Applozic aims to be white-labelled WhatsApp for developers and enterprises

For an online service to take off, its user interface needs to get three things right -location, payment and communication.

While working on multiple projects in app development at an early-stage startup, Applozic co-founders Devashish Mamgain and Adarsh Kumar realised that there were many service providers in the location and payment services, but communication or the ability to connect two parties on an interface was an underserved area.

It was then that the duo decided to get together and start Applozic on their own. Enterprises can use Applozic to enable chat or messaging on the interface instantly.

Marketplaces or platforms, where buyers and sellers need to connect to each other, was the first area where Bengaluru-based Applozic found its first use case. Since their inception in 2015, the startup now has 232 paying customers in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the US.

"We started off with adding chat as a capability for individual players in the marketplace domain but we have also seen good traction in bundling our offering with larger SaaS players to find diverse markets," said Mamgain, CEO of Applozic.

While there are various mediums for business owners to engage with customers, in case of third-party communication needs such as the ability for users to be able to interact with other users it comes down to an external communication medium like WhatsApp. Herein lies the differentiator for this startup which aims to be a white-labelled WhatsApp for developers and enterprises.

In an online communication industry that is crowded with players finding new ways of enabling communication, from voice-based assistants to chatbots, Applozic has found a niche problem to solve.

It enables individual and group messaging within a platform via a plug-in through which messaging can be activated in a matter of minutes.

The startup is targeting a global market having found use cases in different industries including consumer marketplace, advertisement and ed-tech.

"Apart from the buyer and seller market, we found several other use cases like e-learning where mentors and students can connect, and healthcare connecting patients and doctors, among others," Mamgain said.

Applozic raised an angel round from serial entrepreneur Satya Ganni in 2015 and is currently profitable, Mamgain said.

Co-founders Mamgain and Kumar bring together over a decade of experience in software development having worked with several technology startups.

"We knew how hard it is for enterprises and developers to build payments and navigation infrastructure from ground up. Messaging is a hard problem to solve, especially given the fragmentation around devices, reliability of network, user attention span, etc," Ganni said."Given that we have close to 6-million mobile apps and 50 to 80-million websites, this presents a large opportunity for Applozic."

The startup competes with QuickBlox and Layer.com, and counts MagicBricks, CarTrade and Zimmber among customers.