LoginRadius founder sees huge growth opportunity in linking websites to social media

March 9, 2014 Leave a comment

LoginRadius founder sees huge growth opportunity in linking websites to social media

Quentin Casey | February 27, 2014 | Last Updated: Mar 3 11:37 AM ET
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Rakesh Soni and Deepak Gupta were fast friends through high school Jaipur, India, before heading in different directions for university. Both pursued master’s degrees in North America — Mr. Gupta at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and Mr. Soni at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. They eventually co-founded a web startup and spent money attempting to bring traffic to it. The effort failed, but the problem inspired LoginRadius, their fast-growing Edmonton-based internet startup founded in 2012.

LoginRadius’s software allows Website owners and app developers to easily link their creations to 30 major social networks. It also lets anyone sign up for new Websites and apps using their social network login information, thus helping Web and app developers secure users. A recent graduate of FounderFuel, the Montreal-based startup accelerator, LoginRadius announced $1.3-million in financing on Feb. 12, from a syndicate of investors including the Accelerate Fund, Yaletown Venture Partners, Real Ventures, and BDC Capital. Mr. Soni, LoginRadius’s chief executive, recently discussed his company’s growth strategy with Quentin Casey. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Q Can you give me a sense of your growth to this point?

A 100,000 businesses use our solution, and we power 15 million monthly users on those Websites. And we are live in more than 180 countries. So we are pretty global. We have clients ranging from e-commerce and news media Websites, to personal blogs and travel and tourism sites. For any company that owns a Website and generates revenue over the internet, we are the perfect solution.

Q What’s your growth potential?

A There are 650 million Websites on the internet, of which 200 million can benefit from our solution. Out of those we want to acquire 10 million as customers by the end of 2016. And we are hoping to have half a billion end users by 2016. We want to be the leader in the space.

Q How do you plan to reach those numbers?

A We will be going after the channel partners: companies that are hosting, say, 10 million Websites, such asYola.com. We would like to partner with them, so instead of going after individual Websites we will be going after large groups of Websites. It would be difficult to acquire 10 million individual Websites.

Q Who are your competitors?

A We are mainly targeting small and medium-sized businesses, and there is no specific competition. There are two companies in the U.S., Gigya and Janrain, that have a similar product, but they are serving only big, enterprise clients. We decided to make a simplified version for small and medium-sized businesses.

Q What’s your biggest challenge?

A The biggest challenge now is hiring talented people. We have seven people here in Edmonton and we’re going to increase that to 15 in three months. We also have 18 people in India, and we hope to increase that to 30 by year’s end. As we grow we want to make sure we continue hiring smart people. We also need to continue innovating our product. In the next couple of years we’re hoping to branch out and develop new products for connecting users and Websites. We need to expand our product offering.

Q You recently opened an office in Sunnyvale, Calif. What’s the inspiration for that?

A We’ll be looking for our next round of financing in 12 to 18 months — a Series A round in the double-digit millions of dollars. That money will allow us to go after a bigger market. Having an office in California gives us a foothold in Silicon Valley, allowing us to focus on investor relations, and also on acquiring partners and customers there.

Q What’s your end goal for LoginRadius?

A I believe it could be a big stand-alone company. Our goal is to have a $500-million valuation by 2016. It’s very achievable. It’s a huge market with huge demand. We have a product that is proven, so it’s a matter of scaling now. We strongly believe we will be the next HootSuite. The whole market is open to us.

 

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About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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