Analytics firm Fractal raises $25M from TA Associates

Fractal Analytics, an analytics service provider, has raised $25 million (Rs 150 crore) in funding from private equity investor TA Associates, as per a company statement. The funding will primarily be used to fuel global expansion of the firm's big data services and product development, and to increase the size of its sales team.

As part of the deal, Naveen Wadhera, director and country head, TA Associates and Kenneth T Schiciano, managing director at TA Associates, will join the board of Fractal Analytics. Avendus Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor to the company for the deal.

"We are passionate about helping companies leverage advanced analytics to better understand consumers, optimise pricing and marketing, and compete more effectively in the marketplace. Our partnership with TA will help us fuel this passion further," said Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and CEO, Fractal Analytics.

Fractal Analytics was founded in 2000 by a five-member team—Velamakanni, Pranay Agrawal, Nirmal Palaparthi, Pradeep Suryanarayan and Ramakrishna Reddy. Headquartered in the US, the company has offices in London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore and Dubai, and has around 600 employees.

It partners with consumer companies, retailers and financial institutions to understand, predict and influence consumer behaviour and improve marketing, pricing, supply chain, risk and claims management. Fractal Analytics' flagship 'Customer Genomics' solution helps marketers learn complex customer behaviour at an individual level.

Its solution learns from every transaction and customer interaction (including from social media), helping marketers build a complete view of individual customers. In addition, the company builds analytics solutions and forecasts business performance.

According to Agrawal, the company has almost tripled its revenues over the last two years and expects to reach $35 million in revenues in this fiscal year. Almost all of the company's revenues come from Fortune 500 companies.

"We believe that the big data space represents a very significant opportunity. Fractal is one of the leading players in this space globally and has been experiencing accelerated growth, making it the ideal company to partner with. We look forward to working with the company's management team to further build value in Fractal," said Wadhera.

TA Associates has invested in more than 425 companies around the world and has raised $18 billion in capital. Its average ticket size in India ranges between $45 million and $125 million. The Boston-headquartered private equity firm has been operating in a mid-market deal-making space in India. It leads buyouts and minority recapitalisations of profitable growth companies in the technology, financial services, business services, healthcare and consumer industries.

The PE firm invested $45 million in Micromax in 2009 and also bought stake in the diagnostics chain Dr Lal PathLabs in a secondary deal. The stake was bought from Sequoia Capital. It also invested $40 million for an undisclosed stake in privately owned Tega Industries, a manufacturer of consumables for the mining industry. In 2011, it exited its five-year-old pre-IPO investment in telecom firm Idea Cellular through share sales in the open market.

In April last year, it invested in e-payment processing services provider BillDesk which is part of IndiaIdeas.com Ltd.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)