AI-enabled Draup Secures Strategic Investment from institutional Private Equity Firm to Enhance Product and Customer Experience

BANGALORE, India, March 22, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The B2B software as a service company Draup Inc.,  announced today that it has secured its first round of institutional financing to accelerate product development, enhance customer experience, and develop new use cases to help customers achieve better business outcomes across both talent management and sales growth.

Draup's first investment is led by HKW, a middle-market private equity firm, focused on growth-oriented companies.  HKW brings a network of operational experience that will help Draup strengthen its product portfolio and anchor its leadership position in the US Enterprise Sales and Talent Intelligence market.

Draup is founded by serial entrepreneurs Vijay Swaminathan and Vamsee Tirukkala, who earlier co-founded Zinnov, a global management consulting firm, and Talent Neuron, a web-based talent platform that was acquired by CEB.

"We are very excited to have HKW on board as a partner. Their deep understanding of enterprise business and the patient capital they bring in, will allow us to learn and deploy the funds towards the most customer value generating outcomes. We have taken a disruptive approach to problem-solving by developing custom Machine Learning models to derive new insights from sales and talent data. Over 10 Million data points from 8000+ sources are fed into these models each day to empower customers with intuitive and actionable sales intelligence and talent insights," said Vijay Swaminathan, CEO & Co-founder, Draup.

In just the last 3 years, Draup has experienced a 30X growth in enterprise value, driven by its strong 98% customer retention, 14x increase in the number of companies analyzed, 21x increase in the number of job roles screened, and analysis of over 500,000 daily signals. Draup is a key enabler of revenue growth and the trusted intelligence platform for enterprise sales teams that generate over USD 400 Billion in global revenue and HR leaders who manage a global workforce of over 9 Million employees.

Unlike other platforms, Draup provides context-rich data in an easy-to-use, natural language interface. This helps go-to-market teams identify new opportunities, understand what's top of mind for customers and their strategic investment priorities, and anticipate key trends in their industries. This allows the sales teams to micro-target specific use cases and become valued partners for their customers.

"This is just the beginning of our journey," noted Vamsee Tirukkala, CCO & Co-founder, Draup. "Our customer-first thinking has us continuously improving our product across the two use cases (Sales and Talent) to provide insights that empower our customers to drive specific, context-rich outcomes. Draup's retention rate of 98% is unheard of in the industry. When you contrast this with the fact that we have acquired most of our customers so far based on word-of-mouth, our belief in our product and in the world-class talent that helped deliver this product is completely validated," he added.

Draup seeks to now grow its customer base globally across the Americas, Europe, and Asia while continuing to build a world-class technology team that will expand on its technology and product leadership in this segment. Draup is able to attract top talent with its innovative culture, growth mindset, and an employee stock option plan that enables its employees to participate in the financial upside of the company.

"Draup is a system of record for our customers' HR and talent acquisition teams, helping in human capital planning across their organizations with insightful talent-trend analysis," said Amaresh Ramaswamy, COO, Draup. Draup helps its Talent customers find and hire the right skills with a powerful AI engine applied to a database of over 700 Million profiles. Draup uniquely helps HR leaders in reskilling initiatives to transform their global workforces, become future-ready, and drive digital transformation journeys, by bringing unique role-level and skill-level insights that aren't seen on other platforms.

"Draup's unique data collection, integration, and modeling platform enables enterprises to make critical go-to-market and talent management decisions with confidence and precision," said Daniel Kim, Partner, HKW. "We look forward to partnering with Draup's management to continue their expansion."

About Draup:  Draup is an AI-driven enterprise decision-making platform for global CXO leaders in sales and talent domains, founded in_2017. Draup for Sales is an AI-Powered Sales Intelligence platform that empowers sales teams with industry, account, and stakeholder intelligence, and enables them to micro-target prospects. Draup for Talent is an AI-driven Reskilling and Talent Intelligence platform that helps HR leaders and talent management teams plan, hire and skill a future-ready workforce. Visit us at: Draup.com.

About HKW: HKW is a middle-market private equity firm investing in companies with talented management teams in the US and Canada. HKW targets companies in the Technology, Business Services, and Health & Wellness sectors.   Since 1982, HKW has sponsored 66 platform transactions of lower middle-market companies throughout North America and 71 add-on acquisitions. For more information on HKW, please visit:  hkwinc.com.