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‘Experience Bolta Hai for CloudFiles Co-founders!’

Though Vishesh Singhal (Pilani, ’09), Ankit Gupta (Pilani, ’14), and Siddharth Garg (Pilani, ’09) graduated from BITS Pilani at different times, they are now working together on their first startup - CloudFiles. Vishesh takes the lead and shares on behalf of his team about his start-up and being the winner at Pilani Sharks at BGM 2023.

Starting Up

I have an extensive experience with start-ups in the document space. Being the lead engineer in one and product manager in another, I was responsible for their CRM GTMs (Customer Relationship Management Go-To-Market). The close experience with customers gave me the initial idea of creating a tool that is friendly with existing documents (e.g. PDFs), and also very integration-first so that CRM users don’t have to come out of their CRMs in order to do anything. This later developed into an idea for a complete document lifecycle product that is built for CRMs and CloudFiles was born. 

Co-Founders and the Team

We are 3 BITSian co-founders. The team is 10 people strong with an equal split between the tech and the business side.

I, Vishesh have extensive experience developing HubSpot and Salesforce Apps. At CloudFiles, I look after products, investments and GTM.

Siddharth worked in tech for some time, before starting up Navimate on his own. He handles all things business at CloudFlies.

Ankit had also worked in a few start-ups. He handles the complete Tech side of CloudFiles.

We have 5 more BITSians on our team alongside a few other engineers and business professionals.

Future of Cloudfiles

We plan to develop a full-stack document lifecycle product for the CRM customers. CRM is a huge market with more spending done on the supporting ecosystem. Sales teams today use a variety of tools for different document related tasks ranging from generation to discovery to signing. We plan to integrate it all such that friction is reduced and adoption increases among these users.

Currently, we have developed the storage & sharing piece of the puzzle and have already gained great traction in both HubSpot & Salesforce ecosystems. We plan to add the other pieces of generation, discovery, and signing soon such that existing users of these features will have a more integrated stack, while new users will have multiple options on which products to buy with CloudFiles at its center.

Agree to Disagree

We argue animatedly, sometimes even creating extensive docs, where each of us writes in our points of parity. Having three co-founders is ideal since decisions are not hung in mid-air. Moreover, all three of us being creatures of logic (something that BITS imbued in us deeply), always comes to the rescue and we reach an understanding backed by facts rather than feelings. Suffice to say, we try our best to not leave the other person half-satisfied which always leads to better decisions.

 

Pilani Sharks and the BITSAA Global Meet (BGM)

BGM was a great experience where we got to meet some of the most influential BITSians in the ecosystem. It was nostalgic talking to these folks who, even though 20+ years our seniors, still shared the same habits and lingo as we do. The event was very well organized.

Pilani Sharks was a great experience as well, and being one of the winners was a the cherry on top. We also got to talk to some of the most active angel investors in the ecosystem and made a number of connections that we will cherish for the rest of this journey.