Khadim Batti On Raising $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. Whatfix has raised funding worth $270M from top-tier investors like Warburg Pincus, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Dragoneer, Peak XV Partners, and Eight Roads.

In this episode, you will learn:

• 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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About Khadim Batti:

Khadim Batti is the CEO and Co-Founder of Whatfix. Khadim has over fifteen years of experience in the tech industry, having previously served as a Program Manager, Delivery Head, and Project Manager. Prior to Whatfix, they co-founded SearchEnabler, a SaaS-based SEO platform for SMEs.

Khadim Batti graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Khadim began their career at CMC Limited as a Customer Support Engineer before moving on to Huawei Technologies, where they spent ten years in various managerial positions.

In 2007, they left Huawei to join Applabs Technologies as a Manager-Technical Services. Batti stayed with Applabs for less than a year before co-founding SearchEnabler in 2010.

Under Batti’s leadership, Whatfix has become one of the leading software platforms for digital transformation and employee engagement.

Whatfix has been recognized as one of the “50 Best Places to Work in India” by the Great Place to Work Institute and as one of the “10 Most Innovative Companies in India” by Fast Company.

Khadim Batti received a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical from the University of Mumbai and a PGDIT in Information Technology from the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore.

Connect with Khadim Batti:

• LinkedIn
• Zoominfo
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the Deal Maker Show. So today we have an amazing founder, you know, joining us. We’re going to be talking about all the good stuff, you know, building, scaling, financing. I mean, on their end, you know, they’ve raised a lot of money. You know, they have employees globally distributed. And I think that we’re going to be learning quite a bit, you know, about things like building a new category, how it was at a seed in Series A, even that fact, how tough it was, how they navigated the challenges.

Alejandro Cremades: Also, how to think about ah building a company in the enterprise ah SaaS you know type of segment and many other you know really great things. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Khadim Batty. Welcome to the show.

Khadim Batti: Thanks Alexander, pleasure to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in Mumbai in India, give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Khadim Batti: so ah So born and brought up in Mumbai, Maharashtra state of Maharashtra in India. I did my schooling there. I was an average student to start with there, but was fascinated with computers and wanted to join in engineering. I couldn’t get through in computer computer science and I joined electrical engineering in Mumbai University did that.

Khadim Batti: After that, I worked for a year in hardware in Mumbai. Somehow, I wanted to keep switching, thinking that, OK, that’s not the place I should be. I wanted to go into software, so I started appearing for post-graduation entrance exams and got through Indian Institute of Information Technology, a Bangalore university in Bangalore, for my post-graduation. I quit my job ah for a year. I joined the Triple IT Bangalore. That’s how I moved to Bangalore, actually, from Mumbai. Did my post-graduation.

Khadim Batti: of years And then from campus, I joined Huawei Telecom, initially building their network management system on 3G, 3G. And then later on switched to building business intelligence reporting platform.

Khadim Batti: It it became a full-fledged business intelligence product line, which I grew from few people to almost close to 100 people in research and development. So that’s the early part.

Alejandro Cremades: So but what was that transition for you two?

Khadim Batti: initial yeah

Alejandro Cremades: Because at the beginning, you know you were like more on the schooling you know to towards ah perhaps hardware, and then all of a sudden you transitioned more, especially after your post-grad day to software.

Alejandro Cremades: So what was that the transition like for you?

Khadim Batti: Yeah, so as an hardware engineer, I used to get support calls like ah fixing some printer issues or configuring machines, configuring servers, and I used to see people actually working on doing some programming and also that created a lot of interest that I i should do the other side, not this side.

Khadim Batti: And but it was not easy for an electrical engineer to get a job and switch to computer science. And that’s where I started investigating further or researching further, like, OK, how do I switch my screen? And the best way I could find was to actually do all my further studies, do my master’s in computer science. And that’s what the easiest way or the best way I could think of.

Khadim Batti: And running master is actually a really loud programming. I did a lot of programming in the first one and a half years and went a little deeper into data mining and some of those areas. Got my job in telecom. First few days, the first few months, in fact, I would say went through a lot of protocols, IEEE papers, and really went deeper into telecom and then Gradually, after a couple of years, we should do business intelligence, got to the application layer. Worked for nine years there. That’s where I might microphone it as well. And then at some point realized that, OK, we have built a lot of products from scratch. Why not try something on our own? and That’s how I came out and we started.

