Matrix Partners India announces seed investment in Anaek

New York/New Delhi '“ March 6, 2018: Matrix Partners India today announced its investment in Anaek, a SaaS company that streamlines and simplifies daily business processes through instant messaging.

Ujjwal Grover and Kanav Abrol founded Anaek, to automate routine business processes related to human resources and office administration functions such as, employee attendance, time tracking, expense filing and office management. Both founders hail from an engineering and product background, and have previously worked at Microsoft, ESPN, Flipboard, Hike and Yahoo. They first met in 2012 while working at LinkedIn and more recently, they worked together at PepperTap where Ujjwal headed engineering and Kanav headed the product and design functions.

Workplace communication is being transformed by Slack, which is dominating the industry and reinventing how employees interact. With the consumerization of IT well underway, businesses are increasingly focused on simplicity and productivity gains when buying new software. Anaek delivers on ease of use through its conversational products that let employees accomplish complex workflows through simple chat messages. Instead of logging onto a website or installing a new app, employees simply talk to Anaek's chatbots right inside Slack and complete tasks instantly.

"In early 2016, Ujjwal and I had quit our jobs and were figuring out our next move. We both came to the realization that over the years we had seen many HR systems, many of them really good, yet they were not embraced by our teams. For example, I had to often manually collate the leave requests from my team from across email, WhatsApp and text messages and then submit those in our official HR tool. So, the tools in fact added more paperwork. We hated the idea of '˜doing work about work.'' said Kanav, co-founder of Anaek.

"With Anaek, we set out to make software that people would actually want to use. Slack was born in 2013 and soon became the fastest growing enterprise software company in history. Slack had just launched its app store, a few months earlier in December 2015, and we concluded that this would be the ideal platform for us to realize our vision of streamlining business processes. The conversational nature of Anaek's software allows users to learn our software intuitively - by simply talking to our chatbots. No new apps to install and no forms to fill!' added Ujjwal, co-founder, Anaek.

Anaek's products were first launched in late 2016 and have since featured many times in the Slack Apps Directory. Right now, the Slack App Directory is where the Apple App Store was back in 2008 with just about a 1000 apps available. Now Apple App Store has over 2 million apps that generate over $25B annually while the more enterprise focused SalesForce's AppExchange is on track generate $2B of developer revenue this year.

"Instant messaging has permeated workplace communication across markets, paving the way for seamless employee interactions. Anaek's enterprise chatbots help employees complete routine business processes in a simple and efficient manner. We look forward to partnering with Kanav and Ujjwal in this journey.' said Tarun Davda, Managing Director, Matrix India.

About Anaek:
Anaek's mission is to drive productivity and efficiency through collaboration. Anaek's suite of intelligent chatbots, are built on top of Slack, to simplify complicated workflows like time-off, employee time sheets, expense reporting and other sundry office tasks. To learn more about Anaek, visit www.anaek.com. To learn more about its products visit their respective websites at www.attendancebot.com, www.expensetron.com and www.officeamp.com. For more information write to press@anaek.com

About Matrix Partners India:
Matrix Partners India is an investment firm with INR 4,500 crore under management. The firm invests in companies targeting the Indian enterprise and consumer market at the seed, early and early growth stages. The firm has invested in several market leading companies in the consumer technology space including Ola (local transportation), Quikr (online classifieds), Practo (digital health platform), Dailyhunt (mobile local language platform), Mswipe (mobile POS), Limeroad (mobile social commerce marketplace), Treebo (digital hotel chain) and Belong (recruitment platform) among others. Matrix Partners has a global network of funds investing in the US, China and India with US $4 billion under management. Further information is available at www.matrixpartners.in