He Raised $270 Million To Co-Found A Platform To Help Users Navigate Software Applications By Providing Guidance And Support

In the field of enterprise SaaS, some founders set out with clear roadmaps, while others, like Khadim Batti, blaze new trails through sheer determination, pivots, and a deep-rooted commitment to solving customer pain points.

In a recent conversation, Khadim delved into his journey from growing up in Mumbai to scaling his current venture, Whatfix. This global digital adoption platform has raised over $270M to date. This journey wasn’t straightforward—it involved multiple pivots and relentless problem-solving.

Khadim reveals his strategic insights into building a new SaaS category from scratch and raising funding for his company. Here’s a glimpse into his transformative journey and the invaluable lessons he learned along the way.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

From Hardware to Software: A Relentless Pursuit of Passion

Khadim was born and raised in Mumbai, where he completed his schooling and developed an early fascination with computers. Although initially pursuing electrical engineering, he soon realized his passion lay in software.

Khadim’s transition from hardware to software engineering indicates his willingness to pursue what truly intrigued him, even if it meant returning to school. He enrolled at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, where he deepened his expertise in computer science.

This drive led Khadim to Huawei Telecom, where he developed network management systems and later spearheaded a business intelligence reporting platform, which quickly became a full-fledged product line.

By managing and growing an R&D team from a few people to almost 100, Khadim gained crucial experience that laid the groundwork for his entrepreneurial ambitions. However, despite his success at Huawei, he yearned to build something of his own.

Khadim looks back at his transition to a hardware engineer. He recalls constantly getting support calls to fix printer issues or configure machines. He would also watch people doing programming tasks, which elicited excitement and interest. Khadim was now ready to take the leap.

Getting Higher Education to Fuel His Dreams

However, getting a job and switching to computer science was highly challenging for an electrical engineer. Khadim started researching and investigating ways to make that happen. The best option that came up was doing his Master’s in computer science.

The course involved a lot of programming during the initial one and a half years, but later, it went deeper into data mining and other similar areas. After getting his degree, Khadim got a job in the telecom sector, going through multiple protocols and IEEE papers.

Gradually, after a couple of years, Khadim did business intelligence, got to the application layer, and worked for nine years there. Having gained experience building multiple products from the ground up, Khadim was ready to start his own company.

That’s when he came up with the idea of SearchEnabler, along with co-founder Vara Kumar.

Early Entrepreneurial Ventures: The Birth of SearchEnabler

In 2011, Khadim launched his first venture, SearchEnabler, a platform aimed at helping small businesses improve their online presence by optimizing search engine and social media visibility.
At the time, he noticed a growing demand for digital solutions among small businesses.

Khadim believed he could capture this market. SearchEnabler aimed to crunch data and deliver actionable insights, guiding business owners on improving their websites and social media content to drive traffic.

However, Khadim soon realized that small business owners required more handholding than anticipated. The platform’s self-serve model struggled with high churn rates, as many business owners didn’t implement the recommendations and, consequently, didn’t see the promised ROI.

A second crucial aspect was that startups operating out of India could only cater to smaller businesses since they worked remotely. But, to cater to enterprise customers, they had to be present within their geographical location, such as the US or Europe, where their customers were.

The only recourse left for the startups was to cater to local businesses based in India. Khadim also realized that the customers using their platform for the long term were SEO and social media professionals, but that was not the target market SearchEnabler was looking for.

Khadim wanted to cater to small businesses by giving them materials and videos that they didn’t really use. Customers needed something in the flow of work, such as tips, guidance, and recommendations on how to fix their issues.

This misalignment between the product and its target market led Khadim and his co-founder to a crossroads. They could either continue with SearchEnabler or pivot toward something new.

Pivoting to Whatfix: A New Vision and a Game-Changing Idea

The pivot that gave rise to Whatfix was born from an unexpected insight. Khadim observed that while SearchEnabler wasn’t resonating with small businesses, some customers were asking for more interactive, on-the-spot guidance for their users.

This idea evolved into “Fix-It,” a feature that provided in-app help by guiding users through tasks within their software environments. In SearchEnabler, a click would show users tutorials or take them to their WordPress, Joomla, or Magento website and show them what they should do.

