Founded in 2008, Capillary Technologies provides mobile based customer management solutions to retailers with real time customer engagement to promote the products and services. It is founded by Aneesh Reddy and Krishna Mehra, both from IIT Kharagpur. 

Genesis of the idea

When Aneesh and Krishna talked with the retailers, they found that the visiting customers were not willing to fill forms to get loyalty cards and carry it to redeem the points. They also realized that the mobile industry is expanding rapidly in India and something can be built upon it. The idea led to combining mobile, social media and retail space to provide a unique service which will be easy for the customers and retailers, as well as gather insightful data about customer preferences and purchase.

Moving to the cloud

!inTouch, the flagship product of Capillary Technologies helps retailers in engaging with the customers in real time. When the founders started with the product, no one wanted to pay for the software. It was not convenient for the retailers to use another application on their desktops. To solve the problem, Aneesh and Krishna decided to use cloud hosting services for their software which proved to be the game changer for them.

How does it work?

When a customer enters into the store and makes a purchase, the retailers enter the information about the sale on the cloud hosted software. The data enables Capillary Technologies to analyse customer preferences and purchase. Using the data, information is sent about an offer or related product to the customer on their mobile phones while they are at the store. This engages the customer with the products available in the store in real time.

So if a customer buys a jeans, as soon as the retailer enters the information on the software, a message is sent to the customer about things that the customer may want to buy with it, like belts or t-shirt etc.

Success

In October, Capillary Tech won the Entrepreneurial Excellence Award at TiECon in Delhi. The award is given away by TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) Delhi that ‘recognises early stage entrepreneurs who started and have achieved a certain degree of success’. They came into the limelight when they won the $100,000 Qualcomm global prize QPrize 2009, a global business plan contest conducted by Qualcomm.

They have over 6000 store installations for over a 100 retail brands and over 15 million end consumers registered on the platform for retail clients.

Funding

Initially the two founders put up Rs 50,000 from personal savings. They went to ECell they had started at IIT Kharagpur and applied for the Rs 15 lakh seed loan which was approved by the committee of professors. Prize money received from  Qprize is also used to fund the startup.

The founders at Capillary Technologies believe that perseverance is very important for a start-up. One may not even get the first client easily and often you fail many times before figuring out what really works for your startup.

Contact Capillary Technologies at:
info@capillary.co.in 

References: The amazing success story of an Indian garage start-up

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