India AI Startup Fractal Weighs IPO as Pandemic Fuels Growth

(Bloomberg) -- India's Fractal Analytics Inc., a provider of artificial intelligence and analytics solutions to global companies, is exploring an initial public offering to fuel its growth as the pandemic helps to boost demand for its services.

Besides weighing an IPO, Fractal is assessing interest from investors valuing the company at significantly more than $1 billion, Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview via video on Tuesday. It has received $325 million in funding so far from investors including Apax Partners.

The pandemic has accelerated a push by companies to move functions to the cloud, a boon for analytics providers such as Fractal that make such processes more efficient. Fractal, whose customers include Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc and Wells Fargo & Co., is predicting revenue to increase 37% to $160 million in the fiscal year ending March 2022.

“The floodgates have opened,” Velamakanni said from Mumbai. “We have the scale to be a public company.”

India has more than a thousand software-as-a-service providers and the industry is set to increase its annual revenue to $70 billion by 2030 from about $3 billion now, according to a recent report by consultancy McKinsey & Co., trade group SaasBoomi and India's software industry body, Nasscom. The country's contenders are set to control about 6% of the global SaaS market estimated to be worth $1.3 trillion by the end of the decade, according to the report.

Fractal has its main offices in Mumbai and New York and 2,400 employees in 16 locations across the globe, including India, the U.S., U.K., Ukraine and Australia. The company plans to add 1,500 workers this year, mainly in India, Velamakanni said.

Revenue in the fiscal year after this one is set to reach $250 million, he said. Among Fractal's new initiatives is Crux Intelligence, which combines machine learning and natural language processing to allow enterprises to easily gather business intelligence from data and convert such analysis into action.

“It's like the Siri or Google Assistant for businesses,” said Kathy Leake, the head of Crux Intelligence. “Customers can query in simple language and have data analysis and personalized business insights at their fingertips.”

Fractal has also incubated several other AI projects including Qure.ai to assist radiologists in their diagnostic decisions, Theremin.ai to improve investment decisions and Eugenie.ai to find anomalies in high-velocity data streams.

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