This functionality sparked interest from a few enterprise customers who wanted to deploy similar solutions for their own end-users. Khadim recognized this new concept’s potential and boldly decided to pivot entirely to Whatfix.

Whatfix is a platform focused on digital adoption that provides on-demand guidance to users within applications. Khadim reveals that, at the time, they were a two-person company, working tirelessly to define their niche and establish a unique product in the market.

Khadim and Vara Kumar, co-founders of Whatfix, found that it was an innovative concept that could disrupt ticketing or learning management systems. Over the next few days, they brainstormed and decided to shut down SearchEnabler entirely.

Shifting from small businesses to enterprise customers, Khadim and his co-founder refunded their SearchEnabler customers and dove headfirst into building Whatfix.

Breaking into Enterprise SaaS: The Role of GSF Accelerator

Breaking into the US-European market and positioning Whatfix as an enterprise solution was no small feat. Khadim and his co-founder were software programming engineers with limited exposure to sales and marketing. Their objective was to scale Whatfix into a $100M company.

To bridge this knowledge gap, they joined the GSF Accelerator, which offered not only mentorship and workshops but also their first opportunity to visit the United States. Khadim remembers there were 11 companies in their cohort, and the program lasted two months.

During their time in the GSF cohort, they were exposed to Silicon Valley’s culture of innovation and learned valuable lessons about building the company, pricing, market size, and sales strategies. This experience broadened their vision for Whatfix.

Initially, they had assumed a $100 price point was ideal, but upon seeing the demand for robust enterprise solutions in the U.S., they re-evaluated their business model.

By targeting the U.S. as a primary market, Khadim positioned Whatfix to tap into a much larger pool of potential clients and revenue.

Evolving the Business Model: From Usage-Based to Seat-Based Pricing

As Khadim explains, Whatfix is primarily a Software-as-a-Service company that is building an entirely new category of Digital Adoption Platforms. As Whatfix grew, the co-founders faced another challenge: finding the right pricing model.

Initially, the platform operated on a usage-based model, but this proved complicated given the wide range of applications and customer needs. Enterprise clients demanded predictability in payouts.

Whatfix could sell to an e-commerce company for hand-holding their affiliates or to banks for their corporate banking customers, which could be millions. The platform could also sell to SaaS companies for their enterprise customers or SMBs or to large enterprises for internal ERP and CLM software.

The incredible number of variations included places where there were millions of users of consumer-facing software, but the usage would be low. However, ERP, CRM, CLM, and internal usage would be high, though there would be fewer users.

Since it was virtually impossible to predict the usage base, Khadim shifted to a seat-based pricing model, where clients paid based on the number of users. Whatfix further customized pricing based on the type of software being supported.

For instance, high-use platforms like CRM systems were priced higher per user than lower-use platforms like HR software. By anchoring their pricing to the type of application, Whatfix established a sustainable revenue model aligned with enterprise needs.

As Whatfix progressed further, several large enterprises wanted to start expanding. Several companies started with one or two software, and then started implementing Whatfix on up to 40 software. Thus, the company and its pricing model continued evolving to cater to demand.

Khadim reveals how the pricing evolved from a few thousand dollars to an average of $150K to $200K annually.

Scaling Challenges and Funding Successes

Raising capital was a unique journey for Whatfix, especially since they pioneered a new product category from India.

During the seed and Series A rounds, Khadim and his team faced skepticism from investors who questioned digital adoption solutions’ market viability and scalability.

At the time, SaaS companies from India were primarily focused on small businesses, and it was rare for an Indian company to target Fortune 500 clients globally. Most VCs believed in backing existing categories, small businesses, or mission-oriented startups.

Then again, investors from Japan, China, and other countries preferred to invest in the consumer market and large eCommerce companies like Flipkart and Uber. Attracting seed funding for a SaaS company in India was next to impossible.

Despite these hurdles, Khadim secured early funding by demonstrating the tangible impact Whatfix had on improving software adoption and productivity. As they achieved significant traction, subsequent rounds of funding became easier.

By this time Whatfix was ready for its series B round, but Khadim and Vara had to work out whether to approach investors in the US. The task seemed daunting since their company was located 10,000 miles away.

