Inside Innovaccer’s journey to $100 million ARR; bold pivots and relentless learning

Abhinav Shashank pitched a 400-pages report as a trainee inside a
Fortune 500 company and managed to get $20 million funding for
the same, much before he actually became an entrepreneur. After
getting his idea approved, Abhinav worked on building the product
in Bangalore, scoped out manufacturing in Shanghai apart from
spending time in Dallas, U.S., giving him an overall experience
in building a truly global product. 


“By the time I left, it was already a $40 million revenue
business,” Abhinav tells me in this podcast. 


Is there a path to doing this on my own, he remembers asking
himself around that time. 


For Abhinav, it was almost like doing a startup again, this time,
however, without the protection of a Fortune 500 company.
Clearly, there is a lot of value in being entrepreneurial, which
is mostly underrated. 


An IIT Kharagpur alumni, Abhinav and his batchmates earlier
planned to build “a Kharagpur Consulting Group”, on the lines of
the famous consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group, he
recollects jokingly. 


On a more serious note, Abhinav started looking at the world of
big data, which is mostly unstructured, and how to make sense of
it for customers. 


“How do you manage this explosion of information for innovation?”


The early prototype for Innovaccer was aimed at helping academic
institutions such as Harvard make sense of information. But when
he met Rajan Anandan of Sequoia, thanks to the connection made by
Aneesh Reddy of Capillary, the first pivot happened.


“Why don’t you build this for the enterprise?”


Since then, Innovacer has been growing its revenues at over 100%
annually and is set to cross the $100 million ARR mark by
sometime next year. 


The big opportunity has been to tap into the U.S. healthcare
market, which is almost like the fifth largest economy in the
world, according to him. And the quality of healthcare data
continues to be patchy. 


“The person you’re trusting with your life knows less about you
than your retailer does.”


Before Innovaccer made its second pivot to focus entirely on the
healthcare market, the startup was already doing $4 million in
ARR. 


“We decided to shut down the existing $4 million business, right
after the $12 million fundraise from Westbridge,” he recalls.
That happened at the first board meeting with Innovaccer’s new
investors. 


There are broader entrepreneurial lessons too.


“As an entrepreneur, most of your days have their lows. There are
only a few of those elusive high points that you are living for
that carry you through all the lows,” he says. 


Listen to this podcast with Abhinav of Innovaccer to learn more
about managing bold pivots, almost like changing the engines of a
plane while still in the flight, and staying bluntly honest to
create a $100 million ARR business.