Whatfix Founder on Building a Global SaaS Giant
Recent interviews with Whatfix co-founder Khadim Batti reveal key lessons from building the Bangalore-based SaaS company, now valued near $900M. Batti emphasizes securing early enterprise pilots with global firms and leveraging case studies to drive inbound interest. His advice is to not wait for a perfect product, but to get it into users' hands quickly and iterate fast based on real-world deployments.
The journey for Whatfix co-founders Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar began not with a digital adoption platform, but with an SEO tool for small businesses called SearchEnabler. After observing poor customer retention, they discovered users needed significant handholding and built a guidance feature named "Fix It" to help. This feature, born from a customer adoption problem, became the foundation for Whatfix. Initially, the two engineering-focused founders struggled, spending three years on a product that failed to gain traction because they spent more time building than talking to customers. With Whatfix, they reversed their approach, focusing on customer validation first. Batti and Kumar sent hundreds of personalized emails with mockups, conducting 30 demos to secure their first two paying customers before heavily investing in development. The company has raised a total of $266 million over 10 rounds from investors including Warburg Pincus, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Peak XV Partners, and Cisco Investments. Its most recent funding was a $125 million Series E round in September 2024, which increased its valuation by over 50%. Whatfix has grown by acquiring companies to expand its capabilities, including the AI personalization platform Airim in 2019, learning management system Nittio Learn in 2021, and mobile assistance platform Leap.is in 2022. This strategy helps bolster its core Digital Adoption Platform (DAP), which provides in-app guidance for enterprise software. The company's core product acts as an interactive layer on top of complex software like ERPs and CRMs, providing real-time, step-by-step guidance to users. This "userization" philosophy aims to make technology adapt to the user, not the other way around, which has attracted over 700 enterprise customers, including more than 80 Fortune 500 companies. Looking ahead, Whatfix is reportedly exploring an IPO in 2026. The company is targeting a $100 million annual recurring revenue run rate and expects to reach profitability in the near future, signaling its maturation from a Bangalore startup to a global SaaS competitor.
