Werize - Product Analyst

About WeRize

Founded in 2019 by Vishal Chopra and Himanshu Gupta, WeRize is building India's largest full stack financial services brand for 300 million underserved middle-class customers who live in 4000+ small towns of India. This customer segment is not served by private sector banks, Insurers and Mutual Fund companies due to their low ticket-size and lifetime value and is dependent on PSU/Govt. banks. PSU/Government banks rarely provide financial products beyond basic savings accounts and these customers lack access to unsecured loans, credit cards, health and life insurance and investment products. WeRize manufactures innovative Credit, Savings and Group Insurance products designed for this customer base keeping in mind their needs, requirements and purchasing power, with a view to add a layer of financial security to their lives and enable access to credit.

While customers in these geographies use smartphones, they need proper guidance and support when purchasing the right financial products for themselves. So, a pure digital model doesn't work for this segment. WeRize has innovated on this front through its 'Finance ki online dukaan (Social Shopify of Finance)', a first of its kind social distribution tech platform in the financial services space that educates and enables local financially literate freelancers across these small towns to source business through online and offline channels, recommend the right financial product(s) to customers as well as provide after sales support. These freelancers, who are located in more than 2000+ towns and cities, earn as much as INR 30,000 a month from WeRize in commissions.

Our social distribution platform supported by financially literate freelancers means exceptionally low cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and operations costs compared to both fully digital and on-the-ground financial services providers. Digital conversions among this target group are way lower when compared to upper income customers in metros and hence pure digital CAC doesn't work for this segment. While companies like LIC and Fino Bank also rely on freelancer distribution, they deploy local on-field teams/branches to manage freelancers in every city. That results in very high CAC and operations costs for such companies. WeRize on the other hand, has been able to acquire, train and manage thousands of freelancers in 1000+ cities only through its tech platform and without any feet-on-street team of its own. This results in highly profitable business model for Werize.

To know more about the company, please visit: https://www.werize.com/

Key Metrics

- Annualized Revenue Run Rate of $20Mn as of Feb 2022. ( Approx $1.6Mn per month).We are growing aggressively and our revenues are doubling every 7-8 months

- Profitability- Unlike most of other startups, we are already profitable because of our unique distribution model.

- Geography Covered- Served customers in 2000+ cities pan india. Aim to cover all 4000 cities in next 3 years.

Fund Raise:

Funds Raised: $26 million (INR 192 Crore)

Valuation - $ 115.5Mn (INR 900 Crore)

Stage: Pre- Series B (raised June 2022)

Investors:

- British International Investment (BII)-UK Government's investment fund (Formally known as CDC group, BII is the British government's investment fund. It's a 10 billion dollar+ impact focused fund that has invested in some of the largest banks and NBFCs of India.

- Sony Innovation Fund, Japan

- Sony Innovation Fund is the investment arm of Japan's Multi-billion dollar Sony Corporation.

- Kalaari Capital

(One of the largest Indian VC with $850MN AUM and investments such as Myntra, CureFit, Dream11, ElasticRun, Upstox, Simplilearn)

- Picus Capital , Germany

(Fund run by Alexander Samwer- Co-Founder of Rocket Internet that had multiple billion Dollar + exits/IPOs - Lazada (SE-ASIA), Jumia (AFRICA), DeliveryHero(EU) )

- 3one4 Capital

(Early-Stage Fund with $300Mn AUM and companies such as NeoBank Open , Licious & Jupiter Neobank in its portfolio)

- Orios Ventures (Early-stage fund with companies like Ola, Pharmeasy and GoMechanic in its portfolio)

Leadership Team: Vishal Chopra, Co-Founder & CEO:

- Ex-CBO Lendingkart - India's largest Fintech Lender ($150Mn+ fund raise)

- Fist hire of Amazon India - part of the leadership team that launched Amazon.in

- Regional Director, Souq.com - largest e-commerce player in the Middle East. Raised $425Mn, acquired by Amazon

- MBA, ISB Hyderabad

Himanshu Gupta, Co-Founder & COO:

- Ex-VP and Head of Data Science, Lendingkart - created AI/ML models and maintained NPAs < 2% vs 8% industry avg

- Data Scientist, IHS Markit

- BTech, IIT Delhi

- 10+ years' experience in AI/ML

Leadership Team:

- Head of Collections:

- Ex-South India Head-Collections, Bajaj Finance; managed 800-member team

- Head of Product:

- BTech, IIT Kanpur; Ex-Product Leader at Lendingkart and Flipkart

- Head of Technology:

- Btech CS, IIT Kanpur; Ex-Tech Leader at Paytm and Medlife

- Head of Business:

- MBA- IMT Ghaziabad, Ex- Business Leader, Lendingkart

- Head of Credit Ops:

- Ex-Regional Head, HDB (HDFC subsidiary)

- Head of Data Science:

- Ex head of Data Science at Udaan. BTech and Mtech from Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) ,Kolkata.

- Head of Banking Partnerships and Debt Raise :

- Ex head of debt/capital markets at Udaan , MBA - XLRI Jamshedpur

Profile Overview:

Looking for Product Analyst who can work closely with Business, Product Managers, Marketing, and Engineering to empower them to work effectively with data, and champion product and business analytics across the organization in a start-up environment.

Responsibilities:

- Crafting and automating reports to help businesses derive actionable insights.

- Identifying, translating, prioritizing, and informing important product questions with data.

- Exploring data to find actionable insights and make product recommendations through funnels, cohort analyses, long-term trends, user segmentation, and more.

- Synthesizing and communicating insights during the product development, release, and adoption process.

- Troubleshooting any gaps, inconsistencies, and discrepancies in data to make sure we work with accurate information.

- Creating and working towards creating a data-centric culture at Werize

Requirements:

- 0-1 years of experience doing either quantitative analysis for a technology company or management consulting firm.

- Ability to work with large amounts of data: facts, figures, and number crunching.

- Ability to work independently at times with minimal guidance and ambiguous data to create actionable insights.

- Strong communication skills to effectively synthesize, visualize, and communicate your ideas to others.

- Strong knowledge of SQL and experience using SQL with quantitative data.

- Strong knowledge of working on Excel and Macros.

- Programming experience in Python and/or R will be a bonus.

- Prior understanding of business-centric measurement (conversions/retention, funnels, user journeys) will be a big plus.

- Experience in Lead squared is a plus

- Experience in fintech will be a plus.