About the Start-up:
Q) What is the URL of your start-up?
Q) What problem your Start-up solving? or planning to solve?
A) During 2009, when data levels were surging on the Web, businesses desired to derive insights from data and run analysis for various use cases. However, data sources were few and far between, and where available noise accompanied it. This bloated data making it look much bigger.
Obtaining refined, relevant data was tedious and challenging. If businesses had the relevant data readily available it would maintain their business edge and catapult them ahead of competition.
This is what PromptCloud resolved to do. The aim of our business was to provide noise-free structured data; and this was central to our inception.
Quite simply, we offered the solution to the data acquisition challenge. Our deliverable was ready-to-use data which saved analysts’ time gathering it on the Web.
Q) How does it benefit the end user?
A) We have engineered the Data as a Service (DaaS) platform that helps gather relevant data from user-specified sources with the desired schema at predetermined frequencies.
This DaaS platform offers Big data solutions to enterprises.
Our offerings are segmented into 3 categories-
- Low-latency Large-scale Crawls: This service delivers data feeds from ~100,000 sites or more for news, blogs, articles, stock data, etc. It is of relevance to finance-based enterprises or those involved in Sentiment analysis or Brand monitoring. This allows mining data as soon as it is published on the Web.
- Hosted Indexing: This component helps clients obtain data sets based on different criteria specified. Clients can obtain data sets via our data API or their own enterprise data.
This service is particularly useful if clients do not wish to directly deal with large data volumes or want to enable search on existing data sets.
- Site-specific Data Crawl and Extraction: Under our flagship offering, we crawl the sources of client interest on the Web and format the data into an XML/CSV as per desired schema. These data feeds are then delivered via our API on an on-going basis as per specified frequency.
We do both – deep crawl, a one-time crawl of all past data; and refresh crawl, where data deltas are delivered as and when data refreshes on given site(s).
There are other related value-added services on top of this data. Details of the same can be found on here.
Q) Is there any unique feature in your start-up product/Service? Which differentiates you from rest of the Products/Services?
A) What sets us and our product is the highly-scalable customized solutions. Our clients need only to list sites, define schema and fix frequency to receive data and we do the rest. All they do then is just download continuous feeds from our API.
This platform is unique, in the sense that it accommodates any (or every) requirement irrespective of data scale and vertical.
Q) What is the current state of your start-up (idea, product testing and beta, live)?
A) As a start-up, we have successfully been serving enterprise customers for about 5 years now. We are looking to hire new talents and about to move into a larger office.
With product innovation, we have our own proprietary software that uses machine-learning components that aids acquiring structured data on the web.
Q) When was your start-up born?
A) 2009
Q) How many Jobs your start-up created till to-date (we believe the co-founders Jobs are the first ones created (
A) Currently, we are a 20-member team.
Q) What business Domain/ Industry vertical your Start-up is focused on?
A) As an organization we are focused in the domain of customized large-scale data crawling, extraction and cloud-computing solutions. We are a technology company leveraging cloud-computing solutions and have our proprietary software that uses machine-learning components that aids acquiring structured data on the web.
As providers of service/product, we are vertically agnostic. That is to say that we cater to clients from all domains. This includes (but not limited to): e-commerce, travel, market research, and classifieds. Our geographical reach is global since we prefer larger and challenging playing fields as opposed to bracketed market domains.
About the Founders:
Prashant Kumar (Founder)
Before starting PromptCloud in late 2009, Prashant Kumar was at Yahoo! with their data team working on Yahoo! Frontpage which was one of its hottest products then. He was mostly involved in data crunching using big data technologies that were still evolving. Prashant graduated with a B.Tech-M.Tech dual degree in CS from IIT Kanpur in 2007.
Q) Where you did get the idea?
A) PromptCloud was not a conscious decision. It started with a product in the consumer space in 2008 that gathered reviews from the web and sent it over SMS, but this didn’t catch up.
With this product out in the market, PromptCloud Founder, Prashant saw that the need to gather data was rising in his network. This need was rooted in gathering data from various sources and employing it in businesses for sentiment analysis, brand monitoring, price comparison and the like.
Prashant then tweaked and extended his existing product to create a platform that could deal with big data, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Q) What are their LinkedIn profiles
A) Prashant Kumar
Q) Where is your start-up located?
A) Bangalore
Q) Do you have any “open jobs” right now (links, or list jobs)
A) here
Q) What is the Link of your start-up -Company page on LinkedIn
A) here
About the Technology:
Q) What Technology Stack do you use?
A) It started with some open source technologies like Hadoop, Nutch, Cassandra and some standard key-value stores like Voldemort. However, as with technologies, our stack has evolved a great deal with us building our own components of top, shifting, and optimizing to suit our needs.
Q) Did you do any Technology innovation to bring this start-up to life?
A) Yes. We have built a state-of-the-art DaaS platform which on completion of some pending work will be patent-worthy.
About the money:
Q) How did you pool up $$$ to get started/ build a MVP (Minimum value product)?
A) At the start, this wasn’t a capital-intensive solution and the initial funds came from Prashant’s savings after a year-old job. Within a few months, the cash started coming in and has been that way so far.
Summarily, the cash flow has never been a challenge internally.
Q) How did you guys/girls overcome the problem of Chick first egg first (Product first or Investment first) ?
A) It’s not viable to wait for the product to be built end-to-end before exposing it to the market. In fact, most of the essential features are anticipated via client requirements. Hence, we took the middle ground, put in some funds, use open-source, make it work for the basic-use cases and then add on top with the cash and arising needs from existing customers.
Q) How much are you guys funded now?
A) We are bootstrapped.
Q) Are you looking for any more funding? Do you want investors to contact you? How to contact you?
A) The revenues we generate from our valued customers has helped us – and them – grow together. We are not looking for any external funding yet.
