Clootrack has raised roughly $4.5 million since it was founded in April 2017 — a rounding error next to the sums Indian consumer-tech has burned through in the same period. Yet in November 2025, OpenAI publicly credited the Bengaluru company for pushing more than 100 billion tokens through its infrastructure for “voice of the customer” analysis, a scale claim that sits oddly next to a funding history so thin that its own founder once described the business, back in 2019, as running on a “low burn ratio.”
The company’s pitch has changed at least three times in nine years: a brand-perception dashboard in 2019, a churn-prediction platform for consumer brands by 2021, and an “AI Super Agent” rebuilt on OpenAI’s models by 2024. What has barely moved is the client count — Clootrack said it served 150-plus enterprise customers in September 2021, and its own website still cites the same figure five years later. This is a company that has grown mostly by depth, not breadth, run by a founder whose previous venture was swallowed by a startup that collapsed within four months of buying it.
Quick facts
| Company | Clootrack (legal entity: Clootrack Software Labs Private Limited) |
| Founded | 17 April 2017 (incorporated; registered office Kakkanad, Kochi, Kerala) |
| Founder(s) | Shameel Abdulla (CEO), Subbakrishna Rao (CTO) |
| Business | AI-driven Voice of the Customer (VoC) analytics platform for large enterprises, marketed since 2024–25 as an “AI Super Agent” |
| Latest disclosed revenue signal | Not fully disclosed; FY2021 operating revenue fell in the ₹1–100 crore band per an RoC-filing-based estimate (Tofler) |
| Latest disclosed profit/loss | Not publicly disclosed for any year |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) |
| Market value / last valuation | Not disclosed; last disclosed funding event was its Series A in September 2021 |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Shameel Abdulla (CEO); board seats held by representatives of Indian Angel Network, Unicorn India Ventures and Inventus Capital India (now Athera Venture Partners) |
What they do
Clootrack sells an AI-driven Voice of the Customer analytics platform to large, consumer-facing enterprises rather than to individual consumers. The system ingests customer feedback from reviews, surveys, contact-centre transcripts, social media and other unstructured sources, then uses what the company describes as a patented unsupervised machine-learning engine — one that surfaces recurring themes and sentiment drivers without anyone having to manually tag the data first — to explain why customers are satisfied, churning or returning products. Since 2024 it has layered “AI agents” and a generative-AI assistant called Genie on top of that engine, aimed at turning analysis directly into action: flagging a returns spike, drafting a decision memo, or triggering a workflow rather than just producing a dashboard. As of September 2021 it described its client base as spanning retail, direct-to-consumer, banking, automotive, travel and mobile-app companies (TechCrunch, September 2021); as of September 2026 its own website names PointClickCare, HSBC, Nissan, Tory Burch, Mejuri, Crompton Greaves, Xiaomi, Vivo, Wipro, Deloitte and Omnicom Media Group among users of the platform (Clootrack website). It offers the product as multi-tenant SaaS or self-hosted on a customer’s own Microsoft Azure tenant for clients unwilling to send customer data to a shared cloud (Clootrack website).
The origin
Shameel Abdulla is an electronics engineering graduate of the College of Engineering Trivandrum who worked as a senior software engineer at Dell EMC before turning entrepreneur. In June 2013 he co-founded Jiffstore Software Labs, a Bengaluru mobile-commerce startup, with Satish Basavaraj, Aswin Ramachandran and Sandeep Sreenath. On 21 December 2015, Jiffstore was acquired by PepperTap, the Sequoia- and SAIF-backed hyperlocal grocery-delivery company, in a cash-and-stock deal for an undisclosed sum; the entire Jiffstore team moved into PepperTap’s Gurgaon and Bengaluru offices, and Abdulla became PepperTap’s AVP of Product for special projects, running reverse logistics (Inc42, December 2015).
PepperTap did not last long after the acquisition it had just made. Having raised close to $60 million from Sequoia Capital, SAIF Partners, Snapdeal and Innoven Capital across four rounds between February and December 2015, the company shut down its consumer grocery-delivery app at the end of April 2016 and pivoted what remained into a reverse-logistics business, Nuvo Logistics, serving Paytm, Snapdeal and Shopclues (Inc42, April 2016). No public source has Abdulla stating on record that this collapse shaped his next move, so that connection is left as a fact of timing rather than a quoted motive: Clootrack Software Labs was incorporated on 17 April 2017, almost exactly a year after PepperTap’s consumer app went dark, with Abdulla as CEO and Subbakrishna Rao — a repeat founder whose earlier two decades ran through analytics and technology-leadership roles, including as CTO at Zee Technologies Kuala Lumpur and more than a decade in healthcare administration and research at Vittala International Institute of Ophthalmology and Prabha Eye Clinic — as co-founder and CTO (Instafinancials director records; LinkedIn/Crunchbase career summaries).
