Sapience Analytics Looks To Accelerate Expansion In The US Market With New Funding

Pune and New York-based people analytics solution company Sapience Analytics has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Credit Suisse Asset Management’s NEXT Investors. Credit Suisse AG is one of the leading financial services providers.

The NEXT investment will be primarily used to accelerate Sapience Analytics’ expansion in the US market. Also, Sapience Analytics will shift its headquarters to the US, post the completion of the funding round.

As part of the deal, Sapience Analytics has also strengthened its board of directors. The new additions to the board include:

• Frank Fanzilli, Senior Advisor to NEXT Investors and former Global CIO at Credit Suisse First Boston, and Corporate Director at EnterpriseDB, SugarCRM, Linux Foundation and Grimaldi.
• Industry veteran Bradley Killinger joined as the President of the company, to lead the North American business as well as global sales and marketing. His background includes prior leadership positions at IBM, Oracle, Unisys, among other firms.

“We are seeing rapid growth for Sapience in the US market. We stand to benefit from our relationship with the NEXT team and their rich industry network which will enhance our ability to accelerate further,” said Shirish Deodhar, CEO and co-founder of Sapience Analytics.

What Are NEXT Investors Betting On, With This Investment?

As shared by Greg Grimaldi, Portfolio Manager, NEXT Investors at Credit Suisse Asset Management, Sapience Analytics helps to solve a big pain point. It is empowering large institutions to efficiently manage human capital resources to optimise work streams across an increasingly disparate workforce made up of permanent staff, third-party vendors, consultants, and contractors.

“With operational efficiency and human capital productivity continuing to be a focus for the financial services industry, businesses need to be smarter in how they deploy resources and allocate workflow,” he added.

Bradley Killinger further believes that the Sapience platform has a unique value proposition that helps customers significantly improve workforce productivity while also improving employee engagement. “Our technology-agnostic approach allows for fast and easy deployments that enable early RoIs for our customers. I am thrilled to be joining such an innovative company as we help define the people analytics market,” he added.

Sapience Analytics: A Glimpse Of The Product Offerings

Founded in 2009 with the vision to transform people, processes and productivity, Sapience Analytics is working in the people analytics space. The startup provides a unique enterprise workforce analytics and efficient solution which aims to deliver unprecedented visibility into work patterns and behaviour in an organisation.

The Sapience platform further focusses on helping companies achieve improved efficiencies for staffing, workload optimisation, process improvement, robotic process automation and outsourcing governance.

As Shirish added, “Sapience is a unique people analytics solution, and unlike other products, is based on automated capture and inferencing of work trends rather than any external or subjective people data.”

As per an official statement, Sapience Analytics is currently helping more than 100,000 users and over 70 enterprises across 12 countries to move the needle on employee engagement, organisational productivity, and business profitability. The company’s current client base comes from Fortune Global 200 enterprises, top 50 global IT services firms, engineering, finance, and business process outsourcing companies.

US-based ventures O-Desk and RescueTime, also offer similar products’ however, not at an enterprise scale.

Funding Overview

Prior to the current investment round from NEXT Investors, in October 2014, Sapience Analytics raised about $7 Mn (INR 45 Cr) in Series B investment round from Orios Venture Partners. This investment was expected to see the investors pick up 25-35% stake in the company, valuing the venture at about $20-28 Mn (INR 130-180 Cr).

Earlier in 2011, Sapience Analytics raised an investment of about $704K (INR 4.5 Cr) in a Series A funding round from Seed Ventures. The company also received about $328K (INR 2.1 Cr) from IAN in which Rehan Yar Khan, founder of Orios Venture Partners, had participated.

Sapience Analytics has come a long way since its launch in 2009. With the recent investment from NEXT Investors, how well will it be able to establish its brand in the US, remains to be seen.