Aneesh Reddy is the Co-Founder & CEO of Capillary Technologies. A visionary who believes that advances in technology can lead to significant advances in business value and ROI, Aneesh leads the Capillary team that works with enterprise customers. Together they help customers put the right communications for the right products into the hands of the right customers at the right time.

Aneesh is a frequently featured expert at global retail, marketing and technology forums worldwide and premier educational institutes such as Wharton and ISB. He participates in discussions around entrepreneurship and major technology trends such as cloud, mobile, social and Big Data. He is also a featured entrepreneur in leading publications like Forbes, Harvard Business Review and The Economic Times. Before founding Capillary, he worked with ITC Limited, where his role involved facility management and setting up a new Greenfield factory for their FMCG division. Aneesh holds a bachelor’s degree in Manufacturing Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

In an exclusive interview with CrazyEngineers, Aneesh talks about his startup - Capillary Technologies, Reverse Innovation and the various challenges he faced while running this company. Aneesh also discusses ways via which entrepreneurs can generate funding for their startup and a lot more. Read On!

CE: Could you please tell our readers more about Capillary Technologies?

Aneesh: Capillary Technologies is a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions that helps retailers to quickly and easily manage their customer data, gain insights and personalize that engagement across social media, mobile, e-mail, online, and in store channels, driving a significant increase in sales and loyalty.

Our mission is to help every retail marketer form successful and personalized relationships with their customers based on insights derived from customer analytics across multiple channels by harnessing the power of Capillary’s integrated customer engagement platform. Capillary has also been named a Gartner 2013 Cool Vendor, Marketing Magazine's CRM & Loyalty Agency of the Year 2013 and one of Mint/WSJ Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Hottest Technology Businesses 2013.

CE: Capillary Technologies is based on the concept of Reverse Innovation. Could you please tell us more about this?

Aneesh: 

Reverse innovation refers to building technologies that are adopted first in developing countries.

This is different from the common phenomenon of initial new technology adoption in developed countries that later trickle down to geographies technology adoption is still evolving. Such technologies are beginning to kindle interest in the western entrepreneurial ecosystems. They are now beginning to take notice of companies using reverse Innovation to build products that solve existing marketplace challenges.

CE: Capillary Technologies was the QPrize winner in 2009 and is the youngest company to win at Marketing Magazine's CRM & Loyalty Agency of the Year Awards 2013. How has Capillary Technologies grown after the recognition?

Aneesh: Till last year, Capillary was present in 6 countries and currently, Capillary is present across 16 countries which includes the Americas, Europe, Middle East, South Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. We are also strategically expanding our footprint in the US, UK and Australia. We have become a truly global company with more than 8 different nationalities working with us.

The contribution of our international geographies had increased drastically in the last one year. More markets such as South East Asia, Middle East and UK are breaking the $1mn in annual revenue from Saas benchmark. During the course of the last year, we have also grown our headcount by 20% with more focus on teams built to scale our business to the next level.

CE:  What according to you are some of the ways through which aspiring entrepreneurs can generate funding? When is the right time?

Aneesh: Investors look for big ideas that are different and can change our behavior, culture or way of thinking; in short, ideas that can build $100-million-size companies. Anything less is very exploratory. 

Usually, the risks of investing in a company is large--and the chances of a reward is very small. When the entrepreneurs show how it can solve real-world challenges and add true business value, it is then the right time for them to generate funding.

CE: What was the biggest challenge you had to deal with at Capillary Technologies? What did you learn from it?

Aneesh: In the early stages, we faced a lot of infrastructure and regulatory challenges which most entrepreneurs do. But, our focus on cloud technology helped us to scale-up easily and offer substantial value to customers while maintaining profitable margins. However, we did spend a lot of our time doing non-value add activities, being part of the first wave of young first-time entrepreneurs, in a country still bound by legacy corporate environments.

CE: Thank you for your time. Any message for young engineers who aspire to be entrepreneurs?

Aneesh: Being a young entrepreneur is never easy but not impossible. 

It's a common saying “do what you love” so always believe in your idea and be passionate about what you are doing.