The struggle years
Clootrack’s first two years look less like a startup story and more like a research project being kept alive on a shoestring. There is no public record of a near-collapse, but there is a clear pattern of long, unfunded stretches between the moments the company chose to talk about money at all.
- 31 May 2017: a first, undisclosed-amount seed round from Unicorn India Ventures, weeks after incorporation (Inc42 funding tracker).
- January 2019, roughly 20 months later: the first disclosed institutional cheque of any size — a $500,000 seed round from Indian Angel Network, Unicorn India Ventures, SEA Fund and Malabar Angel Network, with angel participation from Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and then-Nissan Motor global CIO Anthony Thomas (YourStory/TheNewsMinute, January 2019). Abdulla told TheNewsMinute at the time that the company had maintained a “low burn ratio” while it built out its algorithms — founder-speak for years spent on thin runway rather than paid growth.
- September 2021, another 32 months later: a $4 million Series A, the only other disclosed round in the company’s history (TechCrunch, September 2021).
Two multi-year fundraising gaps inside a five-year window is an unusual rhythm in a category where better-capitalised rivals raise $50–100 million a year just to keep pace. The product’s own positioning shifted underneath that slow capital drip: in January 2019 it was pitched as “the first of its kind AI-driven data analytics platform that discovers and measures brand perceptions in real time” (TheNewsMinute); by September 2021 the pitch had narrowed to helping consumer brands identify the drivers of retention and churn (TechCrunch); by 2024–26 it had been rebuilt again as an agentic “AI Super Agent” for Voice of the Customer (Clootrack press materials). Three different elevator pitches for the same company in nine years is itself a form of pivoting, even without a single dramatic near-death date attached to it.
The turning point
The clearest inflection in Clootrack’s history is not a funding event but a technology one. During 2024, the company migrated the “patented unsupervised thematic analysis engine” that had been its core differentiator since the 2019-era pitch onto OpenAI’s models (Clootrack press release, November 2025). On 12 March 2025 it launched Neo, described in its own materials as “the AI-powered insight engine that unveils every hidden driver of consumer behaviour” — its first fully agentic workflow product, capable of turning raw feedback into recommended actions rather than just a report (Clootrack press release, March 2025). On 19 November 2025, OpenAI itself publicly recognised Clootrack for surpassing 100 billion tokens processed for Voice of the Customer analytics (Clootrack press release, citing OpenAI). By 10 June 2026 the company had gone a step further, launching its own MCP (Model Context Protocol) server “to bring reliable customer intelligence to any AI workfront,” letting other AI agents pull Clootrack’s data to generate reports, raise tickets and trigger alerts automatically (Clootrack press release, June 2026).
The numbers either side of that shift are stark by contrast, not by scale: before 2024, Clootrack was one of dozens of “CX analytics” dashboard vendors competing chiefly on natural-language-processing accuracy, with a funding total still stuck below $5 million. After 2024, it had a specific, dated, third-party-verified usage claim (100 billion tokens, per OpenAI) that no funding round had ever given it, without having raised a disclosed dollar of new institutional capital to build it.
The money behind it
- Round 1 — seed, 31 May 2017: undisclosed amount from Unicorn India Ventures (Inc42 funding tracker).
- Round 2 — seed, January 2019: $500,000, led by Indian Angel Network, with Unicorn India Ventures, SEA Fund, Malabar Angel Network and angel investors including Kris Gopalakrishnan (YourStory/TheNewsMinute, January 2019).
- Round 3 — Series A, 2–3 September 2021: $4 million led by Inventus Capital India (subsequently rebranded Athera Venture Partners), with continued participation from Unicorn India Ventures, IAN Fund and Salamander Excubator Angel Fund, plus a personal investment from Jiffy.ai CEO Babu Sivadasan (TechCrunch, September 2021).
- Total disclosed: about $4.5–4.6 million across three rounds as of September 2021 — Inc42’s funding tracker puts cumulative disclosed funding at “$4.50 million+” over three rounds, and TechCrunch separately put the Series A close, including the side investment, at “$4.6 million in total.” No further institutional round has been publicly reported since; this piece could not independently verify a later round referenced only in passing on aggregator sites, so it has been left out rather than guessed at.
- Board composition corroborates the cap table: Clootrack Software Labs’ filed director list includes Padmaja Shailen Ruparel, a co-founder of Indian Angel Network, and Anil Rambilash Joshi, a co-founder of Unicorn India Ventures, alongside Parag Dhol of Inventus Capital India/Athera Venture Partners — each seat lining up with one of the named institutional backers above (Instafinancials director records, sourced to RoC filings).
