Whatfix- Empowers Users To Make Best Use Of Software Applications

Avantika Bhardwaj, Manisha Mishra

Nov 2, 2023 — 15 min read

Whatfix Success Story

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations.

The Software as a Service (SaaS) model continues to gain traction across all corners of the business world, and for good reason. Also known as on-demand software, hosted software or web-based software, SaaS eschews traditional software installation, maintenance and management approaches in favour of delivering cloud-based applications via the internet. With SaaS, service provider partners shoulder the burdens of security, availability and performance.

Whatfix is revolutionizing the way Application Support and Learning content is consumed by providing Contextual and Interactive Walk Throughs inside the application at the exact time a task is being performed.

Whatfix- Company Highlights

Company Name	Whatfix
Headquarters	Bengaluru
Founders	Khadim Batti & Vara Kumar
Founded	2014
Sector	SaaS
Website	whatfix.com
Registered Entity Name	Quicko Technosoft Labs Private Limited

Whatfix - About & How It Works?
Whatfix - Founders
Whatfix - How It All Started?
Whatfix - Target Market Size
Whatfix - Shareholding
Whatfix - Business Model
Whatfix - Products/ Services
Whatfix - Startup Launch
Whatfix - Customers/ Clients
Whatfix - Challenges
Whatfix - Revenue
Whatfix - Product And Services
Whatfix - Funding & Competitors
Whatfix - Acquisitions & Mergers
Whatfix - Recognitions & Achievements
Whatfix - Partnership
Whatfix - Future Plans

Whatfix - About & How It Works?

Whatfix is a SaaS-based platform which provides in-app guidance and performance support for web applications and software products. Whatfix helps companies to create interactive walkthroughs that appear within web applications. Whatfix's platform provides product adoption, user onboarding, employee training, self-service support and performance support for companies using enterprise web applications. The platform allows SaaS application users to create interactive walkthroughs, or in-app guidance flows, that can lead users through a task on the application.

Whatfix Logo

They choose this name because they’re all about problem solving and this conveyed it the most direct manner. Their mission is to empower companies to maximize business outcomes by eliminating technology complexities for their users.

Whatfix has obtained ISO 27001:2013 certification as well as being SCORM 1.2 and DITA compliant. Whatfix is available as a paid-Business version as well as a free version. Whatfix is most commonly used on platforms like Salesforce, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle Cloud, Workday, SharePoint, Apttus etc. Whatfix also has a free community version where individuals can create interactive walkthroughs on websites and applications and share them publicly. Whatfix has also obtained SOC 2 certification.

The product then pivoted to an interactive guidance platform for enterprises called Whatfix. Currently, Whatfix helps companies increase user adoption of the applications they use while also providing performance support.

Whatfix - Founders

Whatfix is founded by Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar. Previously, the two founders had worked together at Huawei, which helped them realize that they could work well as a team to start a new venture.

Khadim Batti is the CEO and co-founder of Whatfix. Prior to creating Whatfix, he was heading the Deep Packet Inspection and BI product portfolio for the Huawei Central Research Division. He has over 20 years of experience in leading technology teams and has worked at Kenexa, Applabs Technologies and CMC Limited in the past. Khadim has passionately educated and mentored aspiring entrepreneurial talent in technology for over a decade now. He acts as a mentor to 25+ entrepreneurs. Khadim holds a Master’s in Information Technology from the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bombay.

Vara Kumar is the CPTO and co-founder of Whatfix. Prior to co-founding Whatfix, Vara spent nearly 9 years at Huawei in various roles from Software Engineer to Systems Architect. He began his career working on Network Management solution for WCDMA devices here. He further continued to help architect multiple products in the Deep Packet Inspection and Business Intelligence sectors. Vara holds a Master’s in Computer Applications from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, and a Bachelor’s in Science from NRK and KSR Gupta Degree College.

Whatfix - How It All Started

The Whatfix journey began in 2013 where Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar who worked together at Huawei decided to start their marketing DIY product called SearchEnabler, targeting the SMBs.

SearchEnabler basically crawled interwebs for data points, crunched the data and showed recommendations for marketing on what could be optimized. While SearchEnabler got a good traction and the duo were able to gather about 100 customers, they faced a newer challenge - most customers on the product wanted extensive support and hand-holding. That core pain-point became the inception for Whatfix.

