Artificial Intelligence Startup Clootrack Raises $500K Funding

Bangalore based, AI start-up Clootrack Software Labs Private Limited (“Clootrack”) has announced raising $500K in seed funding round from Indian Angel Network, country’s largest horizontal seed stage funding platform. Led by IAN, the round also saw participation from IAN Fund, Unicorn India Ventures (existing investor), SEA Fund and Malabar Angel Network. Anthony Thomas, Global CIO, Nissan Motors and Salliel Gupta have led the round on behalf of IAN with Anthony joining the company board. IAN investor group also includes Kris Gopalakrishnan (Co Founder, Infosys).

Founded in April 2017, Clootrack is the first of its kind AI driven data analytics platform that discovers and measures brand perceptions in real time. Clootrack does this based on analysis of customer conversations in various online media and customer care tickets. Clootrack discovers brand perception elements in an unsupervised manner from text conversations. The company runs on proprietary deep learning algorithms based on proven mathematical models and has two pending patents.

Shameel Abdulla, Co-founder CEO, Clootrack says, “It is encouraging to see top tier investors continually backing our vision and trusting in our business. We are glad to have kept our burn ratio low and built the business where healthy traction, better algorithms and deeper use of Machine Learning is showing near real time results to our customers.”

Brainchild of Shameel Abdulla and Subbakrishna Rao, CTO, Clootrack, both the founders bring serial entrepreneurship experience to the table. Shameel, an ISB drop out, holds 2 patents and has founded Jiffstore which was acquired by PepperTap and Kode Blink, a mobile app company with apps topping Appstore charts. Subbakrishna Rao, also a serial entrepreneur, has close two decades of experience in the tech sector.

Speaking on the investment, Lead IAN investor Anthony Thomas commented, “Understanding customers fast is key in today’s rapidly changing markets. Clootrack depicts a unique combination of making this happen with superior technology and rapid adoption in enterprises with smart go to market.”

Unicorn India Ventures, which is the first institutional investor in the Company, seed funded them in 2017 and has been supportive and actively mentoring the founders to scale their business.

Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, says, “We decided to seed fund Clootrack in 2017 because their tech stack and a well articulated strategy to solve the brands’ need gap when it comes to understanding their customers, convinced us to back them. Two years later, we believe the Company is in a sweet spot and is providing the much needed brand perception solutions to its customers. With the use of AI and deep learning, they have proven how can brands stay close to their customers and this is what has kept us interested in the Company.”

With digitization and AI ruling pretty much every aspect of our lives, even today, most of the companies receive arbitary information about their products but are unable to make anything of it. Clootrack solves this problem with its unique AI driven solutions about customer preferences. In most of large companies, 50% of the advertising costs are going into digital channels. Such channels are quite flexible and one can change their strategy within a few hours and react as per customers’ feedback provided they have that data to make a quick turnaround on their campaigns.

Clootrack assists brand managers to not only achieve this but also discovers real time brand perceptions from end users’ perspective at 80% lower costs in comparison to closed surveys, which takes months and are sometimes biased due to the nature of closed questionnaire.

Clootrack currently operates a subscription model and operates in 6 domains – Pharma, FMCG, retail, finance, travel and automotive. The Company works with more than 150 enterprises including Fortune 500 companies.