Mumbai June 11, 2019: Venture Catalysts, India’s largest and pioneering integrated incubator and accelerator platform, recently invested in SaaS based modern customer interaction platform Jumpstart that powers local and SME businesses to enhance their online reviews and optimize customer communication. The platform, started in late 2017, helps location brands drive Purchase decisions, Brand visibility and Customer experience. It has already acquired 4000+ businesses across 50+ verticals in the retail and service space and helps drive 10x more online reviews with reviewboost. Rajesh Patel, Mrunal Jhaveri, Bhavesh Chaudhary, Bobby Reddy led the investment round amongst others.
Local businesses are everywhere and are ready to adopt digital transformation to grow. Globally more than 300 million offline businesses exist today. With a significant majority of them looking to make the online transition in the most effective way, Jumpstart has immense potential as a SaaS based modern customer communication platform for businesses to drive comprehensive customer engagement. It helps businesses drive more revenues through a three pronged solution structure of Online Reviews, Social commerce through location based re-targeting and online word of mouth and AI-powered customer interaction that enhances the level of customer engagement through a single system of engagement that also increases prospect conversion rate.
Commenting on Jumpstart’s prospects, Dr. Apoorv Sharma, Founder, Venture Catalysts said, “VCats is always looking for businesses that can serve as the catalyst to the next phase of transformation. Jumpstart, in its role as the facilitator of local enterprises develop a strong online presence to reach out to more consumers effectively, fits this role perfectly. It is led by two well-experienced founders and a skilled core team that knows the needs of different fast growing consumer and B2B start-ups well. The technological and product level maturity of Jumpstart, and its deep market research also prompted us to invest in this company at a seed stage. We could clearly see the vision and roadmap ahead, which always builds immense confidence in an investor and gives clarity about the enterprise’s long term and short term goals.”
Jumpstart has been co-founded by Raghav Soni and Qamar Siddiquie. Raghav was the ex-Chief Marketing Officer of CredR and was named the most influential eCommerce professional by CMO Asia in 2017. Qamar was the business talent acquisition head of CredR and has immense experience and identifying and acquiring promising business prospects.
Commenting on the recent funding, Raghav Soni Jumpstart, said, “With ever growing internet penetration – customer interactions has very much transformed and has become more personal. Jumpstart started with a mission to boost offline based businesses small and big. Local brands have seen growth of upto 40% in new customer footfalls by adopting Jumpstart proprietary Reviewboost and Social commerce features and becoming most trusted businesses in their locations.”
Raghav Soni added,” As we are fast evolving on our mission, Venture Catalysts with its big portfolio of such businesses will provide us strategic understanding and financial capital on our mission. We aim to boost 1 million businesses by 2022. This funding round will help us double down on our industry first innovation driving millions of businesses adopt digital transformation going around them.”
According to a recent Accel report – India will be home to 50 billion dollar Global SaaS opportunity by 2025. With a large number of SME and local enterprises turning the digital leaf, platforms like Jumpstart have a significant role to play as an enabler, bringing customers to these local enterprises and leveling the playing field in a highly competitive, digital driven business ecosphere.
