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Sure! Our journey to entrepreneurship starts much earlier than what today has become a successful exit for our business and team. Growing up in what was a tough environment in rural India, it built character and traits which have helped myself and our co-founders lots when building and founding Greendeck (Cliff). My mother had a background in pharmaceuticals growing up, and it was through this I understood that India was one of the largest manufacturers of temporary medicines for western countries such as the US, but in India specifically the usage of temporary medicine was so much less and pricing around medicines in India was highly fragmented. Our journey initially started when we were at university. When I was in my third year, I began discussing this further with healthcare professionals, and was extremely perplexed by the idea that there could be huge disparity in pricing for medicines that had the exact same substance and effect on one's health.
This led to founding our first company as a founding team called TrueMD. Fascinated by the lack of clarity around pricing for products in healthcare across India, we set out to what was a google search like online pharmacy where there was clear price comparison on products. Looking to bring visibility to consumers around pricing for products. This is where our team had our first flavour for demystifying pricing around pharmaceutical products. All the lessons learnt through collecting data was the perfect insight that led to us understanding more about the problems around structuring data and solving a real issue for consumers. However, TrueMD was not a business idea we had strategically planned. Although we were approached by many VCs in India, it was a passion project for us which we were happy to continuously learn the problems in creating a price comparison site / search engine for pharmaceuticals products. TrueMD exposed all of its data through APIs. So we actually made it possible for more data professionals to use and leverage this data that we had collected which was awesome.
TrueMD was ultimately acquired and was the perfect experience for us as a team to tackle a problem in the space around pricing analytics. Greendeck was born largely out of this experience. We took a look at trends in the sector and realised that businesses were highly unaware of pricing of competitors and were not data driven in their pricing of products. We ultimately joined techstars in Berlin to formally set up Greendeck, a pricing optimisation and analytics platform for enterprise retailers. Post techstars we met Reece at Concept, who subsequently invested and led our pre-seed round and has been an influential figure in supporting our company in our many ups and downs, and ultimately pushing and helping us in getting our business acquired by Gmthub.
Our experience with TrueMD and time at university gave us a sneak peak into what it was like to be building something that businesses and developers valued. We had over 1500 companies powering their databases with our data and managed to get 800 developers using our APIs. However, with TrueMD, we had no real desire to build and start a business. My journey post university took me to Credit Suisse in the equities derivatives desk. My experience within finance was BS. It helped me realise that if we put our brains together to build something that people will want, it could be successful and that the idea of working in finance was more of a herd route that most students around me took during university.
Both those experiences helped me a lot in realising that I was keen to build something, particularly with my co-founders.
Greendeck was set up in 2017/18 and we embarked on the journey to solve this problem for enterprise retailers. With much success, we grew our team to 30 people and had marquee clients such as Net-A-Porter paying for our software. Whilst this business was steadily growing. We realised a more complex issue in how databases and dashboards were constructed.
We had always been curious about solving problems, and been learning from our product and how our customers interacted with their systems. We saw that there was something systematically wrong with how companies identified issues within their business using historical data. We quickly noticed that nothing was ever auctioned in real time through data. This meant that companies would typically wait for their internal reviews through dashboards and would action changes based on historic 3 months old data. We then asked ourselves… What if a company relied less on its dashboards and had a tool that would monitor data in real time and create actionable insights without the need to review dashboards.
This led to us creating Cliff.ai, a product that tracks unexpected changes instantly without creating dashboards or complex data pipelines. Allowing businesses to truly stay in control.
Once Cliff had grown to substantial clients and the product was seeing demand from a number of types of clients. We were introduced to our acquirer via one of our early backers Techstars, the global accelerator that had also backed Gtmhub. It was through this connection that one of our advisors had connected the two companies and we were made aware there was interest in our business.
I had a lot to weigh up in my head, but when seeing how aligned the buyer was with our goals as well as thinking of how far we have come as a company, it was the right decision.
When a company goes through an acquisition, there are various moving parts and having an investor on your cap table that is on your side, quick to respond and can make a meaningful impact on enabling the acquisition to be completed was key. Concept was all of this and more. Their experience in having sold previous businesses proved extremely valuable and their ability to bring all the necessary parties to an agreement and on the same page was vital. More importantly they backed through every high and low we faced. They simply the best investor we had on the cap table.
We will be 100% knocking on Concepts doors again soon when our next idea comes around!
I’m excited to be partnering with Gtmhub on this next chapter of our journey and build out this function within the business!
