Indian IoT startup Zenatix raises $1.2M in pre-series A round led by pi Ventures

Zenatix, a data-driven energy efficiency company has raised $1.2 million (INR 80 million) in a pre-series A round of funding led by pi Ventures. The company’s existing investor Blume Ventures also participated in the round. The company will use these funds for the expansion of its operations and hiring across functions such as technology, product, operations and sales. Co-founded by Rahul Bhalla, Vishal Bansal and Amarjeet Singh, Zenatix uses advanced machine learning based models and delivers 10-30 percent energy efficiency to large commercial consumers of electricity. Speaking on the funding, Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures, said that they are very excited to partner with a talented team like Zenatix. Their integrated approach of building connected hardware, with sophisticated machine learning algorithm to work on resulting dark data generated is what will set them apart.

“India cost of electricity is same as in US, despite the purchasing power parity. Thus it’s a big space with plenty of innovation and upside possibility, given the kind of data, Zenatix is starting to lay its hands on. Current use case of Wattman is a great one, which allows them to sustainably get good quality data sets, while building deep customer value. As they amass more richer data sets, we should be able to tap into predictive insights for equipment and energy usage for their customers,” he added.

The company aims to address the energy efficiency problem across a range of customers and eventually help grids turn smarter. According to Zenatix, their recent product, WattMan addresses these problems for large retail chains and banking/financial set ups.

Zenatix’s WattMan

WattMan was launched in 2016 an is built on IoT stack. The company claims that it solves energy efficiency problems in an automated manner through its cloud based intelligent controls driven by advanced machine learning algorithms. It ensures right quality of service with consistent temperature maintenance in real-time, normalizing the energy consumption across outlets, and generating email/SMS alerts in real time regarding anomaly. The company also claims that WattMan has signed up by 20 customers since its launch and will continue adding more with additional focus on scaling up with the existing customers.

“We have a subscription based engagement model – the customer doesn’t have to pay anything upfront. It is a fixed annual fee whereby the energy efficiency benefit itself outweighs the fee,” said Rahul Bhalla, Co-founder and CEO, Zenatix Solutions.

“Additionally, there are multiple other benefits such as improved consumer experience and ability to automatically audit the usage of electricity. Typically, the customers become cash flow positive from 1st quarter itself,” he added. Previously, Zenatix raised money from angel funding led by Rahul Khanna, Trifecta Capital, Rajan Anandan, Google and Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Co-Founders, Snapdeal. Currently, the company is focusing on Indian market and plans to expand its operations internationally over next 6-12 months. It also aims to achieve an ARR of $2 million by middle of 2018.