Once the direction changed towards Whatfix, they were very clear on what they wanted - build what was required for the market rather than validate a solution after building.

So, the first step towards growth-hacking Whatfix was the creation of its community. They cold emailed SMEs to announce the Whatfix community, which was open to all to use, integrate - the only catch - the content was public. The idea was to keep engaging the customers on the community as well as on the web for the first 30 days till the product acquired some polish before formally rolling it out. The community and the initial evangelism led to their first few paid customers.

Every software organization solves for product and feature adoption, even the largest in the world. So, they reimagined the product to the current interactive guidance platform for enterprises it is today. They now play a significant role in the digital adoption process, while still allowing their customers to learn and adapt to digital transformation at their own pace. Currently, they have focused on the Enterprise segment catering to many Fortune 500 customers globally.

Whatfix - Target Market Size

Whatfix is industry and platform agnostic. And hence, they cater to a wide variety of organizations in industries like BFSI, High Tech, Automobile, etc. In short, everyone responsible for the usage and implementation of software tools needs to examine the digital adoption space.

Currently, they are one of the leading providers of Digital Adoption for Enterprises across the globe. Most of the Enterprises have a large array of web applications. To ensure effective use of these technologies and to train their workforce to utilize them, these organizations invest millions of dollars. Whatfix as a Digital Adoption Platform helps in curbing this need for onboarding, training, and in-app support with its capabilities.

Whatfix - Shareholding

Promoters 17.60%
Softbank 14.04%
Eight Roads 12.62%
Cisco Investments 2.20%
R Prime Capital Partners 5.41%
Others 4.01%
Stellaris 12.32%
Helion 14.38%
Sequoia 14.02%
DF International Partners 3.40%

Whatfix - Business Model

They’re a leader in their own space, and although they’re a private organization, their growth has been on a strongly upwards curve. Looking back at 2019, we can conclude that the company increased their total revenue by 300%.

Whatfix - Startup Launch

The first step towards growth-hacking Whatfix was the creation of the Whatfix community. They cold emailed SMEs to announce the Whatfix community, which was open to all to use, integrate - the only catch - the content was public. The idea was to keep engaging the customers on the community as well as on the web for the first 30 days till the product acquired some polish before formally rolling it out. The community and the initial evangelism led to their first few paid customers.

Once they understood the market potential, the next part was figuring out the right price point. After talking to the valley experts, they realized that it should be on the higher side of what we were providing. Few of the initial tradeshows and events like the Salesforce mega event - Dreamforce, that they sponsored helped in validating the price point as well.

Post which, Whatfix gradually started positioning themselves to serve Enterprises and their constant need for Digital Adoption in the applications used by their employees.

Whatfix - Customers/ Clients

Gartner recognized Digital Adoption Solution as a category last year. This has been a pivotal moment for Whatfix as they are one of the pioneers in Digital Adoption as a category and this has helped in connecting better with Enterprises who are potential customers

Expanding their footprint by sponsoring and presenting at events on a global stage. And also scaling up their event footprint rapidly in their largest target market – US.

Integrated campaigns have been the crux of their growth strategy. They have a wide variety of marketing activities across the board like Events both physical and virtual, ABM, creating content relevant to each part of their funnel, etc.

One of their recent viral campaign was their 1st ever virtual-conference - The Digital Adoption Summit 2020 (held in May). They hosted 41 speakers at the event, which included industry influencers from SAP, Tesla, Lynda, HP, Infosys, and many more. They saw 3500+ registered attendees and visitors from across 142 countries across the 3 days of the event. 3/4th of the attendees was from Enterprises, fitting our ICP.

Whatfix - Challenges

They are building a new category -- Digital Adoption, and have been very successful in doing so. Many understand the problems they solve, but don’t necessarily understand that there is a solution available to them. That is the task they are currently solving.

Gartner recognizing our category - Digital Adoption Solution last year has positioned them as one of the pioneers in the space. Since then they have been recognized by Deloitte and Everest Consulting as well in industry reports regarding the category.

Whatfix - Revenue

Financials

Financial Year	Operating Revenue	Total Expenses	Profit/Loss
FY22	Rs 172 crore	Rs 440 crore	Loss of Rs 250 crore
FY23	Rs 382 crore	Rs 631 crore	Loss of Rs 328 crore

Expenses

Whatfix total expenses rises from Rs 440 crore in FY22 to Rs 631 crore in FY23.

