler has raised an angel round from investors in London and India and have an annual revenue of close to 1 million USD.

“We want to ensure our stakeholders, large corporates and startups should be able to enjoy access to real-time intelligence. In next six months, we’re adding an Analysis page that will give real-time sector and startup ecosystem analysis with board-ready slide decks and reports,” Rajeev says.

Growth enabler will provide top search trends based on role and sectors to ensure companies know what their industry peers are searching and what are the top business issues faced by an industry.

“Our goal is to build an AI-based recommendation engine that allows you to looks at tech disruption and business models based on your needs, making it a very personalised experience,” Rajeev shares.