Failed Startups Taught Them to Build a $960K/Year BI Business
After shutting down ventures in unfamiliar domains, Nitin Sahu and his co-founder built an open-source BI product in the space they knew, reaching $80,000 per month with 51+ enterprise clients.
Part of Indian SaaS builders
Business snapshot
Monthly revenue
$80K/mo
reported Feb 2022
- Business model
- SaaS
- Started
- Jul 2016
- Team
- 2 founders + 42 staff
- Based in
- Hyderabad, Telangana, India
- Monthly revenue
- $80,000
- Customers
- 51+
- Team size
- 43 resources
- Profit margin
- between 35%
- New clients per month
- 1-2
Tools
- AWS
- E2E
- Vtiger
- ERPNext
- Zoho
Founder-reported figures, not independently verified.
Who built it, and what they built
Nitin Sahu is co-founder of Helical Insight, an open-source business intelligence product aimed at B2B enterprise customers. The software targets any company that generates data and wants to turn it into decisions.
The product comes in a free version and a paid version, with the paid tier priced more than 85% below competing products. The company reports 51+ customers across sectors including clinical trials, banking, pharma, manufacturing, education, and call centers, with most clients in the US and India.
Helical Insight reports making $80,000 per month and growing.
Where the idea came from
Nitin studied engineering at Pune University and did post-graduation work specializing in the DW BI space, then spent a few years working in that field at MNCs. He and co-founder Nikhilesh Tiwari, who had been schoolmates, had tried starting ventures before, including a healthcare IT company selling software to hospitals, labs, and blood banks.
That healthcare venture failed because they lacked domain knowledge in a heavily regulated field. The lesson pushed them toward a domain they knew inside out: data warehousing, business intelligence, and ETL.
“Build something in a sector wherein you know the pain points and how you can tackle those pain points.”
They started Helical IT as a pure-play services company focused on open-source BI tools. In the first year they raised an angel round from a friend who believed in their vision, and they say the business has been fairly profitable and did not need a follow-up funding round. Over the years the services arm worked with more than 80+ clients, including CA Technologies, Tata Communications, Fractal Analytics, Technip, and several Pacific island governments.
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