Former Microsoft exec's Big Data startup Indix raises $4.5M in Series A from Nexus Venture, Avalon

Seattle & Chennai-based enterprise startup Indix Corp, set up by former corporate vice-president of Microsoft, Sanjay Parthasarathy, has raised $4.5 million in Series A from Nexus Venture Partners and Avalon Ventures, according to a company statement.

Founded around two years ago, Indix is positioned as a platform for product managers where they can find data, prices, product ideas and more. Indix is working on big data, analytics, visualisations and applications that help products and services companies manage and get the most out of their portfolio. It is building a cloud-based product for business professionals around the world and will continue to be in stealth mode until later this year.

Indix was started by Parthasarathy after he left Microsoft back in 2011. He was joined by other co-founders Sridhar Venkatesh, Rajesh Muppalla, Satya Kaliki and Jonah Stephen Jeremiah.

"It shows what the product managers would be capable of if we gave them the data, the tools and the applications that would help them come up with new product ideas, set the right prices, manage promotions and make their offerings available to their customers in the best ways possible," says a blog post describing Indix.

Another blog post indicates that the company was started with an idea to implement a search engine for numbers and later discovered the importance of daily consumer goods' prices. "Everything on the planet has a price – every product, every service, every person, everything. What if we built the world's largest database of prices? A really, really big database of prices for everything," said the post.

According to SEC filing, the firm raised seed rounds of  $250,000 in late 2011 and further secured around $1.1 million (around a dozen investors participated in that round) one year ago. Nexus also took part in the second round in which most of the existing angel investors came in.

The latest funding will be used to accelerate product development and scale up marketing & sales in the US, an official statement said.

After the latest round, a total of 20 investors or so are there in the company, as the SEC filing shows. Indix counts among its investors active angels such as Indiagames founder and now chief of Disney's digital business unit in India Vishal Gondal, K Ganesh and his wife Meena (founders of Tutorvista), Tola Capital's Sheila Gulati, the Anthemis Group, Geoffrey R Entress, global legal advisor Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Sand Hill Group co-founder MR Rangaswami, Charles Fitzgerald (cloud application platform strategy head at VMware), Aditi Technologies CEO Pradeep Rathinam, Vijay Vashee, S Somasegar and Samir Bodas (co-founder & CEO of enterprise solutions Icertis).

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)