By Series C and beyond, Whatfix had established a compelling value proposition, and the numbers spoke for themselves. Khadim managed to raise a total of $270M without needing investment bankers, a rare accomplishment that underscored the company’s market potential.

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Enterprise SaaS: Lessons in Product-Market Fit and Perseverance

Khadim attributes much of Whatfix’s success to its relentless focus on finding product-market fit. The company started by targeting small businesses but quickly pivoted to enterprises when they saw a clear opportunity in helping large organizations manage software adoption.

The team also had to continuously evolve the product, adapting to the needs of different sectors, departments, and software applications. Although Whatfix had a consumer-facing application, Khadim realized that large companies and banks needed simple software solutions for end users.

Attending several conferences and events in the US like Dreamforce and others, Khadim and Vara saw that enterprises were investing several hundreds of millions of dollars every year on software which were large and complex, but poor adoption can lead to wasted resources.

Whatfix’s digital adoption platform provided a solution that directly addressed this challenge, creating a strong product-market fit and reducing customer churn. It got a few initial customers in the enterprise segment and took off from there.

The journey wasn’t without its challenges. Breaking into the enterprise SaaS market required perseverance, especially when Khadim faced questions about the viability of selling from India to Fortune 500 clients.

Yet another challenge Khadim faced was the sales cycle. Small businesses had a single founder and reaching out to them was easily done. However, enterprise clients had several decision-makers and complicated budgeting processes–particularly for a new product category.

Khadim also had to deal with multiple departments and issues like security vendor registration in IT deployments. He traces the Whatfix journey through cross-application flows, understanding the processes and utilizing organizations and their friction points.

Khadim and Vara rebuilt an analytics tool from a single adoption tool to help enterprises realize the ROI of their software stack. Whatfix also gave them different tools to improve their productivity at the organizational level.

Future Vision for Whatfix

Essentially, the company evolved per changing customer needs. Khadim stresses we need to learn technology and be tech-savvy. However, we are moving into an era where technology should become user-savvy rather than users becoming tech-savvy. This philosophy is called userization.

Khadim and his team have written several white papers and coined this term. His vision for the world is one where users get the desired outcome and become very productive. He underscores the importance of a robust company culture, considering they have multiple offices worldwide.

As Khadim sees it, culture has to be accommodative for employees across the world. Very early, they articulated that Whatfix would have a one-team concept. Anyone can lead a global team regardless of where they are.

The capital core culture of hustle mode is that people should be very proactive and not wait for others. They should proactively reach out, and everybody should be able to respond.

Transparent communication is the key, where every number, detail, and individual expectation is available–regardless of geography, function, or department. These things have helped keep the teams together. Whatfix has what they call collective global leadership.

Since 65% of its market is in the US, Khadim has learned to build a team and have a strong geographical presence. They have aligned with the local culture and worked to attract the right talent there.

Conclusion

Khadim Batti’s journey with Whatfix is a testament to the power of perseverance, adaptability, and a customer-centric approach. By navigating multiple pivots, embracing mentorship, and evolving his business model, he built Whatfix into a global leader in digital adoption.

Today, Whatfix continues to help enterprises maximize the value of their software investments—a success story that underscores the potential of Indian SaaS companies on the global stage.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Recognizing when to pivot is crucial. Khadim and his team shifted from SearchEnabler to Whatfix based on user feedback, evolving their product to directly meet customer needs.
• Creating a unique category comes with challenges, especially in articulating the value and pricing to investors and customers, but it can unlock vast market potential.
• Despite initial doubts, Whatfix proved that a global SaaS company could thrive out of India, selling successfully to Fortune 500 companies.
• Whatfix adapted its pricing strategy over time, learning that flexibility is essential when navigating diverse customer use cases and applications.
• GSF Accelerator exposed Whatfix’s founders to the US market and gave them crucial insights into scaling, pricing, and sales strategy.
• Initially, fundraising was tough, but with traction and proof of demand, Whatfix raised $270M without using investment bankers.
• Realizing the challenges of software adoption in large enterprises allowed Whatfix to tap into a lucrative market by enhancing user experience and productivity.

 

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