Alejandro Cremades: So you got started first with search enabler and it was kind of like a transitioning of events you know towards say ending up with a what fix. So what was that transition of of events you know that that happened there?

Alejandro Cremades: you know It seems like you guys thought that the market was going to be receptive towards you know one angle and then all of a sudden you know you guys decide to pivot.

Khadim Batti: Yeah.

Khadim Batti: Yeah, so but i think legitimate to andy I think it is very important to understand the context at that point. ah In 2011-12 timeframe, a lot of companies, small businesses were trying to leverage their online presence, like everybody wanted to come online. ah And the second, another important aspect was it was There was a strong belief that companies which are getting from startups which are coming out of India, they could actually cater globally only for ah ah smaller businesses because they can be done remote. For enterprises, you need to be present you need to be present in the geography, like US or Europe, wherever your customers are. Or you need to cater or you to build a startup which is catering to a local India market.

Khadim Batti: And with that assumptions, we started Search Enabler for solving or helping small businesses to leverage their social media presence, online presence, help them drive traffic from search engines. And we built that platform for and and thought we can scale to millions of small businesses. And that was the initial hypothesis which we launched. We tried that for going up three years. ah Things didn’t move as expected.

Khadim Batti: And well but the the hypothesis was actually we would do a lot of crunching of data and give recommendations to the user saying, OK, what they need to fix in their website, what, how they should position their social media content and so on so that it can drive traffic. But that hypothesis didn’t work because the business owners ah for expected a lot more handholding to fix those issues or those recommendations. If they don’t implement those recommendations, they would not see the ah ROI.

Khadim Batti: and if this is a and And they would churn. And we started of seeing a lot of churn in a few, like six to eight months of the sign up. The folks which were actually using our platform for a long term were SEO professionals, social media professionals, but that was not the target market we were looking for. We thought, OK, we need to make our product a lot more self-serve.

Khadim Batti: ah for the segment which we want to cater that is small businesses. And while trying to solve the problem by giving them a lot of health material, giving them a lot of videos, we realize people are not reading all the stuff. They needed something in the flow of work. When actually they are doing the job, they need to get those tips and guidance like how they should be fixing those issues or recommendations.

Khadim Batti: and That’s where know we came up with, a you can say, what fixes a feature or a by-product, which was called Fix-It. We used to have a button called Fix-It. In search enabler, when somebody clicks, it would show them health tutorials or take them to their WordPress or Joomla or Magento website and show them what they should do. Some of our customers came back to us saying that, okay, this sounds really cool. Can I use this for my customers so I can handhold them? It’s like somebody is helping me over the shoulder, telling me what to do.

Khadim Batti: We were two people company, me and my co-founder. We had to make a call that whether should we continue with search in OBLR or should we pivot to this new concept. we We did a lot of Google and a lot of searches. We didn’t find, we thought this is a disruptive which can actually disrupt ticketing systems or learning management systems. And we thought, okay, let’s pivot. So we brainstorm for two to three days. One thing was very clear, we cannot do both. We have to shut down one and accept another one.

Khadim Batti: We gave a notice to 6070 paying customers of search enabler return money to most of the people and then pivot it to what fix that was the that’s how we started.

Alejandro Cremades: so then So then you guys also went through an accelerator program, right? GSF. So what was that experience of the before and after going through an accelerator program for you guys?

Khadim Batti: Yes. Yeah, so very importantly general like. When we were looking at then we thinking about working on what fix, it was very clear for us at that point that India is not going to be a market. If we want to build a large company of $100 million dollars at least in revenue, we should target a European US market, primarily US.

Khadim Batti: ah Both of us being programmer engineering background, we never we had a zero exposure to sales and marketing. like We didn’t even know what are the different roles in those departments. So we we thought some we need to join something which can actually help us get some mentoring or some kind of workshops where we can learn and push our product, specifically in the geography which we want to be like US. So we came across GSF which was creating a cohort for two months in the area.

Khadim Batti: And we applied. We got through GSF. There were 11 companies in the cohort. We all were initial first one month. We were in India doing a lot of workshops. Then for two months, we were in the US. That was my first visit. Even my co-founders first visit to us so wepo allla founders law the a lot of CROs, a lot of investors.

