Commerce is becoming pervasive – every interaction with a consumer is an opportunity to inform, educate, and sell products. In order to become Product-Aware (as businesses today are location-aware) businesses are going to need reliable and comprehensive product information for making informed decisions. Product awareness is nothing but, a state where every app and website has access to comprehensive product data in real time that will help them serve their customers in a better way.
After spending two decades in the US at the Microsoft Corp headquartered at Redmond, Sanjay thought about building his own venture in India. Sanjay was at the TED conference in Oxford, England when the thought of starting a “product related data analytics company” struck him.
The idea of building algorithms to detect and analyze every piece of product information on the web to generate insights for retailers emerged. He envisioned a single platform to bring together every product in the world and thus Indix was born. The company encompasses almost everything that Sanjay is passionate about – art, design, technology, and business, social and economic activism. Indix got its final shape in 2010. Sanjay Parthasarathy along with Sridhar Venkatesh, Rajesh Muppalla and Satya Kaliki was the core team that set up Indix.
The brainchild of the former Microsoft executive Sanjay Parthasarathy Indix is “everything about products” and it is fondly called the “Google of Products.” The company has operations in Chennai, India- Seattle and San Francisco, US. The name “Indix” came up after Sanjay met some folks at Yandex and liked the sound of the x at the end of the name, hence India + x = Indix was born. Also it is close to the word “index” which was relevant to what we’re doing.
Business Description
Indix is building the world’s largest product catalog covering 1 billion consumer products to help brands compare prices and make crucial business decisions. Using sophisticated data science Indix collects documents and structures product information and delivers it through Product API and as feeds to its subscribers.
We offer Product Data Science and machine learning services to help companies bring products to market faster, improve search and discovery, refine classification, and so on. Businesses that make and sell products, or enable commerce, use the Indix platform to improve search and discovery of product information, gather, and analyze intelligence from e-commerce’s digital shelf. Indix has track of nearly 1 billion product across more than 7,000 product categories.
This infinite catalogue will help in transforming apps, websites, and online services to be product aware.
Robust technology forms the foundation of everything we do here at Indix. In order to build the world’s largest product database, we have put in place proprietary seeding, crawling, and parsing mechanisms. In the next step, products are classified, matched and category-specific attributes (size, dimension, colors, etc.) are extracted. All these processes have been built on strong foundations of Scala, Hadoop, Akka and other advanced technologies.
We recently made the powerful Product API available via Self-Serve. For the first time, developers can obtain an Indix API key through a simple online sign-up process, immediately gaining access to the world’s largest product database. As a result, developers can find products using a variety of search options; compare the assortment, availability, and promotions of products across channels; and improve the overall quality of their product information.
Funding
Indix raised a Series A of US $8.5 million from Avalon Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners, with the funds being channelized towards product development and scaling marketing and sales efforts in the U.S. In June 2015, it raised US $15 million from Nokia Growth Partners, and existing investors Avalon Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners, to expand the workforce and enhance sales and marketing efforts across geographies.
About The Team
Indix has a smart and highly motivated team that solves hard technical and business issues to make our customers more productive and happier. We are a team of explorers who work with assumptions and experiments to add value to the products we create and offer. What brings us together is that, we work to innovate not only, on our product and technology, but also in the way we work and our culture.
Challenges.
At Indix, we faced a number of the challenges that most startups face. In the beginning, it was around building the right team, talking to customers and understanding the right product to build, etc. We learned a lot during the first year that has shaped where we are today.
The Road Ahead
Just as we see that every application has become “location-aware” over the past 10 years, we will start to see every application become “product-aware”. We already see the beginning of this today with Buy Now buttons showing up everywhere. The business model of the internet is shifting from advertising to commerce and Indix is helping usher this evolution.