Whatfix: A class of its own

Taking a leap into the unknown

The path to that $900 million, category-defining company began in an unlikely way: a casual conversation between two colleagues who barely knew one another outside work. Batti and Kumar met during the early 2000s, when both worked at Huawei, the China-based equipment maker, in India. Batti was leading a new business intelligence unit; about a year later Kumar, fresh with a master’s degree in computer science, joined his team. “Vara was one of the most phenomenal engineers I had ever met,” Batti says. For his part, Kumar looked up to Batti as a strong leader. But the pair moved in their own circles. “I had my set of friends at Huawei, and he had his,” Kumar says.

The idea of founding a company together was floated so casually that either might have wondered if the other was serious. At the office late one night, Batti, who had been working at Huawei for 10 years, asked Kumar, who had been there for nine, to join him for coffee in the company cafeteria. 

“I said, ‘Listen, we’ve been building this product for years, I feel we should do something on our own,’” Batti recalls. “And he said, ‘Yeah, I feel the same way.’” Until then, neither had thought seriously about founding a company. To make sure they were on the same page, Batti added: “OK, what that means is quitting Huawei. And he told me, ‘I know.’”

“The whole conversation lasted maybe five minutes,” Kumar says. 

Most founders have a notion of what they want to build before quitting a stable job. Batti and Kumar had only a willingness to leap. They spent weeks batting around ideas — everything from business-intelligence tools to social-media plays — before finally settling on a search-optimization platform for small businesses. In June 2010, they launched SearchEnabler, a product that crawled a company’s website and offered tips for improving its visibility. 

For three years, Batti and Kumar slowly built a base of paying customers but kept hitting the same wall: Small businesses lacked the know-how to act on their SEO advice. Their breakthrough — a “Fix it” button that guided users step-by-step — became the seed of a larger idea. It also forced a hard choice: keep grinding on a limited product or chase the bigger opportunity. “The one thing we both agreed on is we wouldn’t do both,” Kumar says. After four agonizing days, they shut down SearchEnabler, refunded customers, and risked everything on the idea that became Whatfix.

The first iteration of Whatfix still had a consumer and small business feel, a kind of alternative to YouTube for “how-to” questions about software. The product was akin to a GPS that guided users through software step-by-step: click here, enter this field, avoid that mistake. It was all delivered inside the application itself rather than in a separate video or PDF. Almost immediately, larger businesses came knocking. 

The need was apparent. The more money companies had invested in software, the deeper their frustration. Many had shelled out millions for complex applications packed with features that employees barely understood or never touched, leaving much of that investment wasted, and its promise of efficiency unfulfilled. That drew Whatfix into the enterprise world but presented a new challenge: positioning. The value was clear — helping companies get more out of the software they had already bought. But clarity wasn’t enough. Large enterprises needed to slot vendors into familiar boxes — and Whatfix didn’t yet have one.

“For smaller organizations, it’s enough to show you can solve their problem,” says Sharath Hari, a vice president at the Everest Group, a consulting firm that advises businesses on large software purchases. “But for the enterprise, you need to be in a category, because that’s how budgets are allocated and RFPs are written.” In other words, if Whatfix wanted to sell to the big leagues, it had to carve out its own category.

Riding the coattails of incumbents

Building a new product is hard, carving out a new category harder. In the early years, Whatfix cycled through multiple descriptors — “onboarding system,” “guidance system,” even “employee performance support systems,” an industry term from the past. “We were looking for a home,” Batti says. “But nothing captured what we were trying to do.”

As they searched for a reliable calling card with customers, they borrowed credibility from established players. They turned their attention to verticals where CIOs were already spending heavily: customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and product lifecycle management (PLM). Their product could sit on top of any of those apps, but chasing all of them was a recipe for burning cash. So the founders focused on two anchor applications where every big company spent heavily: CRM and human resources (HR). They tailored their pitch to the bellwethers in the category, and established a strong OEM partnership with one. They seeded the market with blogs and white papers written in the language of customer engagement and hosted webinars for anyone they could convince to watch. “Education was the biggest challenge,” says Supriya Goswami, Whatfix's head of marketing. “Buyers didn’t even know this kind of solution existed, so we had to create constant content to build awareness and trust.” Until Whatfix had a recognized category of its own, the best way to win mindshare was to ride the coattails of others. 

Batti and Kumar also began attending the big conferences hosted by enterprise software giants. Their first splash came at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2015 in San Francisco. They spent $25,000 for a kiosk-sized booth and travel expenses, nearly 10 percent of the company’s cash on hand. But the gamble paid off. Batti and Kumar made the trip, joined by Vispi Daver, who had participated in a $900,000 angel round one year earlier. “What struck me was how quickly people connected with the product,” says Daver, now the company’s global head of sales. “They’d see the demo and immediately say, ‘Yes, this is what we need.’” On their first day, Batti quoted $10,000 for a license — and the customer asked if he meant per month rather than per year. “That’s when we realized that even if we just focused on one application like Salesforce, we could build a hundred-million-dollar company,” Batti says. 