How it makes money
Clootrack is an enterprise SaaS business, not a marketplace or a transaction-fee business: revenue comes from multi-year contracts with large brands rather than a per-transaction take rate. Seafund, one of its seed investors, described the model in its own investment note as “recurring revenue through enterprise contracts with global brands,” priced around the volume of feedback data ingested and the number of stakeholder seats using the dashboards and agents (Seafund investment page). Two structural features shape where the margin sits:
- The IP is the pricing lever. Abdulla holds multiple patents tied to the company’s unsupervised theme-detection approach; that differentiated NLP layer is what is meant to justify enterprise contract pricing rather than a client simply building a similar pipeline on top of a general-purpose LLM in-house (LinkedIn/company profile; Clootrack website).
- Deployment flexibility trades margin for market access. Offering a self-hosted option on a customer’s own Azure tenant, alongside standard multi-tenant SaaS, almost certainly costs more to service per client than a purely shared-cloud product — but it is what lets Clootrack sell into regulated sectors such as banking and healthcare that will not send customer data to a third-party cloud at all (Clootrack website).
The part outsiders most often get wrong: Clootrack is frequently lumped in with survey-and-feedback tools such as Qualtrics. Its own founders have argued since at least 2019 that its real edge is analysing feedback nobody was asked to give — reviews, social posts, support tickets and call transcripts — rather than responses to a company-designed survey instrument (TheNewsMinute, January 2019; Clootrack website, 2026).
The numbers
Clootrack has never listed, never filed for an IPO, and does not publish an annual report or investor letter. Its Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings exist, but the line-by-line revenue and profit/loss figures sit behind paid aggregator subscriptions (Tofler Pro, InstaFinancials premium reports) that this review did not purchase and therefore cannot responsibly reproduce as fact. What is verifiable from sources actually available without a paywall is thinner than a typical Deep Dive numbers table, and is presented as such rather than padded:
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Profit/(Loss) |
| FY2021 (year to 31 Mar 2021) | Somewhere in the ₹1–100 crore operating-revenue band (Tofler, based on the company’s RoC filing — a range this wide only confirms single- to low-double-digit-crore scale, not a precise figure) | Not disclosed |
| FY2022 – FY2025 | Not publicly disclosed | Not publicly disclosed |
- Growth signal, not a figure: Clootrack told TechCrunch in September 2021 that revenue had grown 9x year-on-year, without disclosing the base period or absolute numbers (TechCrunch, September 2021).
- Balance-sheet signal: the company’s book net worth rose 51.65% in the year to March 2021, per Tofler’s public summary of its RoC filing — consistent with a company adding paid-in capital from its 2019 seed round rather than one burning through reserves.
- No profit or loss figure for any year is available from a source this piece could open. Rather than estimate one, it is left blank.
Where the money comes from
Clootrack has never published a formal revenue split by segment or geography, but its own disclosed client list across two eras sketches the shape of its business:
- By vertical, 2021: retail, direct-to-consumer, banking, automotive, travel and mobile-app services were named as the core customer segments (TechCrunch, September 2021).
- By named client, 2026: apparel and luxury retail (Tory Burch, Mejuri, TFG), consumer electronics (Xiaomi, Vivo, Crompton Greaves), professional services (Deloitte, Wipro), banking (HSBC), automotive (Nissan), advertising and media holding groups (Omnicom Media Group, Mullen Lintas), healthcare technology (PointClickCare) and even an investment firm (Premji Invest) all appear as platform users on Clootrack’s own website (Clootrack website, September 2026).
- The geography surprise: Clootrack is press-described as Bengaluru-based and is legally registered in Kochi, Kerala (RoC filing via Instafinancials), yet its named 2026 client roster is dominated by global, non-Indian brands — a British bank, a Japanese automaker, American luxury and apparel labels, and a Canadian healthcare-software company. A company built inside India’s own D2C boom now appears to earn a large share of its enterprise-logo credibility from Western accounts rather than the domestic consumer brands it originally set out to serve.
The risks
- Foundation-model dependency. Having rebuilt its once-differentiated “patented unsupervised” analysis engine on top of OpenAI’s models during 2024 (Clootrack press release, November 2025), Clootrack’s cost base and even its long-term differentiation are now tied to a single external AI vendor’s pricing, availability and model roadmap — at exactly the moment far larger, better-capitalised rivals are adding similar generative-AI layers of their own.
