ProMobi Technologies is a SaaS product company. Its main product includes a leading mobile device management solution under the brand Scalefusion. The product is trusted by 6000+ companies from all around the world.
Today, we had a chance to interact with the company’s co-founders about how the company has grown and many more aspects. So without any further ado let’s get started.
1. Tell us about your company. When was the company founded? Who were the founders? Tell us more about their backgrounds.
Founded in the year 2013, ProMobi Technologies is India’s leading multi-product company that operates in the SaaS (software as a service) space. The company is known for its flagship product – Scalefusion.
Scalefusion is an industry-leading Mobile Device Management and Endpoint Management platform tailored for businesses and enterprises of all sizes. It allows companies to secure and manage employee-owned (BYOD) and company-owned devices such as laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other endpoints for business use without hiring a specialized IT team.
Organizations can configure the devices to run only business-related apps and websites, preventing data copy from these devices and ensure that only authorized users have access to the device. These devices can be used as customer-facing devices, for example:
- For self-ordering at takeaway food joints, can be used by customers and employees.
- the handheld devices used by last-mile delivery executives.
- tablets used in classrooms by students.
MDM allows organizations to secure and manage endpoints including smartphones, tablets, laptops, rugged devices, mPOS, and digital signages, along with apps and content. It supports the management of Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows 10 devices and ensures streamlined device management operations with Scalefusion Remote Troubleshooting.
Headquartered in Pune with offices in Hyderabad, Gurgaon in India, and global offices in France, Mexico, Canada, and the US, the company is significantly growing y-o-y basis under the leadership of its founders, Mr. Harishanker Kannan and Mr. Arnab Chakraborty
Harishanker has experience working with over more than 6 startups throughout his career of over 18 years. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Hertfordshire and has a keen interest in developing products that solve real market problems.
Arnab has 20+ years of experience building software products and is passionate about building useful products that have a positive impact on people’s lives, modular clean codes, design systems, and typography. He leads the technology initiatives at ProMobi Technologies.
2. What inspired you to start your venture in this particular domain? What is unique about your products/services?
While working on a previous startup, we were first introduced to the challenges in using kiosk technology. Kiosk technology is used in airport lounges, self-check-in devices at the airport and hotels, devices displaying audio-visual ads in waiting areas or wayfinders in zoos, museums, and shopping malls, and devices used in school and this has been exponentially increasing, thanks to the popularity of mobile devices. After working on multiple projects around the same lines as software services at ProMobi Technologies, we realized that MDM was an essential tool for every organization but there were only a few players catering to the MDM domain, and the solutions in the market were limited to solving the challenges of big organizations / MNCs. This was our clicking point. What inspired us to go full-fledged was that the existing solutions in the domain were complex and expensive. There was no solution provider for the small and medium-sized businesses and their needs.
What makes Scalefusion unique is that it takes out the complexity of using MDM – from on-boarding to policy-driven flows, replacing it with an easy-to-use device management platform that businesses of every size can adapt quickly. Our mission is to make device management simple and effortless by providing world-class products and customer support.
3. Tell us more about the features of the solution.
Scalefusion MDM facilitates enterprise IT teams to have optimized control over the devices on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows operating systems. Our product is designed to meet the growing needs in the field of device management technology across different operating systems and ownership models. Following functions can be performed using Scalefusion:
- Companies can apply compliances.
- Deploy company policies on devices with diverse ownership models & device-types.
- Secure device and critical business data from misuse, unauthorized access & malware attacks.
- Organizations can also prevent data copy from these devices and ensure that only authorized users have access to the device.
- Organizations can configure the devices to run only business-related apps and websites, they can also distribute business resources, apps & content on devices from a single console.
- Perform device-health & compliance checks to maintain device performance.
- Real-time device location tracking
4. Tell us more about the industry and the competition in this particular segment. It would be great if you can share some market trends in the industry.
When we launched the product, our target market was SMBs. The MDM market space back then largely focussed on big organizations. Today, we have numerous reputed organizations across the spectrum including small and large businesses, as our esteemed customers.
We have some big players as our competition and that simply makes our journey more exciting.
5. What kind of challenges have you faced in founding your company and in the subsequent time period? How did you overcome these difficulties? Are there any takeaways from them which can help in furthering the growth of your company?
We are a bootstrapped startup and hence managing cash was always one of the biggest concerns when we started off. We started setting month-on-month goals to have a positive cash flow and gradually when we started making revenue, we created a runway for 3 months, expanding it to 6 months over the time. Having to keep a close eye on our spending was the initial difficulty.
Also, MDM is a crowded space, and we face a lot of competition from small as well as big players. Building the entire feature set that our competitors had with a small team at our disposal was difficult. To overcome this challenge, we chose to progress steadily by building the features that the customers really needed.
Another major challenge arose when we rebranded in March 2019, our marketing efforts had to be redirected and the blip lasted for more than 3 months.
The key learnings from our challenges were:
- Keep your spending low.
- Opt for sustainable growth as opposed to going all out.
- Build your product and your team gradually.
6. Tell us about your journey so far, your current team, and also its customer base and revenues.
The journey of Scalefusion (previously known as MobiLock) started from being a kiosk solution to a full-blown mobile device management platform. We launched our standalone Android app MobiLock in the Play Store for free to test the market. Within the first 2 months, we hit more than 1000 downloads from 20+ countries, in the next 2 months, the number reached 5000+ downloads and we had downloads from over 35 countries. Our team geared up and re-designed the entire product, launching the Beta Version of MobiLock Pro in January 2015, with a 30-day free trial. Since then, we have extended our offering to multiple operating systems- Android, iOS, Windows 10, and macOS.
We are currently a strong team of 125+ employees, our customer base is spread across the globe and belongs to diverse industries including Information Technology, last-mile delivery, logistics and transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, banking and finance, retail, hospitality, and education.
7. What are the strengths of your company?
The strengths of our company include:
Our customer service: Our support is 100% free and has helped us retain our customers, some of them have been with us right from inception.
Our authenticity: We are an Indian brand, and we take pride in it, we keep it real and our customer support specialists use their real Indian names- be it on calls or chatbots.
8. What are the addressable market and underlying opportunities you are going after?
The addressable market for our product is huge. In the era of remote working, remote learning and remote everything has brought in new potential customers to our product. Anyone and everyone who needs to manage their mobility and mobile devices hence can be our customer- across industry verticals and geographic locations.
9. How have you distributed your initial funds so far? Do you have any plan to raise funds in the near future?
We are a 100% bootstrapped company, our revenue is redirected to drive research, development, and marketing efforts at the company as well as churning out new products under the ProMobi family of products.