Khadim Batti: It was a real eye-opener like how companies can be built, how big the market is and no so prior to that we think we thought like hundred dollars is a good price point but then landing in US we realized no we can sell much more. So that’s how we got exposed so to US market and actually looked at US as a primary market for us.

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about do the um what what ended that up becoming the business model of of of what fix because I mean, it’s been quite a journey for you guys.

Khadim Batti: Yeah, so we’re primarily a software as a staff company initially because it’s a new category. There was no clear because like what should be the pricing model for our category. We tried the usage based model, but then we face a lot of.

Khadim Batti: friction from customers because they wanted very guaranteed payout like they they should be able to estimate how much they’re going to pay. Which was very hard in our case because there were so many variants of use cases. For example, I could sell to an e-commerce company for hand holding their affiliates.

Khadim Batti: I can give it to banking for the corporate banking customers, which can be millions, whereas I can even give it to SaaS companies for their enterprise customers or SMBs, or I can give it to large enterprise for the internal software on ERP, CLM. There’s too many variations where some places like consumer-facing software, millions of users, but the usage would be very less, whereas in ERP, CRM, CLM, internal usage, ah number of users will be less, but the usage would be very high.

Khadim Batti: So it was very hard to predict the usage base. So we ah gradually moved to seed-based model. The second complexity was if I go to larger enterprise, they would have typically thousands of software. We would start with one application like CRM or ERP or something. So we would sell them one license.

Khadim Batti: for CRM for let’s say 1000 users and then they would come back and say okay I need on ERP, I need on my HR software, I need on my CLM software and so on. So we started evolving that how do I to sell on applications. Now underlying application also differs like CRM typically it is charged $100, $200 per user per month whereas HR software is typically $10, $15, $20 per user per month.

Khadim Batti: The reason also being like CRM, there are sales guys who have been working for five hours every day on that software or ERP. Whereas HR software, travel software, people log in once sort twice or twice a price in a month. So, how do we price on different applications? So, we came up with ah another thumb rule or a measurement saying, if it’s a vertical software like CRM, CLMs, CPQ or ERP,

Khadim Batti: We’re going to charge a few dollars, three to five dollars per user per month. But if it’s a horizontal software, but we’re going to charge maybe half a dollar to one dollar. So in a way, we derive that we should be around five to seven percent of underlying software price.

Khadim Batti: So that’s how our pricing also evolved. As we progress further, there were a lot of large enterprises who wanted to start expanding. ah Several companies started with one software, two software, then they started to implementing what fits on 30, 40 softwares. And they also, the procurement started coming back to us. I don’t want to raise POs, and I don’t want to keep buying licenses. Can I get an enterprise-wide agreement signed? Or can I get a department-wide? Like I have 50 softwares in my department.

Khadim Batti: So we evolved. We removed that application variable. We said, okay, in your department, there are 5,000 users. This is my ELA for 5,000 users. You can use that any any any number of applications in terms of your organization. So that’s how our pricing, our business model kept on evolving over a period of time.

Alejandro Cremades: and And also how much capital have you guys raised to date?

Khadim Batti: Yeah, we raised close to $270 million dollars so far.

Alejandro Cremades: And I know that the seed of Series A was quite a challenging because you guys were like literally like leading the creation of a new category. So how was that for you all?

Khadim Batti: Yeah, so I think ah early days there were a couple of problems. One, of course, this category was unknown. So the question we would get asked is like, is somebody is going to pay for this? How much somebody is going to pay? How many people are going to pay for this? How big is the category? ah We also didn’t know in enough time. So in my initial estimation of time also was a couple of hundred million dollars because I thought only SASM was going to use this.

Khadim Batti: um Gradually, I realized this large enterprise market, I can go for internal tools and the time became several billions of dollars. ah so One was a time calculation, ah how much people are going to pay, our pricing also evolved like from few thousand dollars now, average pricing is like 150, $200,000 per year. so It was difficult to actually articulate that or actually calculate those share of market or how how we would evolve.