EBITDA

The EBITDA Margin for FY22 was -124%, showing a serious financial difficulty. With a worse than ideal financial performance, the expense per rupee of operating revenue was Rs 2.56, and the return on capital employed (ROCE) was -41%. The EBITDA Margin improved to -96% and the Expense per Rs of Operating Revenue dropped to Rs 2.21 as the company moved into FY23, indicating a significant improvement. Nevertheless, in spite of these gains, the ROCE was negative at -93%, highlighting persistent financial issues for that fiscal year.

FY22 - FY23	FY22	FY23
EBITDA Margin	-124%	-96%
Expense/₹ of Op Revenue	Rs 2.56	Rs 2.21
ROCE	-41%	-93%

Whatfix - Product And Services

Buyer’s Guide to Digital Adoption Platforms

Leading research firm Everest Group announced on December 13, 2021, the release of the first-ever Buyer's Guide to Digital Adoption Platforms through Whatfix. This research looks at the most crucial features that digital adoption platforms (DAPs) offer to users and the return on investment that DAPs provide to businesses.

Whatfix AI

Whatfix is developing AI using a "human-in-the-middle" methodology, which keeps people in charge of the technology while empowering them. End users can choose to provide business/IT stakeholders more precise control over AI-powered solutions by allowing them to examine them before using them.

Product Analytics

Whatfix announced the launch of its new product line, Product Analytics, on February 9, 2023. With seamless instrumentation that guarantees no-code event monitoring and data consistency, this product line enables enterprises to track, visualize, and analyze user engagement and behavior data.

Whatfix - Funding & Competitors

Whatfix has received a funding of over $139.8 million till date. There are 18 investors in total for Whatfix, as updated till July 2021.

Funding-

Date	Stage	Amount	Investors Name
June 8, 2021	Series D	$90 Million	Softbank Vision Fund, Eight Roads Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, Dragoneer Investment Group and more
February 19, 2020	Series C	$32 Million	Sequoia Capital India, Eight Roads Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Cisco Investments
March 12, 2019	Series B	$13 Million	Eight Roads Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Cisco Investments, Stellaris Venture Partners, and Helion Ventures Partners
April 4 2017	Series A	$3.6 Million	Stellaris Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners, Powerhouse Ventures and Marquee Angels Gokul Rajaram, Girish Mathrubootham, Aneesh Reddy and Vispi Daver
April 10, 2015	Seed Round	$900K	Helion Venture Partners
October 6, 2014	Convertible Note	$300K	-
August 1, 2014	Seed Round	-	-
July 10, 2014	Pre-Series Round	$45K	-

Whatfix was valued at $600 million after the last fundraising amount that came from Softbank, Eight Roads, and others. It had reportedly quadrupled the company's valuation from its last funding round, when it was valued at $150 million, after which Whatfix decided to launch its first ESOP on July 6, 2021.

Competitors-

In their enterprise category Whatfix compete only with Walkme rest are SMB focused.

Whatfix - Acquisitions & Mergers

In October 2019, Whatfix announced the acquisition of Airim, a company that provides an AI-powered Personalization Engine for users and customers. Incorporation of Airim’s capabilities will allow for hyper-personalized in-app guidance at the user’s point of need. Airim’s offerings will allow Whatfix to analyze clickstreams and help in figuring out how long a step takes and where users get stuck or abandon the process completely. This is invaluable in further personalizing and customizing in-app guidance. This kind of information gives administrators the ability to make corrective changes to help users complete tasks in processes, even in an automated fashion.

On July 6, 2021, Whatfix has declared that the company is ready for its first employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and has offered an ESOP buyback of $4.3 million (Rs 32 crores) for its employees. Whatfix has further granted its employees to liquidate up to 35% of their vested ESOPs. A total of 175 eligible employees would be getting this privilege of liquidating their ESOPs, out of which over 80% of them have chosen not to liquidate their vested shares, who have further reinforced their trust in the future of the company. The value of shares will be available for both the current and former employees at the series D, non-discounted valuation of the company.

Whatfix acquires Nittio Learn, a learning management system to fulfill diverse and dynamic training needs, on August 10, 2021. Nittio Learn is a platform that wields additional content options, assessment capabilities, and training course allocation, all of which will add to Whatfix's application training capability, thereby making learning more personalized, adaptive, and rich and help to turn it into a comprehensive digital adoption platform for organizations. With Nittio, Whatfix could now promise a shockingly less ramp-up time for learning.

