Reinventing The Way People Interact With Machinery Rocketium helps its team become the best version of themselves, build great products, and create an impact in the world around us

The COVID-19 pandemic affected almost everybody across the planet. The consequent global lockdown hit businesses severely and led many to look for new, innovative ways to maintain business continuity. This, in turn, led to the transformation of business models and forced industry leaders to reevaluate how they do business. Keeping business continuity as a priority, collaborative robots, or cobots for short, and automation have become buzzwords and have panned out as the undisputed champions in support of the changing business processes in manufacturing, supply chain, food supplies, remote work and e-commerce.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an economic turmoil, where industries and businesses have come to a standstill. Organizations are also suffering losses due to the shortfall in productivity due to the lockdown.

At a time when there is a greater thrust on the contactless environment, the demand for such automation technologies has increased manifold, with industries and companies looking at ways to ensure safety, efficiency, productivity, and also profitability.

Automation technologies have been around for some time, with their deployment at various levels such as chatbots, automated tele-calling, voice assistants, or the industrialized robotic environment. But now, the trigger has come in the form of COVID-19, where there seems to be an urgency to deploy these technologies.

Indian IT industry body NASSCOM, in a report title COVID-19 – Tipping for automation, says the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for the development of automation technologies.

Rocketium chief executive officer Satej Sirur in an interview with Entrepreneur India, said, "Anurag and I started Rocketium as a content creation app in 2015. We wanted to enable anyone anywhere to share their ideas and knowledge with visually-appealing content. We started with games then branched to interactive slideshows and then to video. We were lucky to serve hundreds of thousands of users from more than 100 countries. In 2019, we pivoted to B2B as we realized there was a much larger problem to solve there."

Today's Rocketium is different in every conceivable way from when the company started except one: its focus on growth and continuous improvement. Rocketium exists to help its team become the best version of themselves, build great products, and create an impact in the world around us.

This focus on growth and continuous improvement applies to its product as well. High-growth businesses operate in an extremely competitive space and their marketing and design teams are unbelievably stretched to deliver massive growth numbers month after month. Rocketium helps them cut through the clutter and reach customers with visually appealing and relevant content at the right time. It helps them do this in a fraction of the time that they would spend with traditional desktop design software and disconnected collaboration and analytics products. Design-led growth will be crucial to business success as attention spans keep plummeting by the day, Sirur believes.

The company has raised three rounds of funding so far: $300,000 Seed round from Blume and angels in 2017, $700,000 pre-Series A from 1Crowd and Blume in 2018, and $3.2 million Series A from Emergent, 1Crowd, Blume, LetsVenture, and angels.

In 2021, the company has said to have scaled its sales team and started outreach in India, the Middle East, and the US. Rocketium is still not open for everyone to buy as they work closely with a limited set of companies. They are expected to open up self-service purchases and a freemium model next year. They are also exploring strategic partnerships with advertising, e-commerce, and marketing platforms for additional distribution.

Building software that lets anyone create visually appealing images and videos right in a browser is a non-trivial technical effort. Its software goes beyond what any other design software can do and allows users to create and edit not one but tens of thousands of images and videos at once. According to him, this has taken years of research into the latest browser and cloud technologies, optimizations to make its product work even on low-end devices, and cutting-edge development to support hundreds of design features on a browser. They also innovate a lot in how they work. Its teams organize themselves in squads with product team members, business team members, and real users. This decentralized approach lets small teams innovate by putting users front and center. They are driving adoption of this user-centric approach with fun events like their own Oscars.

Sirur believes that Adobe is the undisputed leader in design technology. They have built beloved products for more than 30 years and are the de facto standard. However, today's marketing campaigns need creative content at a speed and scale that Adobe software is not built for. That is why products like Canva and Rocketium are coming up to solve these problems. Canva focuses on helping individuals and small businesses make a few designs quickly. Rocketium focuses on the other end of the spectrum, helping mid-sized and large companies make a large number of designs quickly.

"Today's marketers run more campaigns on multiple platforms with highly targeted content and endless experiments. Such campaigns demand 10-50-time more banners and videos in days, not weeks. Businesses need scale-first design software that automates repetitive work and helps them run more effective campaigns faster," he shared.

"The US is a big opportunity for us. With zero ad spend or sales effort, 30 per cent of our revenue already comes from the US. I will be moving to the US to focus more on that market and replicate our success in Asia. We will also build a team there, starting with sales and then adding more teams. Our product will expand to cater to other aspects of marketing campaigns that need scale such as publishing, analytics, and optimization," Sirur further commented on the future plans for the company.

Today's users are expecting rich, relevant, and real-time content. The tide is not turning back on good design. In fact, the design will be an integral part of business growth and not an afterthought. The company sees itself playing a critical role in this transformation and ensuring that every business communicates in the best way possible with its users.