Quickwork-The most versatile and easy to use real-time integration platform

• ByStartupStory     |    August 24, 2022

“To young aspirants the startup world looks glamorous from outside. In reality, startup journeys are tough, full of challenges and need a lot of grit and patience to see success.” – Dr.Milind R. Agarwal, CEO & Founder of Quickwork in an exclusive interview with Startup Story.

Quickwork is an Indian technology start-up based in Mumbai, India. Dr. Milind R. Agarwal founded the company in October 2015 and later inducted co-founders Deepak Bhatia, Omkar Sathe, and Krish Advani to start building a predictive performance tracking app for entry level employees. The company has pivoted since then and has now become the world’s first enterprise-class integration platform which works in real-time. With users in 145 countries, and a growing enterprise customer base world-wide, Quickwork is rapidly becoming the integration platform (iPaaS) of choice across users world-wide.

The Founder’s Intent

Dr. Milind R Agarwal, the Founder & CEO of Quickwork holds an engineering degree from MIT Manipal, India as well as an MBA in Logistics from Michigan State University, USA.

Milind participated in his family-owned business of transportation and logistics until 2006 when he changed careers and joined the early founding executive team of Gupshup, a conversational messaging company, which became a unicorn in 2021.

In 2015, Milind founded Quickwork with his co-founders and a young team of engineering and marketing interns. Quickwork is now gaining traction among enterprises all over the world, but Milind is far from satisfied. His aim is to make Quickwork the finest and the most powerful integration platform in its class which is loved and chosen by millions of enterprises worldwide. Armed with an ambitious 3-year product roadmap which spans till 2025, he seems to be all set to get Quickwork a leading share out of the Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) market opportunity which is slated to cross $42 Billion by 2030.

“With Quickwork, we want to make automation easy, accessible, affordable and compliant for every single enterprise out there,” says Milind.

The Journey of Quickwork

When Quickwork was started in 2015 to build a predictive performance tracking app for entry level employees, it was initially planned to offer the app in web- and mobile- formats. Around 2016, conversational messaging and NLP based chatbots started becoming very popular and hence the same app was launched in chatbot format. By 2018, over 2-years of engaging with early enterprise customers, Quickwork team started seeing a pattern around the real pain point area which enterprises were struggling to resolve – that of integrating the performance tracking chatbot with their various enterprise systems like CRM, HRMS, ERP, Accounting, Messaging and more, in a secure manner.  Milind observes, “Back then, our engineers were spending 4-6 weeks in manually integrating our chatbot with other systems and apps of our enterprise customers, which had started feeling like an IT services business versus building a product. The bigger challenge for us was to test and certify connections, and then manage change for our customers in these bespoke integrations. This is the moment when all of us collectively decided to take a leap of faith to pivot the product towards a no-code, easy to use, secure, enterprise-class integration platform.”

Quickwork team knew that it would not be an easy task to build an integration platform with diverse problems to be solved around technological complexity of connecting multiple on-cloud and on-premsie apps, systems and services, security risks and creating a reliable, scalable infrastructure.

After putting rigorous thought they concluded it would take a minimum of 2-years and funding support to build out the first version of the integration plarform. Quickwork raised $2 million in 2019 for this purpose, and by Q3 2020, launched the beta version of Quickwork integration, API and automation platform.

The Core Team of Quickwork – Energetic Freshers and Interns

In 2015, when Quickwork started operations, it hired a lot of fresher graduates and student interns to test and prove in-house the hypothesis around predictive performance indicators of a young workforce. Many of the early team members have now become senior engineers and marketers in the company. and hold high positions in the firm.

Omkar Sathe, co-founder & VP (Operations), Quickwork says,”It became a blessing in disguise for us to have hired energetic freshers and interns in our early days – they have no past baggage, no preconceived notions and no unlearning to do. A slight challenge for them could be the steep learning curve they have to climb to learn new problem-solving techniques and latest technologies. As an experienced cofounder team, we felt the energy the young freshers and interns brought to the table was so complementary to our ability to execute our plans successfully.”

Building Quickwork on a Customer Driven Product Roadmap

Quickwork had an advantage while building its platform for 2 reasons –

1. It was designed and architectured from first principles by a team with no prior knowledge of having built a similar platform.
2. It is built on a customer-driven product roadmap. Every feature in Quickwork is adopted in the product roadmap only if it is requested by a handful of customers where the need is seen as a common pattern felt by a larger set of potential customers.

The outcome of the above was that Quickwork became a one of its kind next-gen integration platform that works in real-time. This unique capability gives Quickwork the ability to integrate and automate workflows which involve enterprise- and public- messengers like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Line, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat and more making it useful for consumer facing, conversational use cases. The real-time capability of Quickwork also makes it compatible with IoT and IIoT devices helpling supply chain companies get real-time visibility in their supply chains. Many fintech companies choose to build their workflows and APIs using Quickwork since they need their money flow transactions to be executed in real-time in a secure way.

Growth and Traction of Quickwork

Quickwork is growing rapidly. With  users present in 145 countries, and 108  paying enterprise customers from diverse verticals like banking, fintech, pharma, ecommerce, manufacturing, real estate, and more, Quickwork has processed 25 Billion+ app transactions till date and is currently executing 5,000+ transactions per second, averaging about 200 million transactions per month. The number of applications pre-integrated on Quickwork  platform continues to grow with the current number at 1,500. Quickwork offers its platform in on-cloud, embedded and hybrid instances and workflows in on-cloud, embedded and on-premise variants. The company has started early sales and marketing initiatives in Germany, Japan and Korea and will soon launch in the USA.

Krish Advani, co-founder and CTO, Quickwork says,”We offer our platform as a SaaS subscription. SaaS companies out of India will be the next big wave of super successful startups and Quickwork definitely intended to be one of them.”

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