Technology has been the clear enabler through the course of COVID pandemic. From food to fashion, from entertainment to payment, we have done it all using one tech platform or another.

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Within technology, the SaaS story has been a story to watch and the India SaaS story in particular has been the big breakout.

According to the SaaSBOOMi latest report, there are nearly 1,000 funded SaaS companies in India and 10 of them are valued at over a billion dollars to achieve the unicorn status.

CleverTap is one of those potential SaaS breakout companies. Founded by Sunil Thomas, Suresh Kondamudi and Anand Jain in 2013, CleverTap is a SaaS platform that helps companies boost consumer engagement on apps and unlock growth. It tracks over a trillion consumer behaviour actions each month.

The customer lifecycle management platform powers over 10,000 apps. Its clients include startups such as bookmyshow.com and Grofers to enterprises such as McDonalds and Mercedes. CleverTap taps insights for clients from over 2 billion consumers globally.

In an interview to Shereen Bhan, Thomas said SaaS has been booming and the company has managed to double since COVID begun.

"SaaS is completely booming. We have been growing over the past 15 months, we have doubled since COVID started. So, all in all we are in an enviable place I would say."

According to Thomas, importance of user retention was a positive outcome of the pandemic.

"Many things happened during COVID but few good things came out of it. One is user retention. The importance of user retention for consumer brands really came upfront and in centre. So that was good for us. While many industries or sectors went down, there was equal or more boom in multiple sectors like fintech, edtech, media and entertainment including gaming. So, we were able to take advantage of that."

Also Read: COVID gave SaaS based companies a chance to thrive and not just survive, says Uniphore's Umesh Sachdeva

However, he said work from home experiment was a big drag for engineering and innovation related services.

"However, we were hit in personal and professional ways. Work from home was a good experiment for first few months, it was a new challenge to solve but it is a drag when you talk about engineering and product and doing innovation. So, we have had to overcome all of that. We have been lucky to not pivot our business except going after new sectors and all of that stuff but we have had to pivot our processes, our style of working and all of these kind of things."

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(Edited by : Bivekananda Biswas)

First Published:Aug 18, 2021 8:16 PM IST