The conference didn’t just validate their approach; it also opened the U.S. market, which today accounts for the majority of Whatfix’s revenue, followed by a strong presence in EMEA and APAC. A pattern emerged from that debut that became the company’s growth engine: Customers would start with a small pilot project worth a few thousand dollars and, over time, expand into multimillion-dollar contracts. “Whatfix started small, sometimes just a single use case inside one department,” says Narendra Rathi, a Whatfix board member and investment director at SoftBank. “But once it proved its value, customers kept spending more. Accounts that began at $20,000 have grown into million-dollar relationships.”

A category is born

While conferences gave the company visibility, Batti and Kumar realized that approval from analysts would lend them much-needed legitimacy. In the world of category creation, big firms such as Gartner and Forrester often serve as gatekeepers. With that in mind, Whatfix leaned into analyst relations unusually early for a startup its size. “We started focusing on the analysts a couple of years after we founded the company,” Batti says. “Because there was no category for us yet, we would go to CRM analysts and talk to them. We’d do the same with HR analysts, looking for ways to be included in their reports until our own category took shape.” Even a brief mention meant a boost in credibility for a small Indian startup. 

Whatfix was two years old when the founders discovered they had a better-funded rival after reading a TechCrunch story about a startup that had just raised $25 million. The news was a gut punch — and a gift. The startup was calling itself a “digital adoption” company and had the marketing budget to make the term stick. “When a bigger player spends heavily to evangelize a concept and shape a category, smaller companies can ride that wave,” says Everest’s Hari. “That’s exactly what Whatfix did, piggybacking on the startup’s efforts while carving out its own identity.” Where its rival specialized in onboarding, Whatfix took a broader approach, casting itself as a platform that helped companies get a better return on their software investments.

Gartner was the first of the big firms to start using “digital adoption.” In 2020, the firm released a report titled, “Improve Employee Usage, Engagement and Productivity With Digital Adoption Solutions.” Gartner predicted that by 2025, 70% of organizations would deploy digital adoption solutions, a forecast that bode well for a company that helped create the category. Since then, the digital adoption solutions market topped $1 billion in 2024, up 28% from a year earlier, and is expected to grow between 15% and 20% in 2025, despite economic uncertainty, according to Gartner.  

Everest added an important nuance. Analysts there also used “digital adoption” but favored “platform” over “service” because the term struck them as too broad. The industry coalesced around “digital adoption platform,” and the DAP acronym took its place along countless others in the world of SaaS. The designation favored a company positioning itself as a full platform, not just an onboarding tool. Enterprise buyers now issue RFPs with “DAP” listed as a requirement. For Whatfix, it was a dream outcome: Identify the white space, help name it, and then be in position to capitalize when outsiders validate this new category as potentially enormous.

Flipping the script

While persuading analysts and buyers, Batti and Kumar had to make sure Whatfix’s product kept pace. The early focus on CRM and HR gave them traction. But the ambition was always broader: a layer to help employees get more out of the full suite of enterprise apps a company depended on. The company also targeted verticals such as manufacturing and healthcare in search of expensive, underutilized tools. Over time, it layered in AI and other new technologies, creating a platform that could anticipate needs and meet people where they are.

“The product has become more proactive in the flow of work,” says Kumar, who heads R&D at Whatfix. “It identifies the context of the application and the intent of users, and it guides them with the best action. That’s an area where we’re continuing to invest alongside some AI-first products in our R&D lab.” AI is central to that effort — automating repetitive steps inside enterprise apps, building assistants that can generate guides or surface insights, and personalizing support based on an employee’s role or past activity. 

With AI, the platform can tailor guides to an employee’s role or make suggestions based on their experience using an app. 

In 2022, Whatfix rolled out a product analytics tool that gives companies visibility into how employees are using their software. It turns anecdotes about underutilized apps into data CIOs can take to their boardrooms. In 2024, the company introduced Mirror, a simulation tool that lets companies create sandbox versions of their systems for training, allowing employees to practice without the risk of disrupting live systems and data. “It was never just about creating guides to steer users,” Kumar says. “It was about helping enterprises see, measure, and improve how work really gets done.”  

AI not only fuels the Whatfix platform but is also widening the company mission by helping clients make use of their own AI investments. Companies have been pouring money into chatbots and other generative AI products but often see disappointingly low usage among employees. That prompted Microsoft, for example, to turn to Whatfix to boost adoption of its Copilot chatbot across Microsoft’s sales ecosystem — including direct field sellers, customer-facing sellers, and partner resellers. Whatfix reported a six-fold increase in Copilot usage within two weeks among sellers and resellers who paired Microsoft’s product with its platform.  

Even with digital adoption now established, Whatfix still invests heavily in the ecosystem that supports the category. It has three employees dedicated to analyst relations, and teams still show up at annual conferences hosted by the large software makers and at trade shows run by Gartner and other research firms. “We participate in about 120 events a year,” says Goswami. That includes its own flagship conference in India and one-day Inspire programs it holds in a dozen or so U.S. cities each year.