Satish Patil launched Mitibase about three years ago, amid the pandemic. Satish Patil has a quick question before he explains his business idea: “How many of your friends and contacts, from school, college, first job, second job and other areas of life, are you still updated on?” The answer is pivotal to Mitibase, the platform Patil launched about three years ago, amid the pandemic.
Mitibase enables companies and executives to keep track of their relationship networks i.e. know when a key contact joins another company, gets promoted or joins a new board position. For enterprises, this could mean tapping new sources of revenue and closing a deal. Patil has invested $500K in building Mitibase, and the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has touched $150 thousand. Patil is planning to fund-raise for Mitibase this year, targeting $1 million ARR this financial year.
A recent client of Mitibase is a Pune-based SaaS company that provides AI-powered automation for business processes. It was facing a problem with pipeline generation (which is an issue for almost all B2B sales team that needs to get month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter leads). “This decade-old company had a contact database that included roughly 1,500 people with whom they had interacted in the past five to six years but had not been able to close the deals. I asked if they knew where these people were today. With Mitibase, they found 288 of those 1,500 people had changed jobs and were now in decision-making positions in their new companies. All these 288 people already know this automation company and their product from their past interactions and, hence, could be approached again for a potential new business,” says Patil. This company reached out to these 288 leads, harnessed the existing relationships and closed five deals in three months.
The central hypothesis of Mitibase is that “relationships are the foundation of all industries. Virtually no dollar is spent without a relationship behind it”. “An organisation’s collective network is far more than just customers, vendors, and prospects. It involves networks of all the employees, management team, board, investors, advisors, clients, vendors, and partners. Unfortunately, only 10 per cent of any company’s network is visible to them and the rest remains undiscovered. Our relationships are always moving and growing, so constantly staying on top of all the data is crucial,” says Patil.
Patil holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota, USA, and a BTech from the University of Mumbai and has been building and delivering products and solutions using artificial intelligence and machine learning for global customers for more than 12 years.
Apart from relationship discovery and tracking, Mitibase enables companies to get a big picture of the market by assessing thousands of relationships among investors, companies, decision-makers, customers and competitors. This would help them understand competitor strategy, disruptive trends and emerging companies. Other features include connecting and sharing networks with close partners and allies.
Can the platform pose a risk to the privacy of an individual? Patil says that privacy is a key focus for them. The platform is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)-compliant and all customer data is well protected. At present, Mitibase is going through the phase that many innovative technologies experience— many companies show interest and are adopting this relation-led growth while many are sceptical. The company has 15 mid-market and enterprise customers in the US and India.