How Srividya Kannan’s Avaali Solutions helps organisations reduce costs and improve efficiency


Getting off a winning horse and starting afresh is never easy, but that is exactly what Srividya Kannan dared to do in 2012. At the time, the word ‘start-up’ was not as fancy as it is today, but Kannan dared to follow her dreams, and quit her job as the Director – strategic business development at SAP India, to found Avaali Solutions, which uses digital technology to help enterprises manage information processes efficiently.

The idea came from an appalling statistic she came across during her interactions with various enterprises: Close to 80% business processes are manual in nature. Various documents like invoices, HR data, marketing materials, come in bits and pieces. Such unstructured content and workflows are ridden with manual interventions, which in turn lead to a higher cycle time and bring down process agility. It also has a corresponding influence on cost. “So I thought digitisation of processes and information was a good area to invest in,” says Kannan, who holds an MBA from Sydenham College in Mumbai.

Six years later, her observation has been validated by the scale the company has achieved. Avaali today has 85 large corporate clients including Wockhardt, Vedanta Group and Tata Sky. The bootstrapped company (with about Rs 50 lakh of initial investment) reported net revenues of $1.5 million in FY18. This year, it is expecting a 2X growth in revenues. It has been profitable since inception and is well poised for a strong growth trajectory on the back of strong client base, constant innovation, and upgradation of their offerings.

But the journey has been far from easy for the Bengaluru-based startup, which provides services including Data & Document Archiving, Vendor Invoice Management, and Portal Content Management. For one, Kannan had to wait for almost 18 months before Avaali got its first client. She also had to patiently deal with the apprehension of larger enterprises for signing up with a startup. Having successfully tided over these challenges, Kannan is now looking at the next phase of growth for Avaali by developing newer solutions and services.

“We are now being recognised as the de-facto, go to, partner for large enterprises when they are looking to drive digitization of operations with emerging technologies…and (we) are going to leverage all the wins we have had to see how we can further propel and make a deeper, more meaningful impact on the lives of customer organisations,” signs off Kannan.

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