CEO and co-founder of Whatfix, Khadim Batti was delighted while citing this acquisition, and according to him, now Whatfix can offer the customers "with all the necessary tools to execute such a massive digital transformation effort." He further added, "We are continuously reimagining Digital Adoption alongside our customers as we grow and expand into new markets over the next year and beyond.”

Nittio Learn is a platform that is popularly used by the largest e-commerce and retail companies of South Asia to train their employees. Gagandeep and Aravindan, the co-founders of Nittio joined Whatfix along with their team to leverage their rich expertise in the learning domain.

Below are the companies acquired by Whatfix:

Company Name	Date	Amount
Leap	Apr 26, 2022	-
Jiny	Apr 18, 2022	-
Nittio Learn	Aug 10, 2021	-
Airim	Oct 30, 2019	-

Whatfix - Recognitions & Achievements

Whatfix

Some of their key achievements and recognition –

Recognized as a Leader by Everest Group in the inaugural Digital Adoption Solution analyst report, which has been a testament to Whatfix’s position as a leader in this erupting space.
Achieved a B2B SaaS Customer Net Promoter Score of 65, that is in the 100th Percentile of the B2B SaaS industry according to GrowthScore.
Recognized in Deloitte’s Learning in The Flow of Work Solutions research report with Full Capability Scores for Incorporating Tools of Work, Providing Actionable and Relevant Data, Automated Reinforcement, Total Workforce, and Offline Activity Tracking.
Recognized in two Gartner research reports, including “Increase Sales Productivity with Digital Adoption Solutions” and “Hype Cycle for CRM Sales Technology 2019”.
Listed in LinkedIn Top 2020 Startups India as #5.
Achieved a 100% quarterly growth on a year over year basis for the past 2 consecutive quarters.
Works with a workforce of 500 employees across 6 globally located offices.
Enjoyed a 3X increase in its valuation over the past 15 months, as reported on August 10, 2021.
Enjoyed a 3X increase in its revenue and headcount over the last 2 years.

Whatfix - Partnership

C Clears

Whatfix announced on May 8, 2021, the beginning of a strategic partnership with C-Clear Partners to support Benelux companies in fast-tracking their digital transformation projects by encouraging the use of CRM platforms like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.

Suntec Business Solution

In order to encourage rapid customer adoption of its SaaS products and provide a smooth and user-friendly onboarding process, SunTec Business Solutions announced in October 2022 a strategic partnership and integration of its products and solutions with Whatfix, the world leader in the digital adoption platforms (DAP) space.

Whatfix - Future Plans

Whatfix has a unique opportunity in that while many organizations focus on a particular region or industry, their solutions can be integrated with almost any form of application, including desktop apps. They have recently raised a Series C round, and continue to grow their teams to meet the high demand of the digital adoption space. They have also re-invested in the development and technology they provide -- continuing to innovate is critically important to them.

They have the capability to focus not just on their existing customers, but expand the scale of their offerings to provide their services to enterprise organizations. They already work with a significant portion of the Fortune 1000 and they believe it’s time for the rest of them to come aboard as well.

Whatfix - FAQ's

How Quickly Can I Get Started Using Whatfix?

You just need to install the Whatfix Editor (extension) in Chrome or Firefox and you are ready to create guides. The user experience of the editor is so simple that you can create interactive guides in a jiffy.

Will My Application User Need To Install Browser Extension?

No, your end-users don’t need to install the browser extension.

Can I Have An On-Premises Setup?

Yes, Whatfix fully support the on-premise set up. Whatfix guides can be exported and deployed on your own web server with the companies on-premises export version.

Will Whatfix Affect My Application Performance?

Whatfix will have almost no impact on performance of your application. The JavaScript size and execution time are negligible.

How Secure Is Whatfix?

Whatfix supports HTTPS protocol and all accounts/data is access controlled. In the self-hosted/on-premises option, we ensure that no web request or data flow is sent outside your servers/premises.

What Is The Pricing For WhatFix?

Whatfix pricing is completely on the basis of customer’s requirements and usage. They have tailor-made pricing models for Small and Medium-sized Businesses and Larger Enterprises. For more details on pricing, you can contact at sales@whatfix.com or call on +1-800-459-7098.

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