AI Founders Podcast

Hi everyone to another episode of the SaaS Universe Podcast today. Joseph Abraham, founder and CEO of Sassandra, Sri and Uber Saga has a one on one with Prabhu Ramachandran, CEO and founder of. Cilio Faciliy is an AI driven property operations platform that helps real estate owners and operators aggregate hard to access building data, optimize performance and control portfolio. Operations all from one place or as problem, simply puts it. Bringing in SaaS and cloud, mobility driven tech solutions for the real estate sector. Listen on as Joseph explores how Prabhu, along with Faciliy, is paving the way for SaaS and fairly uncharted territory, enjoy.

Hi Prabhu, thank you so much for joining us on the SaaS. Found this podcast and we're so glad that you were able to take the time today and join.

Hi Joseph, thanks for inviting me for the glad to be part of it.

Awesome, so very interested to hear the story of, you know Cecilio and and I hope I'm pronouncing it right and please feel free to you know. Correct me so in terms of you know this is an industry which you know is is is not been looked into for quite some time, right? And we'll. Come to that as to how it all started. But before that, if you can quickly give a, you know a small brief introduction about you. You know about how you started, and I did hear your story about Zoho, but. Like how did the shift happen from Zoho to being? An entrepreneur right so? Let's delve a little bit on that.

Yeah, you're right Joseph, it is cesilio you spelled it out correctly. About me. My name is Prabhu Ramachandran. I am born and brought up in Chennai.

Great happy.

Day after finishing my College in 2000, I joined Zoho, my first job and I spent around 17 years at Zoho where I was for a very long period of I was heading there. Telecom and IoT Software Division zone is known for its zone.

All right?

Com suite of products. But the. Company company itself started with their telecom products and I joined that team and then I became a product manager and director and head of the Division and the Cecilio Story originated. I would say from there in terms of I was building enterprise. SAS for global telecom space and at a high level. The problem we are solving is how do we help telecom companies that are infra heavy operation heavy with modern technology to bring in remote monitoring, predictive maintenance? To a help their help reduce them their operational expense and to improve their customer experience. How can they provide consistent quality of telecom service to their customers? With that background, when I decided to start facility we looked at. Real estate is one space which is much more important than telecom, much more global, much more larger than telecom market. But in terms of technology and sophistication. And operational efficiencies. It's like I would say it's 2530 years behind telecom, so that is the opportunity that we spotted. How can we bring SaaS cloud, mobility driven tech solutions to bring in operational efficiency for?

OK.

Real estate so that. The founding idea of starting facility.

Great, so is specially your only for you know corporate so I'm just gonna go one step back. So I mean who is this product for and what does this product do? So let's let's explore that.

Yeah yeah, so we are into operations and maintenance of real estate. This is like real estate are all properties. You're talking about office building homes, apartments, hotels, resorts, hospitals and all of that and the initial phase of the property is a construction. There is lot of technology that comes during the construction phase. Then once the property get constructed it is going to be used for decades and maybe like beyond 100 years. That is the day to day operations of the properties. So we come post construction where we are bringing in technology that helps building owners building operators to run their day-to-day operations and maintenance of real estate. So what operations and maintenance? Approaches you have to provide simple things right from electricity, water, air conditioning. Security cleaning all of that to the properties. So that is the operations and maintenance part and then then the next level is how do you reduce energy consumption? How do you reduce water consumption? How do you make sure that the properties? Clean their quality, the pollution, air quality. Controlled so that is that is. What is the operations and maintenance. So where we within operations and maintenance we are playing in the commercial real estate sector. The other 2 sectors are broadly the residential, which is homes, villas, multifamily apartments. We are not yet there. And then you have large infra and industrials like industrials. Other other like large infra dams, and that we are not yet there. We are into commercial real estate which includes properties like office buildings, large chain of. Hotels, hospitals, airports, data centers education institution. These are our target customers who our users of our solutions. Ours is a multi product solution. We cover right from your workforce, management, energy management, managing equipments, assets like elevator, air conditioning system, fire safety systems, water pumping. Systems and finally the occupant experience management. If you're an occupant in an office building or an occupant in a hotel or an occupant in a. Hospitals. How do we provide better experience in terms of air quality, better thermal comfort, and all of that? So we cover all these capabilities within operations and maintenance so our users are right from executor level. Who could be like head of properties, head of operations. To head of sustainability. And then you go one one level below to building managers, facilities, managers, technicians like air conditioning technicians, elevator techniques, cleaning supervisors and then all the way up to 3rd party vendors vendors. To come and do maintenance services for properties like pesticide and cleaning and any special equipment maintenance and all of that. 2 We also have occupants or users. If you could be a office occupant where we provide apps for raising. Service equals tracking it and.

