Category Archives: Products

Introducing Jaunt – “Document technology meets AI”

Career update: I’m headed back to the startup world!

Introducing Jaunt – the new, AI powered way to share documents, slides and pdfs on the web.

TechCrunch wrote about it! Check out the post.

We’re going back to a space that has been left behind by others – formats like videos, photos, podcasts are cranking down furiously on innovation, but documents seem stuck in the past! We think this opportunity fits our skills, interests and temperament… we’re venturing out to take another stab at it!

Why now?

Because AI has brought “text” as a format back in action! We are witnessing AI kinda rewrite the entire web landscape, and textual content is the foundational block of this rewrite! So much of human expertise, ideas and knowledge is stashed away in pdfs, documents and slides lying around on peoples computers and mobiles.

We built SlideShare and it was successful in capturing the zeitgeist of its times! But unfortunately it never kinda reached its true potential – #bigtech acquisitions don’t always pan out the way the founders visualized the opportunity (that’s another story to tell sometime!)

But for the founding team – we still are believers in the idea (think “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”). And the idea itself has morphed and grown in its scope – sharing of documents in a AI first, mobile centric world!

Check out this blogpost… captures some of our thoughts around this topic!

Signup for Jaunt

And I need all your blessings….. starting up again at this career stage (as I’m discovering!) is a different cup of tea ?

The Tracxn IPO is a playbook for a true global tech play from India!

Tracxn went public today… congrats to the founders, employees & investors!

It’s a small personal milestone also. First angel –>IPO for me (I angel invested in Tracxn in 2015-16)…. & chose not to sell in the pre-IPO window:) Besides, I’m a regular user of the platform & can vouch for its utility!

But what really makes Tracxn stand out? – It’s a true/rare global tech play from India – IPOed in India, HQ/OPs in India, but main market is US & Europe!

Most folks in the tech ecosystem know Tracxn, but to newcomers – Tracxn is building a “Bloomberg Terminal for Private Markets”. Public markets have all their data, analyses, trends, and reports out in the open, but that’s not the case with private markets (VC/PE/Angel). This report does a good job of explaining the position.

You can’t publicly find hard numbers or verifiable figures to base your decisions on… everyone is trying to guess and make judgments in the absence of data. That’s where companies like Tracxn come in – they collate data from a bunch of diff sources & create a dashboard that they sell.

The Tracxn IPO is significant for the Indian tech ecosystem –

1) Headquartered in India, but 70% of revenues from US & Europe – true global play!
2) It’s a software driven business (think MARGINAL COST = ZERO), hence lightweight & scalable without huge investments
3) Raised VC $$, but not crazy levels (think #Realistic #Valuation)
4) $8-10MN runrate & profitable (or knocking on those doors)
5) First-mover advantage (think #DataIsTheNewOil)

As @MohapatraHemant (from LightSpeed Ventures) points out in his tweet, this isn’t a case where a big chunk of the value discovery has already happened in the private markets (by VCs). It’s a relatively early IPO, where the company will grow & reward investors in the public space.

Indian stock markets have recently witnessed a string of grossly overvalued tech/ecommerce IPOs that make them question the very rationale of the Silicon Valley originated VC playbook/model. IPOs like Tracxn can help soothe such misgivings & help folks internalize how it really works!


Originally posted on Twitter https://twitter.com/amitranjan/status/1582996280443170816