Capillary's Aneesh Reddy on balancing growth and profitability

Twelve-year-old Capillary Technologies raised too much, too soon. And despite success in India and Southeast Asia, it had to shut down its US operations for want of product-market fit. Founder and CEO Aneesh Reddy tells us how the company learnt to balance growth with profitability

‘Land and expand’ was Capillary’s early strategy; offer trials for a small number of stores in a chain and go from there

It raised more than 2X of what it aimed for Series A, more money than it knew what to do with

Its runway in the US shortened to 40-45 days; it couldn’t afford to keep burning money

Capillary is now prioritising its target of ~20% profitability and a path to $100 million in ARR in three to four years

High school science taught us about “capillary action”. It is the ability of a liquid to flow in narrow spaces without the assistance of, or even in opposition to, external forces like gravity. True to its name, Bangalore-based customer relationship management (CRM) software startup Capillary Technologies Capillary Technologies The Ken Every move you make, Indian offline retailers will be watching you Read more has emerged as a formidable but largely unheralded SaaS startup.

Capillary offers an omnichannel CRM and e-commerce platform to retail chains, enabling them to track, engage, and reward customers.

AUTHOR

Sumanth Raghavendra

Sumanth is a serial entrepreneur with more than eighteen years experience in running startups. He is currently the founder of Deck App Technologies, a Bangalore-based startup attempting to re-imagine productivity software for the Post-PC era. Sumanth’s columns appear regularly in leading publications. He holds MBA degrees from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, USA.

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