Khadim Batti: Second, ah it was very unheard of um in India that somebody can build a company startup from India, which can sell to Fortune 500, the global thousand city in all of India, right? Because there are several, there will be players locally who competent to be like, there will be a disadvantage. So most of the VCs used to believe to invest in the existing categories, catering to small businesses or some very mission also. That was a very hard sell ah ah ah early on. And third, also,

Khadim Batti: There was also another belief that most of the investors at that point were going behind consumers like we have Flipkarts or ah several large e-commerce companies and competitors over Ubers and all. There were all of investors coming from Japan or China or some other other countries investing in consumer market.

Khadim Batti: So there were several investors also asking a question like, OK, we’ll do CDD, Ron, we’ll do CDZ. For value, you will get CDZ. Who would want to invest in a SaaS company in India for CDZ? Eventually, you’ll have to go with US. But time has changed. Like today, we have seen examples in India where companies can raise seed and go to IPO in India in SaaS. So following the similar trajectory, we raised CDZ also was a challenge, but we had traction to demonstrate.

Khadim Batti: Series B was a little bit confusing, whether we should raise in India, we should raise in the US. And if we go to the US, we would ask question like, OK, you were sitting 10,000 miles away. How do i we want to invest some in companies locally? So those were the confusion. Post that, Series C, D, E, we never had an issue. There was a lot of numbers used to speak, traction used to speak. In fact, in C round and D round, I didn’t even have a proper deck. And there was so much of pull from the market.

Khadim Batti: And we were able to raise all this 270 million so far without having investment bankers. So for the founders, with the help of team, we were able to raise.

Alejandro Cremades: So it sounds like a quite the journey. i mean Obviously, ah quite ah a bit of pivoting you know from one company to another, from one business model to another.

Khadim Batti: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: At what point would you say that it was that moment where you were like, i think I think we’re into something here. I think we’re going to be okay.

Khadim Batti: Yeah, so i think we started, as as I was mentioning, we started with the small businesses. And then we started seeing churn, we got to a couple hundred thousand dollars, but churn was high around 40% of the churn. There was no clear stickiness. There was no fear of we were getting customers regularly, but there was no strong product market fake. So then we realized that, OK, we need to actually look for some other segment and now enterprise segment.

Khadim Batti: Consumer-facing application, we also realize they’re large companies, consumer companies, or bankings. Their softwares need to be very simple enough or when they’re facing the end users. But we attended several events in the US, including Dreamforce and others, and we realized there’s a big problem of yeah ah ERPs or CRMs and all those large, complex softwares in and enterprises. And the enterprises typically invest several hundreds of millions of dollars every year on software.

Khadim Batti: And adoption is a challenge there. And we got few first few customers ah in enterprise segment solving adoption problem for the software internally for their employees. I think that was kind of a new call. That was a kind of a moment where we felt the scan delay.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, in terms of enterprise SaaS, why is enterprise SaaS so hard? you know what what what What’s about it that is so so challenging and complex?

Khadim Batti: Yeah. so if you If you look at small businesses, I can reach out to founder or ah one of the execs and share ah the value prop, what i and my product can offer, and sign a deal in a couple of thousand dollars, a few thousand dollars. Sales cycle will be pretty small. Whether it’s an enterprise, actually, there are several, it’s not a single one-person decision, actually. Typically, there are a lot of people involved. Second, many of these decisions has to be budgeted earlier in their annual budgets, right? So it has to be called out. If your category is new,

Khadim Batti: where the budget would come from. It has to be snatched from somewhere else, so that makes it more complex. Then more departments get into it. Is this going to be secure for my enterprise? Do they have all the compliances? How I’m going to deploy it? Is it going to be cloud? Is it going to be on-premise? There has to be a sign-off from several CXOs.

Khadim Batti: so That cycle itself becomes like several months including getting the budgets and all many of these want to do pilot so that makes a having multiple ah people in decision making having multiple departments involved a lot of expectation in those security vendor registration it deployments makes it more complex.

Alejandro Cremades: So now let’s talk about the um you know the vision here. you know Let’s say, because i mean you have a ton of employees, i mean you have like over 900 employees, you know all these investors.

Khadim Batti: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: If you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world cutting where the vision of the company is fully realized, what does that world look like to you?

Khadim Batti: Yeah, so one thing i I have learned last few years, right? Like the problems, the problem what you try, what do you start with to solve actually keeps evolving. If it doesn’t evolve, then as a company will at some point perish, right? So we started with a problem of helping software improve their adoption.

