How this Bengaluru SaaS startup enhances employee engagement, business productivity with gamification
Founded in 2019, Bengaluru SaaS startup Unotag helps companies design gamified incentive programmes to motivate employees to improve their performance.
With more millennials joining the workforce, a lack of motivation has led many to fail in delivering the tasks. Sales, customer support, and delivery teams have a tough job, and they need constant motivation with incentives and recognition to keep up with their work.
To make work more fun and engaging for employees, — a gamification-based all-in-one toolkit — was launched in 2019.
“While everyone admired gamification done by Google Pay and , creating a platform for this new-age workforce was a market requirement. We are a platform that gamifies’ incentives, recognition, and hence motivates the workforce to perform better and more productively,” Mohit Ambani, Co-founder, Unotag, tells YourStory.
Co-founders (L-R): Mehul Jain and Mohit Ambani
Founded by Mohit Ambani, Arpit Vasani, and Mehul Jain, Unotag helps companies and their sales teams, channel partners, and influencers to improve their performance through gamification, thereby motivating them with automated incentives.
In fact, its proprietary AI platform — Mok — improves the productivity of sales teams and employees using behavioural economics and personalised nudges.
“The AI-driven personalised nudges help sales teams drive better behaviour in completing tasks and achieving goals. Our platform helps in improving product knowledge using quiz and memory games,” Ambani says.
Unotag — which can be integrated easily with major CRM’s, including Hubspot, Salesforce, Freshdesk, Zoho, Teams, etc. — uses elements like points, leaderboards, goals, fantasy leagues, and badges to drive users in completing their tasks.
The Bengaluru SaaS startup has surpassed $135,000 annual recurring revenue (ARR) and clocked a monthly growth of 120 percent in the last six months.
At present, the Unotag platform is used by more than 300,000 users across India, with about $2 million (Rs 15 crore) incentives already dispersed to them. The startup is targeting around $1.35 million (Rs 10 crore) ARR by the end of 2021.
The team
A graduate from the Bangalore Institute of Technology, Mohit has close to five years of work experience, having worked with firms like Analytics Quotient Services India Pvt Ltd, Maxwell Industries, and , among others. The co-founder manages product, sales, and investor relations.
Arpit Vasani has over 10 years of experience in design and development. As the CTO of Unotag, he manages technology, product, and design verticals in the startup.
Meanwhile, Mehul Jain is responsible for setting up operations and lead generation.
At present, Unotag has a total of 18 employees in its team.
Plans for 2021
In March 2021, Unotag raised an undisclosed amount from the Indian Angel Network (IAN). Led by angel investors Vikas Kuthiala, Anand Saklecha, and Pradeep Jaisingh, the startup is now poised to further develop its cutting-edge tech product and expand into newer markets.
“Following this investment round, we will leverage the capital raised to strengthen our platform in providing enhanced services to our users. This funding round should grow our revenue by 5x, and the team to 60 by 2022,” Mohit believes.
The startup’s product pathway includes evolving more gamification features, including Fantasy Leagues for sales teams, Housie, Bingo contests, World Cups, and Championship events.
It also plans to embed AI to better track behaviours, higher personalisation, and coach users in completing their goals.
The SaaS product is priced per user per month between $5 and $75, with access to the mobile app, web portal, and analytics.
The startup’s current revenue stands at $300,000 and is expected to close this fiscal year at $1 million.
The future ahead
According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the global gamification market size is projected to grow from $9.1 billion in 2020 to $30.7 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 27.4 percent.
The report added that rewards and recognition to employees over performance to boost employee engagement, provision of lucrative offers to the customers and consumers, and gamification yielding a higher return on investment (RoI) are some of the major factors driving this growth.
Unotag — used by more than 50 clients in four countries, including India, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand — competes with the likes of , , Microsoft Dynamics, , , , and , among others.
Unotag counts RR Global, GM Modular, and Livguard, among others in its clients.
By 2022, the startup wants to target over 200 MSMEs and enterprises in India, expecting to increase its ARR to $2 million - $3 million. It is also planning to go for Series A funding and launch in the US and Canada markets, targeting $20 million ARR and over 1,000 enterprises by 2024.
“Our focus is more on creating game-like experiences by hiring game developers in upcoming phases of growth. Our focus segment is software businesses and gig workforce dependent businesses to achieve 200 percent yearly growth,” Mohit says.
Edited by Suman Singh