Ola co-founder Ankit Bhati opens up about his new SaaS startup Amnic

Ankit Bhati- Cofounder Amnic

Sometime in 2018, Ankit Bhati decided to take the back seat at cab aggregator Ola, which he co-founded with his IIT Bombay friend Bhavish Aggarwal in 2010.

Passionate about travel, Bhati and his wife traversed the world, going all the way to the South Pole, apart from visiting the UK, continental Europe and New Zealand, living out of a suitcase for more than a year. They would have continued for some more months had the Covid-19 pandemic not happened.

Confined in his Bengaluru home during the lockdowns, Bhati realised that he wanted to start another venture, this time on the enterprise side rather than the consumer side. With more than eight years’ experience as a technology officer at Ola and an angel investor himself, Bhati wanted to find a way to make startups get more bang from each buck they invest in technology and the cloud.

The result: Amnic, a software-as-a-service or SaaS firm that he co-founded with former Ola colleagues Satya Nagarajan and Nimish Joshi.

Launched officially in the middle of 2021, Amnic operates in the DevOps (software development and IT operations) toolchain space, where it will help businesses maintain a software development pipeline and make the process easier.

Bhati, who prefers to stay away from the media glare, spoke to Moneycontrol from his office in Indiranagar, in what was his first media interview in years.  A geek and technologist at heart, Bhati is getting used to the transition from CTO to CEO.

“So emotionally, my mind is 10 steps ahead and my language is trying to catch up with that… As a cofounder, especially as a CTO, there comes a time when we have to do a lot of soul searching and prove where all the investments are going, but we won’t be able to quantify… finally, I have found the right platform for it. It will drive objectivity to the engineering function, which is missing so far,” Bhati said about his new venture.

Bhati felt the need for Amnic while interacting with people in whose companies he has invested.

"I was speaking to a couple of my portfolio companies to understand the pain points... Even at Ola I always wanted to fix the process but could never understand where the problem is actually coming from," Bhati said.

During the research phase, Bhati found that every CTO and founder he spoke to faced a quandary he himself grappled with at Ola: "How do I showcase the results of all the investments being put in technology in a startup?"

"Tech and cloud spending is one of the huge costs in a startup, in fact in any startup today... As a CTO, I always wanted feedback on the tech spends, whether it is used properly, whether it's helping the company's revenues," Bhati said.

And that's exactly what Amnic wants to solve by giving meaningful feedback on tech spending and presenting the RoI (return on investment) on tech spending that will help improve enterprises' top and bottom lines.

"Usually for any business, tech is still thought of as a research and development (R&D) cost but this is also something that is essential to the bottom line and top line. But there are no strong feedback loops to find out what the return on investment in technology is," Bhati explained.

Amnic, which is derived from the term amniotic fluid, wants to be that nourishing and protective layer for any firm.

Peak XV partners (previously Sequoia) and some angel investors including Silicon Valley-based Gokul Rajaram and Latentview Analytics founder Venkat Viswanathan have invested in Amnic and it has raised around $15 million, as per data sourced from Tofler.

“We wanted to wait till the business scaled up more but the opportunity came at a time when we least expected it and we thought it will be helpful to build the business further,” Bhati said.

What does Amnic do?

The cloud intelligence platform basically helps engineering teams which include developers and technology leaders with a software product tool that gives constant feedback on whether the investment made in a particular technology or software is adequate to meet business strategy goals. It could also lead to saving costs on the cloud.

The platform also has products that will help DevOps teams monitor a particular software's release process under one tab, which will result in faster software/software update releases to customers.

"We so far work on the discovery and analysis layer of the investment made in any software used or developed in-house. The platform helps in giving feedback to tech leaders on the RoI of the software or tech used in the organisation," Bhati said.

Registered in 2021, it has not yet launched its product, but is working with a few companies and startups as partners to establish it. Amnic presently has around 25 employees and it closely competes with the likes of Harness.IO.

US-based Harness is valued at around $3.7 billion and operates in the developer tool segment and has expanded over the years and includes products like CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment) tooling, cloud pricing optimisation, feature flags and chaos engineering.

Journey from a CTO to a CEO

"I believe that CEOs and CTOs have drastically different roles. But the good thing is the founder role is the same. There is this whole responsibility of hiring the right persons, creating a strong organisational structure and more," Bhati said.

On AI, Bhati says that while it is a disruptor in the developer ecosystem, it is not a threat.

"I do believe that AI will have an impact on the developer ecosystem, but I think there will be less of replacement and more of leverage. The integrating role of a developer is not going anywhere, AI cannot do that," Bhati said.

Learnings from Ola

While Bhati has stepped back from Ola, he continues to be a shareholder and remains friends with Aggarwal.

"When we started Ola in 2010, the whole technology ecosystem was in a flux, there were so many new things that were coming. We were playing a lot of catch-up and at that time there was no playbook on cloud. So most of the time was spent on this technology infrastructure and not on feedback," Bhati recalled.

"At the peak, Ola had about 1,000-plus people in engineering teams. And I took a lot of learnings from there. I wanted to bring something that was an enabler at the same time not clash with the core operations", he added.

Bhati said that there are a lot of mental models that he carried from Ola that he will use at Amnic. However, he strongly believes in growing his business with a nimble team and working and spending more time strengthening the foundational structure.

"Nothing is definitely very different, but I think that's also a function of a B2B versus B2C, which is that we are spending a lot more time building the right foundations," Bhati said.

Bhati also believes in single-threaded executions rather than multitasking.

"I actually have become a fan of single-threaded execution instead of multitasking, because it just becomes easier to sort of, you know, have fewer but more intense priorities than many but more diverse priorities," he added.

Amnic’s journey ahead

While Amnic is still in its build-up phase, it has managed to get around 10-12 clients.

"Our market is mostly the US, Europe, India and APAC… We have struck a partnership with 10-12 companies where we run a design partnership programme with whom we are testing and analysing our own product," Bhati said.

Amnic is also testing AI waters for its operations.

"There are a lot of AI that we already are exploring and using in our platform apart from just generative AI. We use machine learning, reinforcement learning and more… So all of those are the ones including generative AI, which are powering our platform today, as well as will be the future investment that we do. To make our product better," Bhati said.

The company is yet to develop a subscription pricing model for Amnic's product as it is in the product market fit stage which comes after problem market fit and solutions market fit, according to Bhati.

"We charge an annual fee but it is too early to develop a subscription model which we will eventually do," Bhati said.