- A brutally capital-intensive category. The category’s largest name, Medallia, was taken private by Thoma Bravo for $6.4 billion in 2021; in April 2026 Medallia was handed to its creditors in a debt-for-equity restructuring that wiped out roughly $5.1 billion of that equity (Wikipedia’s Medallia entry, citing 2026 restructuring coverage). If a category leader with vastly more capital and scale struggled to make CX-analytics economics work at that size, it is a caution for a company that has raised barely $4.5 million in total.
- Financial opacity alongside an expensive pivot. No institutional funding round has been publicly documented since September 2021, even as the company took on the compute-heavy work of migrating to a large-language-model backend and building agentic products from 2024 onward. The last time its own founder discussed the business’s spending discipline in public was 2019, when the description was minimal, deliberate burn (TheNewsMinute) — a posture that may or may not fund an AI-agent build-out five years on, and the company has not said either way.
The takeaway
Clootrack’s story does not have the hockey-stick shape most Deep Dives on this site are built around. It has two multi-year gaps between funding rounds, a founder who had just watched an acquirer implode within months of buying his previous company, and a product that changed its own elevator pitch three times before any outside institution called it “AI-native.” The transferable lesson sits in what did not happen: the company never chased a big round to force growth at any cost, and it kept rebuilding the same core idea — understanding why customers feel what they feel, from data they were never asked to give — as the underlying technology moved from dashboards, to machine learning, to large language models. Enterprise software businesses with real patents and a small number of large, renewing accounts do not need funding-round frequency to survive. They need the patience to keep re-platforming the product under those accounts every time the technology underneath it changes, without ever needing a press release to prove it.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Clootrack and when?
Clootrack was incorporated on 17 April 2017 by Shameel Abdulla, who serves as CEO, and Subbakrishna Rao, who serves as CTO. Abdulla had previously co-founded Jiffstore Software Labs, which was acquired by PepperTap in December 2015 (Inc42; Instafinancials director records).
What does Clootrack actually sell?
An AI-driven Voice of the Customer analytics platform that ingests customer feedback from reviews, surveys, call transcripts and social media, and uses an unsupervised machine-learning engine to identify the themes and sentiment drivers behind satisfaction, churn and returns for large enterprise clients (Clootrack website; TechCrunch, September 2021).
How much funding has Clootrack raised?
About $4.5–4.6 million across three disclosed rounds between May 2017 and September 2021: an undisclosed seed from Unicorn India Ventures, a $500,000 seed in January 2019, and a $4 million Series A in September 2021 (Inc42 funding tracker; TechCrunch, September 2021). No further institutional round has been publicly confirmed since.
Is Clootrack profitable?
Not publicly known. The company has not disclosed a profit or loss figure for any year from a source available without a paid subscription; the only public revenue signal is a wide FY2021 operating-revenue band (₹1–100 crore) from a Registrar of Companies filing summarised by Tofler, and a company-stated claim of 9x year-on-year revenue growth as of September 2021 (TechCrunch).
Why did Clootrack move its AI engine to OpenAI?
The company migrated its core thematic-analysis engine onto OpenAI’s models during 2024, then launched an agentic workflow product (Neo) in March 2025 and was recognised by OpenAI in November 2025 for processing more than 100 billion tokens on Voice of the Customer analysis — part of a broader repositioning from a “CX analytics dashboard” vendor to what the company now calls an “AI Super Agent” (Clootrack press releases, 2025–26).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- TheNewsMinute, “Bengaluru-based AI startup Clootrack raises $500K from Indian Angel Network, others,” January 2019
- YourStory, “Bengaluru-based Clootrack raises $500K seed fund,” January 2019
- TechCrunch, “Customer experience startup Clootrack raises $4M, helps brands see through their customers’ eyes,” September 2021
- Inc42, Clootrack company funding tracker, accessed September 2026
- Seafund, Clootrack investment portfolio page, accessed September 2026
- Instafinancials, Clootrack Software Labs Private Limited company record (CIN U72900KL2017PTC053631), accessed September 2026
- Tofler, Clootrack Software Labs Private Limited financial summary, accessed September 2026
- Inc42, “PepperTap Closes Series B Round At $40 Mn; Acquires Jiffstore,” December 2015
- Inc42, “Grocery Startup PepperTap To Shut Down Its Hyperlocal Delivery Operations,” April 2016
- Clootrack press release archive (clootrack.com/press-release), including announcements dated March 2025, November 2025 and June 2026, accessed September 2026
- Clootrack company website (clootrack.com), product, client and deployment details, accessed September 2026
- Wikipedia, “Medallia,” Thoma Bravo acquisition and 2026 debt restructuring, accessed September 2026
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