Mr. Ram Jalan has seventeen years of experience as an entrepreneur, marketer, researcher and internet evangelist. He is Co-founder of DINTW, a Marketing Automation and Consumer Neuroscience Lead Digital Company; Executive Director of a hyper local news outfit Ten News; Angel Investor in a B2B Footwear ERP platform. He has served several brands like Emami, Reliance Industries, IMImobile-UK, AskMe-Malaysia, Batelco (Bahrain) and has successfully implemented Digital Transformation Projects at Askme, Wave Group and Omaxe.

In brief, the session had insights on the following:

Reactive Marketing, Database Marketing, Targeting and Segmentation, Trigger Based Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media and Content, Lead Management, Sales Enablement and Business Intelligence

It is all about Customer and Consequences

“Fundamentals of any marketing or any customer outreach revolves around consumer and the consequences.” As Mr. Ram Jalan opined, digital marketing automation has gained momentum in the last several years now and the pandemic has further accelerated the process. A high usage of the internet, rather demanded by adversities brought by the pandemic during the last eighteen months has made it climb slots on the ladder. “There are internet first brands who have generated more than 2000 crore revenue.” Also, there is a paradigm shift Internet pure business with zero fixed costs coupled with low ownership and more subscription approach.

With many changes taking place, it is also a time for a transformation at the organisational front. Thereafter, he listed five different forms of customers and it needs to be streamlined in which category one’s target customers are located.

What is Zeni platform all about?

In simple words, Zeni offers an integrated platform to business owners that performs daily bookkeeping besides consolidating all the financial flows like spend, payments, accounts and more. At the same time, the tool connects firms to dedicated teams of finance professionals to provide guidance and deliver insights based on real-time data. It’s a blend of both AI and human finance experts that together manage every financial need of a company, especially a start-up for a flat month-to-month charge. The platform integrates with a company’s bank accounts, credit cards, payroll providers, or expense management system section. It is like Zeni is running your finance department.

The services include:

● Invoice Pay and Invoicing

● Expense and Receipt Administration

● Monetary Projections, Budgeting, and Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) Assist

● Payroll Administration

● Actual-Time Reporting through Zeni Dashboard

● Month-to-month Monetary Statements

● Yearly Taxes and R&D Credit score

Given the speed and the accuracy of this approach, Zeni is able to provide its clients with a real-time access to key financial insights via the Zeni Dashboard – including burn rate, operating expenses, cash/card balance, revenue by product, month-end reports, and more.

In its first year itself, Zeni processed over $300 million in transactions and is now managing $200 million in finances each month. It is on track to process a total of $1 billion in transactions in the next 12 months and is expecting to achieve 300% growth in 2022. Zeni claims to be specialising in technology start-ups and has over 100 clients on board since inception.

Twin Power

Shinde brothers Swapnil and Snehal always had a knack for AI and Machine Learning (ML). Swapnil worked in the technology industry for over 15 years and worked as the Vice President (VP) of Product for international markets at Rdio and also spent four years at Yahoo! as a Senior Product Manager. Snehal also worked in the technology industry for 15 years and worked at both Yahoo! and Rdio as the VP for Emerging Markets. The Shinde brothers both have master’s degrees in computer science from the University of Southern California.

Following their technology-concentrated careers, the brothers ventured into the world of start-ups with the launch of a Bollywood music streaming music service called Dhingana, which was purchased by Rdio in 2014.

This was followed by their second venture Mezi, an AI-powered Travel-As-A Service platform, that was acquired by the American Express (AMEX) in 2018. The duo spent 5 years building this human assisted AI-powered platform which today serves more than 10 million AMEX card members across the U.S. and U.K.

In between the hustle, the duo never stopped building on AI and ML technology. Even when they were dwelling on the proportion of selling Mezi to American Express, the duo brainstormed on how the later had set a Gold Standard for providing high-class personalised concierge service to its Platinum and Black card customers, but is unable to give it to all its card members because it was too human intensive and very hard to scale. The only way to democratise what American Express was doing was by using Artificial Intelligence.

Post the acquisition, the duo wanted to invest more and more in AI and ML and apply the same in different markets which were fragmented and complex. They understood exactly how a similar platform like Mezi could be effective in the world of start-up bookkeeping and accounting markets. This inspiration came from the duo’s first hand experience as start-up owners.

The brothers met with Nexus Ventures in May 2015 and showed them a mock design of how they wanted to build the product. In 20 minutes, the investors decided to fund the company.

In 2019, Zeni launched its AI – powered financial concierge service for start-ups, with founders Swapnil and Snehal taking charge as Chief Executive officer (CEO) and Chief Product Officer (CPO), respectively. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States and has a team of 40 and growing.

To date, Zeni has raised a total of $13.5 million in funding over two rounds. Their latest funding was raised on March 9, 2021 from a Series A round. The two year-old start-up has a line of as many as eight marquee investors, including Sierra Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, Saama Capital, Firebolt Ventures, SVB Financial Group and others.

The first paid client came in January 2020. By March 2021, Zeni had managed over $200 million in funds each month throughout over 100 start-up clients. Lockdown also worked in the company’s favour as the majority of businesses were working remotely and looked at Zeni as their remote finance team.