Brothers in apps

Brothers Laxman and Ram Papineni’s Software As a Service (SAS) start-up AppVirality recently raised USD $500,000 (around Rs 3.3 crore), just two years after being founded. AppVirality CEO Laxman says the start-up helps companies build and retain customers on mobile platforms like apps, hence the name. Using their software development kit (SDK), their clients can employ various marketing strategies within 24 hours of its integration, something that would usually take months to develop in-house.

“We track everything and show you granular level data... everything that you would have if you had developed it in-house,” Laxman says.

After graduating from Osmania University in 2008 with a Master’s degree in Computer Applications, Laxman (28), worked at a couple of MNCs for six years before quitting to begin working on a start-up with his brother Ram (30), an app developer himself. The idea for the product, says Laxman, came in 2014 from conversations with clients of their previous start-up. “Everybody is moving towards mobile, right from start-ups to banks,” says Laxman, adding, “It’s easy to build an app, but getting those first one million downloads and then expanding that to five or 10 million... that’s a challenge.”

The main factor holding people back was the time it took to develop and implement marketing tools in their platforms, and that’s when Laxman and Ram knew they had discovered a space that had so far been unexplored in the tech arena.

From serving their first customer in February, the company has now over a hundred clients across the country. While he maintains that he still would love to have Hyderabad as his base, Laxman admits that the start-up scene in the city is only just picking up. “In Hyderabad, it’s getting better, but as little as a year ago, ‘start-up’ was not a fancy word.”

Building up a presence in the US is also on the cards, adds Laxman.