Decade of building products!
LiftOff is a business accelerator working with early-stage companies and individual entrepreneurs having out-of-the-box technology solutions or product ideas. The LiftOff saga began in 2010 in Bengaluru.
It was then that the company started operations as the India Development Centre for UberMedia — a US-based business intelligence and data analytics solutions outfit — with just a couple of professionals.
Two years later, Liftoff came out with its first product called ‘Chime.in’, a rich tweet platform that was built to scale on Hadoop and launched as a competition for Twitter.
Commercial Software Products
LiftOff has built and launched more than 40 commercial software products since. These include Thrively, a product idea for democratizing education that secured a USD 500K funding and is now fetching USD 1.1 million annual revenues; FriendO, a top-ranked highly scalable social network iOS App with 160K daily active users; Veritone, built a radio Ad booking platform.
Business Expansion
Earlier, in 2012, LiftOff had officially acquired UberMedia India, signalling its readiness to launch companies from the idea stage. Two years later, in 2015, LiftOff made its first investment in an Indian startup called Wishberry, a crowd-funding platform for creative artists.
The next five years saw Liftoff crossing significant milestones like the company’s third startup — an AI technology and solutions venture called Veritone — going public with an IPO, the company securing its first overseas customers, namely UK’s AccessPay for building a fintech product and Singapore’s Quilt.AI for creating an investor lens product, and so on.
Matching Human Resources & Work culture
By 2017, Liftoff had grown into a 50-plus-strong family. Today, it has an exceptional team comprising 60-odd young product managers, architects, and engineers, mostly in their late twenties, with an average developmental experience of four-and-a-half years.
Many in the team are serial entrepreneurs themselves who have had a history of successful exits. They have been contributing to the making of an institutional legacy by striving to achieve world-class standards and deliver the highest quality products and innovations to the company’s customers.
Liftoff’s unique, inclusive, no-silos enterprise culture, is based on fairness and concern for its employees. Having a lean team with a flat hierarchy, helps Liftoff move, build, and grow faster.
Product-building Philosophy
Liftoff believes that “from a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to a strong User Experience (UX) design to a long-term product roadmap, execution is everything when you’re bringing a new product to the market”.
On an average, the company takes 12 weeks to convert a unique idea into a marketable product. Almost 99% of the products the company develops come from client referrals.
Liftoff acknowledges that it is a matter of immense satisfaction that, to date, the company could help 30-odd passionate entrepreneurs in transforming their ideas into lucrative businesses.
It is also a matter of pride for the company that it has been instrumental in its clients driving product deliveries with utmost care and attention to detail while executing successful go-to-market strategies.
Plans on the Anvil
Having completed a decade as a successful product-builder and business accelerator, Liftoff has bigger plans on the anvil. “In the coming years, we are betting big on incubating newer growth engines and passionate entrepreneurs with infinite ambition, vision, and ideas, and providing solutions to industry problems. In continuation of our accelerator spirit, we also plan to set up a Liftoff seed fund to promote and invest in Indian startups to be a part of a successful Indian startup ecosystem,” says one company source.