Khadim Batti: We realized that’s not a big enough problem. We need to flip. So we said, okay, can we make employees more productive? Now suddenly it gives rise to ah requirements like can I have a cross-application flows, understanding the processes we’re getting, utilizing an organization, their friction points. So from a single Adoption tool we can rebuild analytics tool and then we realize okay companies are spending several hundreds of millions of dollars on software can i give them. Perspective of what’s working what’s not working help them in making decisions can we help them realize the roi of their software stack.

Khadim Batti: and give them different tools to improve their ah productivity of organization level. So problem keeps evolving as we move. So ah maybe a short answer would be like when the day when I wake up and if I see that my vision is realized, probably I would not have a good job in evolving my vision or the problem statement. ah But it lasts for for now, actually what it looks like so far It was always been accepted that users should become a tech savvy. You would have heard several times. We need to learn technology. We need to be tech savvy. But I think it’s an era we are moving into where technology should become user savvy rather than user becoming tech savvy. And this philosophy we call userization. We have written several white papers and we have coined this. So I believe at some point we want to userize every software in the world so that users can

Khadim Batti: get the desired outcome and become very productive. probably Probably by then we should have evolved the problem statement much bigger.

Alejandro Cremades: And then talking about innovation here and and and and aligning it with culture, right? I mean, you have all these different employees all across the world you know in different offices. How do you go about you know building culture and making sure that there’s alignment towards that future that you guys are living into?

Khadim Batti: yeah so ah We were very conscious about it. Like if you want to build a large company, we need to be and it has to be global. So the culture also has to be accommodative and for employees across the world. So very clearly we had articulated early on itself that it’s so we have one team concept. Doesn’t matter whether people is somebody sitting in Bangalore or Delhi or London or Frankfurt or San Jose. So whoever is the best can lead the global teams will be also capital core culture of

Khadim Batti: hustle mode on that people should be very proactive. They should don’t wait for others. They should proactively reach out and everybody should be able to should be able to be responding. Transparent communication. We share every number, every detail, what individual expects in our all hands. Doesn’t matter where the person comes from, which geography, which function, which department. I think some of these things have helped us actually keep the teams together. Most of our leaders have been like here for now, several years.

Khadim Batti: So half of my leadership actually is sitting in India, another half of sitting in the US and Europe. So it’s it’s a collective global leadership.

Alejandro Cremades: So now let’s say um I was to put you into a time machine. and Can I bring you back in time?

Khadim Batti: OK.

Alejandro Cremades: you know Maybe to that point moment that you were thinking about the launching something of your own, you know maybe like 14 years ago. And let’s say you’re able to have a chat with that younger academia and give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a business.

Alejandro Cremades: What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Khadim Batti: Yeah, so I would not have those assumptions which I had heard from different people saying SMB is not going to work from India. This new category is going to be hard. I would not have all those assumptions and I would actually directly look at what’s the right segment for this particular problem and go for it. I would have achieved product market very pretty early, probably probably maybe three, four years in my journey I would have saved and I would have probably reached ah several milestones much earlier.

Alejandro Cremades: And what about coming to the US? s you know There’s probably a lot of foreign founders that they that are thinking about tackling this market and you know expanding here. i mean what What kind of words of wisdom would you have for them?

Khadim Batti: Yeah, so we ah we have around 65% of our markets in US today, right? So to build team and to have a good presence in the geography, you need to build, you need to get the, also align to the local culture and build a team and get the people right talent or attract talent there.

Khadim Batti: ah Very hard if all the founders are remote. So I would suggest if there’s a multi ah is that if you have two or three co-founders, one of them actually preferably should know. I think as soon as we crossed a couple of million dollars in revenue, my co-founder moved to US and he started helping build the look team locally. That really worked out for us.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing, Kadeem. So for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Khadim Batti: Yeah, they can reach out on me on LinkedIn. My email and general responses, call them at whatfix dot.com. If they want to evaluate what fix or take it out, whatfix.com or reach out to us at sales at whatfix.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, easy novel. Hey, Kadeem, thank you so much for being on the Dealmaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Khadim Batti: It was my pleasure the a to I hope I think I was able to share some of the learnings. Thank you.

*****

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