This Pune Based Startup Helps Every Enterprise Create Bespoke Customer Experience: Cognilements

• BySheetal Sidhu     |    September 2, 2021

About the Founder

Akshay Khochikar, Co-founder at Cognilements shared his entire journey with Startup Story starting right from his educational background to how he came to become the Co-founder at Cognilements who are helping enterprises give bespoke customer experience. Akshay was born and brought up in Mumbai; from there he shifted to Pune followed by pursuing engineering at IIT Guwahati. He got introduced to IITs through a robotics workshop from IIT Bombay which helped him explore and participate in technology as an extracurricular project. Being an eager exploring student in an environment that IIT Guwahati offered helped him gain the required knowledge and exposure needed across technologies and design discipline. 

 Post college what he felt was missing was some understanding of marketing and business and so thereon he decided to gain exposure and experience in the same and work on it. Akshay joined a venture in 2017 working and building Products in the future tech space. Due to certain team and leadership related reasons he had to exit. After that he took some time off to himself and started looking for what problem out there to focus on in his next venture. That is when Akshay started this venture with his partner Samudragupta and set out to solve the problems of businesses everywhere looking to go digital. 

The Tech Journey 

Akshay told Startup story that before they started their venture, Samudragupta, had been exploring various potential industries. They realized that most end users were not receiving the customer experience the desire with smaller business enterprises looking to go digital as they received with other luxurious brands. Due to this, enterprises everywhere were being hampered on two ends firstly digital adoption and another getting users to engage with their digital presence. So they moved forward to explore various industries including hospitality, real estate, automobiles and more, and they then put together the problem statement. 

In their attempts to figure out what was lacking, the questions they asked were what was that these industries needed to fix & elevate their respective customer experiences. This led them to take a few clients and work with them to understand the demand better; helping them create the MVP (minimum viable product) that could solve these problem statements at scale. They serviced a few clients in the beginning and then moved on to bigger clients as they gained experience and solutions. As they proceeded on their journey each project was chosen specifically to help them improve and iterate on their MVP. 

They are currently at a point where they are building towards delivering on the version 1.0 of their web based platform Relata.io. They have a cloud based platform that empowers enterprises with next generation end to end customer experience, right from helping users more meaningfully explore what the enterprise offers to interacting with the enterprise and finally transacting with them. Their tools enrich end customer’s experience for enterprises using Analytics, AI, Design, VR, AR, talkbots, and more.  They are primarily focussing on real estate, hospitality.

 Story Behind The Name, Cognilements

When asked about the peculiar name they chose for the startup, Aksahy explained to Startup Story that Cognilements came from elements of cognisance, because what they are building is a collective effort of the team putting together their intelligence, knowledge and thoughts. “That is where Cognilements comes from,” he said. 

The Team Behind Cognilements

Akshay told Startup Story that before the pandemic struck they were a team of around 7 which slowly grew despite facing the challenges of the pandemic’s lockdown. But it only helped them come out stronger. Currently they are a team of 50+ people with educational backgrounds in IITs, NITs, NMIMS and other premium institutes. The team is led by Samudragupta, his partner who looks into sales, strategy and administration and acts as the CEO while Akshay himself is the Chief of Innovations who looks into planning the product strategy, technology roadmap, design philosophy and more. Akhay and 4 of his friends from IIT Guwahati and NIT Surat, Sukumar, Lokesh, Chayan and Sachin, work closely with him at the topmost positions across the startup looking after client services, marketing, research and technology respectively.

Tackling The Pandemic

When being subjected to the diverse circumstances due to the pandemic they got the time to reflect and look into the internal processes and automation to adapt rapidly into a completely remote workforce.  The insights that came across because of the experience and expertise of the CEO helped them a great deal here. As of today a good percentage of their workforce is spread across India from Haryana to Bangalore to Kolkata.

Cognilements was awarded as the best startup in a competition conducted by Pune University and looking at their growth since then, University offered them office space inside their green campus. They inaugurated and now opened up the office place to offer their team an alternative space they can work from that is insulated from unpredictable electricity and internet connectivity that a majority of  the team has faced as they worked from home from various parts of India for over a year. Prof Nitin Karmalkar, Vice Chancellor, Pune University and Dr. Apoorva Palkar, Director CIIE, Pune University, inaugurated their new premises.

Area Being Worked On And Future Plans

Akshay told Startup Story that the area that he and his team at Cognilements was working on were refining their technology and product offerings launching version 1 of Relata.io. A dedicated team is working on identifying strategies to enable Cognilements market its product offerings and enter tier 2 cities across India. They already have big names from Hospitality and Real Estate as their clients like Hiranandani, Bramhacorp, Poddar, Runwal, Ozone, Xanadu and more.

They are also actively raising capital to fund their next stretch of growth across international markets and even expanding their technology offerings further. Having delivered 60+ major projects to now, in their next Phase of growth they are targeting onboarding middle of the pyramid clients across India and even internationally to service even more projects at scale.

Given they are B2B they made the conscious decision to be bootstrapped, iterating on solutions and exploring product market fit with lucrative unit economics. They are right now at early revenue phase, with major clients, success stories and actual real world impact to show in at least one industry. As next steps they are trying to focus on raising funds for their next leap as they further build their product offerings and expand their presence beyond metro cities into tier2 cities. 

Challenges Faced 

“Some problems can be solved by interacting with the customers, but there are some things that are escaping their awareness” Akshay said, telling about the problems they face. he further said that this has helped them understand and recognize the problems really fast and iterate on MVPs even faster. 

Secondly, there was an issue with enterprises scared of digital adoption, however with the push for digital India and the circumstances of the pandemic, businesses have realized the need to expand their horizons to next generation digital experience for their customers and their brand.          

A Few Words By The Founder 

“Focus on building a product market fit or a solution in the most lean way possible before heavily investing on the development, design and marketing. This will help filter the mistakes, solutions that won’t work, quickly.” Akshay  Khochikar, Co-Founder, Cognilements. 

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