Right?

So a broad spectrum of users.

Wow, I mean yeah that that's that's a lot like you know. So you you take care right? From setup to sustenance, right? So like you know so. So it's pretty interesting to know that so. So to build this software as a as a product road map, right that road taking you quite a bit of time because I can just imagine like the number of features that it has and and the modules that you have and the microwaves that you have built, right? So from an engineering and product point of view, how did you actually go and scope your software right? So was this. More in terms of you're doing a lot of user interviews or was it intuitive because you being ahead of the curve? How did that whole process go about?

Yeah yeah. The first is. We identified that this is a very important problem to solve because a real estate is global and because of urbanization it is becoming more and more important because of expanding cities and all of that. It's a global problem and the pain was increasing as the market was expanding, so we that's where we identify the problem. Plus we are able to relate it to mainly because. Our like experience with telecoms, it is a very similar problem we have solved it for more than a decade. Working built products and sold globally for a similar problem in other sector. So we are able to really relate us into the whole thing about how do you use. Data for remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, operational efficiency, workforce efficiencies. So those insights were there, so that was the sort of the equity we acquired because of our 17 years of. It's building out enterprise. As for global market.

Yep, Yep.

Yeah, so so once we drill down upon real estate then we looked at like like as I explained, commercial real estate is lot more ready for technological disruption compared to other spaces because the problem here is more aggravated. The building owners have Slas. They have adhered to their tenants either at the hospital or a hotel or office compared to say residential where it's all like individuals. The ownership is even though it could be a multi Storey property, the ownership is more individualized so we picked commercial real estate as a sector. And within that we identified because it's a new category of solutions. Customers are not used to those kind of technology. So we identified what are within commercial waste. What are the specific verticals that are having this pain? More aggravated? That is where the whole office we started with. Office and then went to hospitals, retail and higher education because back in like. After 2010, when the whole core ING Wave started that came and set the reset, the expectation of office itself.

So true.

Yeah, before that office was like one place for employees to come and work. Then office became an experience. It became a way to improve productivity to. Attract better talent so all the regular corporates also started giving more importance for office itself. So there was an appetite there on. How do you bring tech? For better experience for occupants so. So that's where we picked broadly real estate within that commercial. Within that there were few sweet spots that were ready to take the disruption which is emerging category of product.

Got it so I'm tempted to ask this question so you you have such a big space. So did you actually start with a POC and go to the market and then get some you know buy INS and then build the whole thing? Or was it more from from the point of view of building the whole thing and going? Because I want to test the thesis of like should we do an MVP first? Should we do an MVP later?

Yeah, yeah.

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So did you actually start with the POC and go to the market and then get some, you know, buy insurance and then build the whole thing? Or was it more from from the point of view of building the whole thing and going? Because I want to? Test the thesis. Of like, should we do an MVP first? Should we do an MVP later?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, see broadly what we were clear from early days is we have to build for enterprise customer. Larger customers, the larger the customer, the more aggravated the problem was. If I'm a small real estate owner having like 23 office buildings problem, they're able to still manage with WhatsApp, or they'll have.

Right?

