SME profile: The Dubai tech start-up that has been turning heads in Silicon Valley

Wrappup has developed an app that allows people to easily create, tag and search highlights of recorded meetings.

From left: Wrappup co-founders Ayosh Chordia, Rami Salman and Rishav Jalan say finding people with both the know-how and the mindset to become part of the start-up has been a struggle. Anna Nielsen for The National
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One of the difficulties in building a technology start-up in Dubai, according to the founders of Wrappup, is recruiting good technical staff.

The company, which has created a technology platform used to better highlight and track meetings, is in the fortunate position of having the money to bring people in, having raised US$800,000 from a group of investors led by Dubai-based Beco Capital last year.

Yet still, finding people with both the know-how and the mindset to become part of a fast-growing start-up based at the in5 innovation hub at Dubai Knowledge Village has been a struggle, its three co-founders admit.

“From my point of view, in Dubai good talent want to be on the secure side,” said Rishav Jalan, one of the co-founders, adding that they would rather join a blue-chip IT company as it will take care of visas and offer more security.

Founder Rami Salman says there are many reasons why potential employees in Dubai are more risk-averse.

“You’re talking about an economy that is relatively new, it’s transient. People come here mainly to make money and send [it] back home.”

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And although rumours are currently swirling about a sale being nigh for one of Dubai’s biggest tech firms – e-commerce company Souq.com – Mr Salman says there are currently “not really many exit success stories people can attach themselves to”.

Thankfully, Mr Salman says Wrappup has two technical co-founders in Mr Jalan and Ayush Chordia who are able to “direct and orchestrate” outsourced IT staff to develop its product.

The trio met at an Angel Hack event at Microsoft’s Dubai Internet City campus in May 2015.

Mr Salman, who was a consultant with Bain & Company, had an idea for a method to better organise, tag and distribute meeting minutes using voice recordings. This was borne out of necessity, he says, as he was working on a client restructuring that involved liaising with eight different teams.

“My week was basically packed up with four-hour meeting after four-hour meeting and I was up until four in the morning writing up the minutes of those.”

He had been to a previous hackathon with a more complicated version of his idea, but said “without the right team, it got nowhere”.

Working with Mr Jalan and Mr Chordia, who were both students at the Dubai Academic City campus of engineering college BITS Pillani, the first basic version of Wrappup was created within 24 hours.

The trio won the Dubai Angel Hack, went through a 12-week accelerator process in Silicon Valley and after pitching to a judging panel at the global finals walked off with a grand cash prize.

They took the opportunity while in Silicon Valley to make contacts that would help with its first-round fundraising – a process that completed in June 2016.

The company is now working on commercialisation through two routes. One will offer Wrappup as a “freemium” service, with users entitled to a limited number of meetings, or for recordings to be held on servers for a limited period. Those wanting unlimited access can subscribe to a premium service for a monthly fee.

The other method involves building Wrappup as a platform for enterprise-level companies, where the software can be integrated with existing phone recording, videoconferencing and work sharing systems.

Mr Salman believes it would be of interest for companies with sales operations – particularly IT sales, where technical details are important – companies engaged in research and for project managers.

Rohit Majhi, a senior manager with Monitor Deloitte, agreed with Wrappup’s co-founders that there was “a general lack of very good engineering talent” for local tech start-ups.

“These days, what you require is a multitude of skills – you’re talking about data analytics, experience in programming, social psychology and things like that.”

He said there was a propensity not to take risks among both locals and expats, although for different reasons.

“What I often see is people have more of the front end here and do the back end somewhere else. That’s generally true across the world. But when you’re trying to do something very specialised, it’s difficult to farm those things out.”

mfahy@thenational.ae

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