Corporate360

Varun Chandran spent eight years in the corporate world at companies such as SAP, Oracle, Dell, and NetApp, working in sales, business development, marketing, and consulting across several countries. That experience showed him how sales teams actually worked. In his view, most data providers sold raw contacts, emails, and social profiles, while a salesperson needed to know who the decision-maker was, what their pain points were, and whether they were really in a buying cycle. He set out to build a company that delivered that kind of actionable lead.

Chandran started Corporate360 in 2013 at age 30, bootstrapped with savings from his corporate jobs. He put less than $10,000 into the business. The money went to launching the website, learning machine learning and big data techniques, hiring contractors in India and the Philippines, and running basic outreach email campaigns. The team worked from home offices. The platform gathered data through its own algorithms, including web scraping and mining unstructured sources like résumés, then ran predictive models over that data to flag likely buyers and trigger events such as a competitor's product nearing end of life.

The clearest growth story Chandran shared was a Japanese customer that wanted competitive intelligence on one of its rivals. The initial subscription went well, and the customer referred Corporate360 to its teams in China and Singapore. The deal then spread to Europe and the US and became a global contract with nearly 4,000 sales executives using the product. Corporate360 now sells more than 40,000 seats in total. Its average deal size is around $20K per year, and it sells on annual or multi-year contracts to encourage an ongoing data-refresh model.

The company kept its sales and marketing lean, with seven account managers and no field sales team. Quarterly business reviews with clients fed directly into product changes. LinkedIn ads were the only paid acquisition channel tried. Chandran said the impressions and brand awareness were good, but the sales results did not justify the roughly $200K spent, so the company stopped. Churn was low, under 1% monthly, or about 9.2% annually. Most churn came from early-stage startup pilots, while enterprise renewal exceeded 95%.

As of March 2017, Corporate360 had about 300 paying customers, close to $5 million in ARR, and a team of roughly 70 across five countries, with headquarters in Singapore. Chandran expected the paid acquisition budget to shrink because inbound interest and existing contract expansion were carrying growth.