They themselves will be involved in the business all of that to go and sell new category solution for them is going to be very, very difficult. Whereas if you're a large customer having like 20 30,000,000 square feet, so when we say 1,000,000 square feet means we are talking about typically. 2 to 3 these office building towers that we see in IT parks. Each of these could be anywhere between 300 to 500,000 square feet. So somebody owning 10,000,000 square feet means they're going to have anywhere between 20 to 30 large 10 plus Florida. Office buildings and and that is typically distributed across multiple cities, and they're going to manage that with different, like so many different. Teams part of them are their own teams. Part of them are outsourced to companies like JLC. CBR will have different set of some buildings, will have air conditioning system from voltas.

Right?

Some buildings will have air condition systems from diking. Elevator systems are different in different building and ages of these buildings are different, so it becomes very. More complex so. We are very clear we have to go to large customers so only then you can build this category. That was one fundamental principle that decided like how do we build the product. For whom do we build the product and the next thing that we were very clear is we didn't want to do a point solution. First, build a point solution. Sell it, make some revenue and then market and then so from day one.

Right?

We were very clear. We have to build it as a proper platform and multiple as applications on top of it because we are very confident on the opportunity. It's a very large market and the pain was growing up. If you build the right product, we are confident that we can go and build a large. Category leading company. So these are the 2 things one is go for enterprise customers and then build a platform plus multiple applications and then go to customers instead of building one piece of it and then testing out with small. Customers and go. So having said that, we took us like 2 and a half years to build the product. Make it really yeah, make it ready to be deployed and go to market.

I can imagine.

So which means like we raise early in our days, and then we use money to build the platform and then go to.

Right?

Customers of course, while we were doing it we we were working with some really large customers as pilot customers. Even our earliest customers, some of them we cannot name, but we some of our early pilots with whom we started building the product as like among like this customer is among top 3 airline companies in the world and we work with some of our early pilots were with a. A customer who had like Top 3 tallest building in the world and we did early pilot with a smart city in Dubai.

Right?

We want to really try the product with right set of customers who are large enterprises with distributed property.

Got it awesome.

So to answer your question short, hey, we we wanted to build a broader suite of like SaaS platform and application model. We built it, but we parted with some of the early adopters early in the day to test it out and then and then. After 2 and a half years we went to. Market for proper selling.

Got it so. Brilliant vision, you know, amazing idea. How did you actually translate this idea? You know and invite your Co founders and a team because I I definitely see that you understand the vision really well, right? So you're the architect. But then disseminating this to everybody becomes very challenging. So how did you actually go about doing that? Because this is a very large thing there, and this is not a very simple straightforward category with an already proven model. That's why I'm intrigued by us. You know, with this, with this whole line of.

Yeah, so in the in the sense. Yes, it's a very hard problem and I would say we were lucky on that in the sense that because we like we are we are 4 Co founders. We all joined Zoho together and 3 of them were with zoo for 17 years until we started Physio and. One of the cofounders, my college mate so college mate friends and couple of us were working in same team all along. We had a strong bonding trust that comes that's one advantage when you work with a a single company for a very long period of time.

Right?

So we got the right co-founder and luckily among the Co founders we had like complementing skills among us. One of the Co founder. Yogi is technologies he's our CTO. And the other co-founder Raj has been into more into customer facing roles all through his career product pre sales. So he's our chief product officer. Other co-founder spent 56 years with Zoho. Then he spent a lot of time with services companies like Wipro, Aricent, so he brings in. Lot of operations customer facing operations experience and on top of that large portion of our early team members. Again we had a very rich. Highly experienced SAS folks come and join us again. Most of them were my ex colleague from Zoho. My team members friends, so we are able to the initial team building happened very naturally quick, so in that sense, like we were really lucky.

So how big is your team today? Prabhu, yeah.

We are like 150 plus globally, yeah?

And what do you look for in a team member right now? I know I understand the competencies and skills, but I'm talking more on a culture code point of view. So when you hire somebody, what do you look for?

