o9 Solutions, Inc. (“o9”), provider of a premier AI platform powering digital transformations of integrated planning and operations at global companies, is looking to accelerate its growth in India and Asia. o9 has received a minority equity investment from leading global investment firm KKR at a valuation of over one billion dollars. The company intends to hire India-based talent in emerging technologies — Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and other key technologies in the Digital Transformation space — as well as expand its customer base in Asia.
Today, the o9 platform is powering the planning and operations for large enterprise clients across the globe in many industry verticals, including retail, consumer goods, apparel, consumer electronics, industrial manufacturing, and oil & gas. These customers use o9’s cloud platform for its next-generation planning capabilities that create improved visibility into drivers of demand, improved quality of forecasts using AI models, better real-time visibility into risks and opportunities across extended global supply chains, and matching of demand and supply using intelligent algorithms. All these capabilities and more are driven off a single platform and code base, thus enabling efficient and rapid value delivery for clients.
o9 is co-founded by software entrepreneurs and supply chain visionaries Sanjiv Sidhu and Chakri Gottemukkala, both Indian Americans originally from Hyderabad. With its first external investment from KKR, o9 plans to fast track the delivery of its differentiated technology solution to clients across the globe, including in India, and realize its objective of becoming a category-defining platform for digital transformation of integrated business planning and operations.
Speaking on o9’s plans for India, Chakri Gottemukkala, CEO and Co-founder, o9 Solutions, said, “The funding from KKR is enabling us to accelerate growth across global markets, including India. India is also the place where we hire world-class Development and Consulting talent. In the last year, our India team grew by close to 100 percent. We have onboarded about 100 new hires even in the midst of the pandemic. We will continue to hire both experienced professionals and freshers from IITs, IIMs and other premier institutions.”
Commenting on the India market, Sanjiv Sidhu, Chairman and Co-Founder, o9 Solutions, said, “Rapid digital transformation of planning and operations capabilities—to drive resilience, agility, productivity, cost management—has become a key business priority for CXO’s in these times of COVID-19. The capabilities offered by the o9 platform are now increasingly mission-critical for any global company. We have been associated with reputed Indian companies in the last few years and see a lot of opportunities to bring in best-in-class Planning processes and technologies to our premier Indian and Asian Blue-Chip clients who are themselves competing in the world space.”
Jake Heller, Co-head of KKR’s Technology Growth team in the Americas, said, “Digitization and the rapid advancement of economies in Asia are secular growth themes that KKR has been focused on. Sanjiv and Chakri are industry pioneers who have built a best-in-class team and technology platform for digitally transforming how supply chains and operations are managed. We are thrilled to be the first external investor in o9 and to provide the support of our global platform as the team continues to accelerate their growth in Asia.”