Whatfix is digitally transforming enterprises with its best in class Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) solutions
Khadim Batti, the CEO & Co-founder of Whatfix envisioned the company with the mission to create a world where people and organizations are empowered to freely use and experience the benefits of technology, regardless of their prior experience.
- What has been Khadim’s vision behind starting Whatfix and how has his journey been as an entrepreneur?
Prior to starting our own venture, Vara Kumar (currently the CPTO at Whatfix) and I had worked together for almost 9 years at Huawei. We shared the common vision of building a global product company from India with innovation at its heart. Both of us had vast experience in the software industry before taking up entrepreneurship. We also made a strong team, so we started up in 2010 with a marketing DIY product called SearchEnabler for SMBs. Our product helped businesses to implement recommendations for enhancing their organic search visibility. While this on-demand SaaS tool received good traction and we had about 100 customers within a year, we faced a newer challenge with the product not being adopted effectively as most customers wanted extensive support and hand-holding. Building smart flows to solve this user pain point led to the inception of Whatfix in 2013. We pivoted in 2014 with a vision that “anyone, anywhere can have successful experiences with technology they use every day” and we have never looked back since.
2. How does Whatfix help knowledge workers become more efficient in their day-to-day jobs?
In today’s hybrid workplace led by digital transformation, Whatfix’s unique Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) helps product owners, business owners, enterprises, employees, or any software user alike. Our DAP platform integrates seamlessly with applications to empower users, providing in-context information and guidance to immediately increase individual capability and collectively amplify productivity. It helps users in real time guiding and nudging them through their respective workflows. Our product analytics helps enterprises and product owners discover key user insights to build a data-driven digital adoption strategy.We enable the digital adoption process, while still allowing their customers to learn and adapt to digital transformation at their own pace.
3. How does Whatfix’s DAP help enterprises successfully drive digital adoption and provide a superior user experience?
Whatfix’s DAP (Digital Adoption Platform) helps enterprises strike the perfect balance between users and their new software using seamless walkthroughs and widgets. It ensures that enterprises achieve higher ROI on their software through context-sensitive onboarding and personalized training. Our platform extends help across every stage of application usage and drives user adoption, without shooting-up support costs. Regardless of the users’ geographical location, Whatfix uniquely provides relevant, 24/7 help, adapted from all sources across enterprises. The digital adoption platform helps users continually improve their user adoption.
Whatfix drives user adoption across an enterprise’s cloud applications with personalized guidance and embedded learn-by-doing techniques. At times, user onboarding can be tedious. We make it engaging by helping a user easily design interactive product tours, onboarding task lists, and providing contextual guidance. Whatfix ensures that users develop a high level of application proficiency within a short span of time. Our user-level segmentation helps enterprises create personalized user onboarding experiences which lead to a higher level of engagement.
4. What are Whatfix’s growth strategies for 2022 and beyond?
Whatfix is set to be on a strong growth trajectory and has become a critical part of not only India but the global startup ecosystem. Since the Series C in 2020, our valuation has increased 3x times and we are using the funds to continue growing our global footprint in the US market while also accelerating global expansion into the Asia Pacific and Europe markets. We saw 76% YoY revenue growth and 250% increase in revenue from existing business. Our new business revenue increased by 85% in 2021 including the addition of several new enterprise customers who have deployed Whatfix both internally for employees and externally for customers. These include customers such as Microsoft, Westland Insurance Group, Allstate Insurance Group, Datacom Group, The Netherlands Red Cross, Coca-Cola Beverages Africa, Geodis, Telenor, Ayr Farmers Mutual Insurance Company, Aggreko, and many others.
We are constantly innovating and catapulted our efforts by two recent acquisitions. The most recent one and our biggest M&A deal as yet being Leap.is – a mobile-first onboarding and assistance platform that brings the value of digital adoption platforms to mobile applications. And the second one was acquired last year – Nittio Learn – to help us advance our application training capability by making learning more personalized, adaptive, and rich.
To support its continued business growth, we increased our headcount by 40% in 2021 in sales and technology departments, including key leadership hires. We have opened two new offices in India in Bangalore and Gurgaon respectively. Our current global full-time employees sums up to around 840. As remote or hybrid work becomes the norm, our game-changing Digital Adoption Platform has enabled many enterprises to drive speed and efficiency in their adoption of new technology offerings. As an Indian SaaS startup in the Digital Adoption Platform space, we are excited to continue our leadership in this landscape.
5. How does the recent Leap. is acquisition prove to be a testament to Whatfix’s expansion story?
We recently acquired Leap.is (previously Jiny.io), a mobile-first onboarding and assistance platform that helps us add the value of digital adoption platforms to mobile applications. This is Whatfix’s first mobile DAP product-focused acquisition and its largest M&A deal so far. The acquisition will augment Leap’s platform by extending Whatfix’s mobile capabilities. Leap’s toolset will seamlessly integrate with our existing applications by adding guidance to mobile apps in order to improve activations and adoption, reduce time-to-ship for onboarding experiences, and increase the customization of the overall user experience. This acquisition add to an extremely successful year for us. The acquisition may be the start of our venture into consumer tech, but right now, we are all set to expand our enterprise reach and value generation.