So if you look at what we are doing right a it is an enterprise vertical SaaS for global markets. What kind of team members come and gel well into the team is people who are really looking to build a strong carrier. On SAS they could. They could be from non SaaS, but somebody who's excited about SaaS excited about building the company along because we are still at a stage where we are in the process of building company. There is a lot we have very less playbook available to repeat. In terms of.

Right?

Right, right?

Product building sales marketing everything is like we are. We have to build this playbook because vertical SaaS enterprise SaaS even globally. It is emerging and building out of India and selling globally. There is really no very less playbook available. So people who are. Driven to build the company along as a team and people who can come figure out, learn so those are the set of employee team members we have been able to attract and build the.

Got it, got it awesome so great Vision team being built. Let's talk a little bit about your early customers, right? So I mean, you did mention that you had a few of them join as a pilot, but we're not going to the names and all of that. But how did you actually? And says versus because you were. Already, you know, coming from a background of managing such portfolios earlier that gave you the confidence and how did that happen? How did you get your first 10 customers, so to speak?

Yeah yeah, the initial set of. Customers where like pilots paid pilots. It started with usually paid pilots and then they became customers. The initial set came from the founder driven sales because it's a new category and we are a very small company. We are going after large customers who are used to buying software from established brands.

Right?

With the established process for procurement and they were always looking for safety, they don't want their jobs to be in trouble. Choosing a new vendor. So with that all what worked is. Founder driven sales. How do we hustle? Go and find out. Talk to customers and there is always a small portion of customers even though they are enterprises who are like early adopters, they are looking for disruptive technology, so we have to read through and find out who. Those early adopters and make them bet on us so the initial set of customers usually came through founder driven sales and they didn't come through any connects or previous contacts because most of us like I was coming from telecom, we didn't have that much of exposure. To real estate itself. So. So the first set of customers came from like founders reaching out. We started with Middle East, so we started. We picked Dubai as we picked Dubai as the anchor city for initial set of customers because.

Oh wow.

OK. It's somewhere between the advanced world and the yeah in terms of appetite for new technologies and openness to try out new.

So true. And there's a lot of real estate there. There's only real estate there.

Right, and the city is built on real estate plus between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Very concentrated customer base and from one end to the other end. You can travel in 90 minutes and visa was easy from Chennai. We while we have to build the product we should also be closer to right set of customers. Yeah we picked there and then I started traveling.

So true.

A lot. To Dubai we would go meet customers, keep on meeting them, make them believe. So what happened is once we have the initial set of customers and they were all like mostly larger brands then it made it easy for us to go and put up sales teams do marketing.

So true.

And all of them.

Great, now this is great. Let's talk a little bit about your funding, right? So you said you initially picked funding. You know the believers in what you're doing, and with that you build a product. So can you just go? Back to how do you? Rally believers right? So is this? Is this based on friendship? Is this based on? You know the vision? What is the primary factor according to you?

Yeah, so we raised our seed fund million plus dollars from Accel Partners Axel in India on Day Zero we raise fund and then started the. Happening and Axel happened. The initial connect came through a warm connect, a fellow startup founder introduced Excel and the initial funding happened pretty quickly where our clarity on like what to do which market. And how to build a product? How long it would take to go to market that helped where being part of building like partnering with large companies, particularly in. SAS, they're able. To see through that they were, they were very very they got. Convinced pretty quickly on the opportunity and the team, and then so we raised our seed. Our next funding was we brought in. We partnered with Tiger Global was after like 15 months of starting the company. We were still building the product pre revenue that we raised our CSA. CDC was 6.5 million Tiger led the round and axle was part of it, and our Series B. We raised early this year in January. We raised $35,000,000 from, yeah, the the lead investor was dragoneer and we also. With Brookfield, who could be among like Top 35 largest real estate company in the world, they became a customer first and then they invested in US.

Awesome, awesome. That's really nice to know. Great so coming to this whole question as a founder, what's your most important metric for you on an everyday basis?

