Capillary Technologies raises $45 million Series C round from Warburg Pincus and plans to take offline business online

Capillary Technologies, a Bengaluru-based cloud software solutions company that help retailers intelligently engage with customers, today announced that it raised USD 45 million in a Series C round led by private equity firm Warburg Pincus. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners also participated in the round.

The company, which focused on offline brick and mortar retail stores, will use the funding to expand its offerings to develop an omni-channel view of their customers, both offline and online. To enable this, Capillary recently acquired MartJack, a Hyderabad-based multichannel commerce provider for an undisclosed amount.

“As both the companies have been around for the last seven or eight years, and both of us are doing well in our sectors, the thought process was to jointly build something large in this region [Asia Pacific] and that made us come together,” said Abhay Deshpande, Founder and CEO, MartJack, a platform serving over 250 companies, including Walmart, Unilever, Future Group, Lulu, Clarks, Body Shop, and Aramex.

Over the last few years, Aneesh Reddy and his co-founders, Krishna Mehra and Ajay Modani, have been planning to expand globally with a keen interest in the Asia Pacific region.

“We always wanted to expand globally and get a higher market share in markets like the US, the UK, APAC (Asia-Pacific) and build more products for omni-channel engagement and superior integration with social and mobile to deliver a better customer experience,” said Aneesh in a previous interview.

The recent funding from New York-based Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm that invests in growth stage companies, has helped the company get closer to its vision.

“This funding round validates our model and vision of enabling retailers harness the power of the cloud and to provide a deeper connect for consumers across channels. It also puts us on the path to being one of Asia’s true product bellwethers, which will establish us as a strong contender on the global map of Enterprise SaaS solutions,” said Aneesh.

Commenting on the funding round, Nitin Nayar, Managing Director, Warburg Pincus, said,

“The retail sector in Asia is undergoing a significant transformation as organized retail develops in tandem with e-commerce, and as retailers invest in tools to drive consumer loyalty and retention across online and offline channels. We believe that the company is well-positioned to further build on its strengths and successes.”

Capillary Technologies, which has raised over USD 79.1 million in five rounds, has currently tied up with over 170 major brands across 20,000 stores, and serves over 150 million consumers through its product.

Capillary Technologies, a SaaS company that was founded in 2008, was built to use mobile technology to help (brick and mortar) retailers interact with customers. Their core customer relationship management (CRM) product is called InTouch.

InTouch helps gather information from all customers using short forms and decides when the customer can be contacted and with what kind of information (such as offers, say)—all this based on the intelligent predictive analysis of the information gathered. The information itself resides on the cloud, and the interaction is built around the short messaging service (SMS).

Capillary’s Intelligent Customer Engagement™ (ICE) suite of software solutions incorporates everything that retail marketers require to engage with their customers, weaving social and mobile experiences into any e-commerce platform or point-of-sale device from legacy terminals to the latest POS devices, mobile tablets, and online shopping platforms.

According to a report from Gartner, India’s CRM market, which includes on-premise and cloud-based offerings, which was worth over USD 111 million in 2011 was projected to hit USD 179 million by 2014, while the worldwide CRM market grew from USD 20.4B in 2013 to USD 23.2B in 2014.