India (Chennai) and Singapore based Crayon Data has been declared winner at TieCon 2014 held at Santa Clara US, in which it competed with top 50 global technology startups, shortlisted from 2800 companies worldwide.
The start-up has been getting attention lately at other global forums as well. Crayon Data was shortlisted among top 50 global finalists at Code_n (Code of the New) Awards at Europe’s largest technology showcase Cebit 2014, held in March this year at Hannover, Germany. It was the only Asian company at the showcase. London-based data company Viewsy which offers retailers, a detailed understanding of their customers’s behavior won the award and walked away with a prize money of EUR 30,000. Other finalists at the event which saw participation of 450 applicants from 60 countries, were AutoGrid Systems from California, Sablono in Germany and Munich- based Cosinuss.
Crayon Data was founded in 2012 by Suresh Shankar and Srikant Sastri and has received funding upto 27 crore from Singapore-based venture-firm Jungle Ventures, Meng Wong, co-founder of Singapore-based Joyful Frog Digital Incubator and William Bissell, Managing Director of FabIndia.
The SimplerChoices platform developed by the startup allows companies to connect with all their internal data on customers with external data such as that on social media to create a taste graph for customers which can used by companies to deliver personalized products for the customer. The company is targeting banks, hotels and telecom companies to drive sales from both new and existing customers. However the start-up has not disclosed the name of any client yet.
Big Data is seeing high growth in terms of number of startups launching solutions for the Indian market. However the next wave in big data startups like Crayon are focussed more on empowering customers to take strategic decisions with the data mined rather than just analytics and insights or customer information. More and more big data start-ups are focussed on specific industry segments. Another big data startup, Flutura raised funding late last year from Hive Technologies, the Indian arm of Silicon Valley-based venture fund, The Hive which is focussed on big data startups. Its patent-pending platform Cerebra, is targeted at specific industries such as oil and gas, heavy industries and utilities. [More]