Yeah, I would say the metric is again. It all depends on the. Stage of the company. Yes, earlier our metrics were like we were basically how many customers, how many prospects we are talking to. How many of them are ably able to relate to the problem, so those were the. Benefits we are measuring. To when we are in the idea building early building stage. Now that we are in the growth stage currently, my favorite metrics is because we are building a new category, particularly in enterprise, and the SAS itself is new there. Adoption, like how much of customers are? How soon they are adopting the solution. They are using the solution and. It is becoming a habit. It is becoming a very critical part of this or their day-to-day life, right? Because our solutions bring lot of changes to the custom. All positive changes like some of the job they're doing manually or getting automated and their experience becomes better their cost. And so, so this this is like a habit changing product at a enterprise scale and our users also right from field service like technicians, electricians, air conditioning technicians to building level managers to head of sustainability. Head of property. All these users are using day in and day out so adoption. How fast were time to value time go like? These are the metrics. Currently we are very particular about. And then in terms of org level feedback like how basically like what is the value customers are able to see from the product.

Got it so I've got some quick rapid fire questions for you just to know Prabhu a little bit. Now for our audience.

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So I've got some quick rapid fire questions for you just to know Prabhu a little bit. Now for our audience so question number one is is there a favorite movie or book that you can talk about it? Not, not necessarily be.

OK.

Inspirational but something that caught your attention.

I'm not that much of a book person. I read a lot of blogs and things like that, yeah?

But movie any movie that that you love?

Movie like I watch movie almost every week so I like to go to theatre and watch. Got it. So some movie side. There is no particular.

There's no particular OK. Great, the second question is, is there? Is there a CEO? Or a founder that you're following and. You feel that they really have, like they're worth following.

Yes, yes one founder I am I follow plus I am able to relate to is Jyoti Bansal. He's co-founder like he co-founded an app Dynamics, a company named App Dynamics. And now he runs a couple of other companies in the developer space and also runs the unusual. Venture fund where it's enterprise problem. New category. They really created the category very fast and grew very fast. We take a lot of inspiration from how they build the particularly on the sales. Customer facing sales, marketing args and then our local example is our sassy rogish

Yeah, absolutely great quick. Question next question is what's your favorite SAS app?

We use a lot of OK now that we are in a growth phase. I'm specifically involved in the sales part of the company. So CRM is where I'm spending a lot of time.

Right?

So we are currently using fresh sales, the works.

Wow, nice, so that becomes your favorite and how many hours of sleep do you catch every night, Prabhu?

The pretty balanced like. Like 67 hours? Not that yeah.

67 hours OK, so my last question to you is how has pandemic changed your life?

Net net pandemic. Who had a positive? Thing on the company on facility like our startup because we are building this new category right and building the new category is always very tough, particularly in enterprise and traditional verticals. After pandemic the whole day to day operations of properties have become super. OK. Or air quality? How do you bring back people to buildings? Give them confidence. How do you refill office properties? Bring back tenants have become super critical, so our customers are all now looking at technology that will help them to reduce their operational costs, manage buildings. Remotely, so all of those have become like very, very important. In that sense, pandemic has been net net. We had a lot of tough journey, particularly in the first year of pandemic, but overall it has been had a positive impact. On the business.

Awesome Prabhu, so I'm done with my, you know, rapid fire. I have one last question that I asked every guest on the show which is what's something that you wish you knew when you were 20 years old.

I think I should have started the whole startup much much earlier.

OK. Got it. But now that you're doing it, it's it's amazing to see what you're doing, so it's it's really super fun to to watch, you know, from the. Lines, so it's really nice Prabhu catching up with you. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing. You know the story of Cecilio and we wish you know a lot more success curves and you know wish you wish that your tribe grows. You know, from strength to strength.

Yeah yeah thanks Joseph for giving this opportunity and thank you. You and your team wish you good luck.

Thank you so much.

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