Excellence4U: Empowering businesses with critical insights

Startup Showcase

If a company intended to grow its business in a unique way, and sought specific data packets to get things right, it could’ve easily gone online, or approached any of the large research consultancies for assistance. But while the latter store and disseminate mounds of information, one may not refute the claim that it’s all mostly macro in nature.

Providing clients with the most nuanced, detailed and micro forms of information, is what sets Excellence4U apart from the larger competition. This five-year-old firm was founded by business consultant Madhu Rao, who is also its CEO. “A lot of companies wanted granular market information. While they did have access to large players who provided them with macro information, they often lacked being provided more specific data. We came up as an on-demand micro information services provider to  companies (B2B),” Rao tells DH.

Simply put, macro information is researched data, linked to trends, statistics, and patterns collected over a period of time, while micro information comprises specific details surrounding that macro information.

In terms of services, Excellence4U offers expertise across four sectors namely — Legal, wherein it provides validated, secondary legal information to law firms across the world to augment cases stronger; Sales and marketing functions of IT firms, to help teams sharpen accuracy (under this, many verticals such as healthcare, retail, and banking, are serviced); Private equity, venture capitalists, and incubation, wherein it conducts forensic research into firms where VCs mull investments, besides validating claims made by those firms; and management consulting for projects, providing raw data to companies.

“In order to provide information, we have created our own online technology platform, ‘LightRay’. Anybody from across the world can register as a user on it, and post business-related queries. In 24 hours, our system generates a sample data file, and mails it to the requester for free. If the requester is satisfied with the sample data, he accepts it, and pays for the full data, which is then sent to him/her in any preferred format — Excel, PPT, and so on,” Rao says, adding that the revenues come from transactional pricing for the data provided.

A bulk of the data compilation happens through secondary research, accessing open-source content online, following which, more comprehensive information generation comes about at the hands of human experts — statisticians and data analysts — well-versed to handle mounds of data.

“Even LightRay has the ability to search huge data sets on the web, which is crunched, to be correlated, triangulated and distilled, deriving only the required information,” he says.

The firm has self-funded Rs 4 crore, till date. Working with 76 clients, it adds four clients, every quarter. “In this fiscal, we plan to take our headcount to 500, from 125 staffers. We have two delivery centres in Bengaluru, and one in Salem, and we want to open additional delivery centres in more B- and C-class towns in India,” Rao concludes.