Minjar's acquisition blaze a trail: With $2 Mn funding, it makes $50 Mn within 5 years

Startups are of two kinds. Those who keep raising capital, increasing its valuation on paper and develop a habit of being in news all the time. Meanwhile, the second breed of startups (very low in numbers in contrast to the first breed) tend to focus on fundamentals without being drowned in the frenzy of funding race.

Minjar Cloud is one such company that set an example of how to build a successful business with a little capital. According to a report by The Ken, the cloud assessment and migration service provider has reportedly been acquired in about $50 million by Nutanix, a US-based publicly-listed cloud infrastructure company.

The Minjar exit is an inspiration to many entrepreneurs in SaaS space as well as for the ecosystem. Founded by Vijay Rayapati, Anand Anand, and Aparna Sharma - Minjar had raised a total of $2 million in funding.

While the investors including Blume Ventures, Emergent Ventures, and Contrarian Capital own 25 per cent of stakes in the company, three founders together hold 65 per cent. About 10 per cent equity is held by employees via ESOPs pool.

The Ken report estimates that investors would exit the company with $12 million, a decent 6X upside on their $2 million investment in Minjar. Importantly, each of the three founders will be pocketing a significant $10-12 million.

About 65 out of total 75 employees are slated to make anywhere between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 3 crore each.

Founded in late 2012, Minjar offers cloud assessment and migration services, such as audit, design, build, scale, secure, and sustain; and Big Data services, including EMR migration, Hadoop, and low latency API systems. At the beginning of 2014, it had launched first SaaS product – Botmetric in the US  market.

Botmetric acts as a virtual cloud engineer to reduce the human effort involved in daily operations. It essentially eliminates repetitive tasks, learns from repetitive glitches and helps in decreasing cloud deployment costs.

While talking to the publication Minjar’s co-founders mentioned that support from the SaaS community including Pallav Nadhani, Suresh Sambandam, Ankur Jain, Rishi Bhargava, and Faiyaz Shapurwala was pivotal to the company's success.

Minjar Cloud acquisition is a win-win deal for all stakeholders and will certainly help in strengthening the belief of achieving great with a little funding. Besides Minjar, companies including Browserstack, FusionChart, Wingify, WebEngage are leading the baton of inspiration for many budding entrepreneurs. The ecosystem certainly needs more companies like Minjar.