Mettl Finds Its Champion In Mercer

The online assessment platform is looking to grow about three times after its acquisition by the global consulting major.

- Deepti Chaudhary

A FEW MONTHS AFTER Ketan Kapoor co-founded online assessment platform Mettl with his friend Tonmoy Shingal in 2010, he began asking his contacts to connect him with top human resources executives at large companies. As the HR industry in India hadn’t yet warmed up to talent assessment offerings for recruitment, Kapoor knew he needed what he described as ‘champions’ of Mettl’s offerings to spread the word and get business for the company.

“Given that we were an India-focussed business and offer SaaS (software as a service) products to HR, our target market was these 20,000 or so companies that have revenues above 50 crore,” Kapoor tells Fortune India over a call from the company’s Gurugram headquarters. “We knew reaching out to each one of them is a slow cook… it’s like cooking biryani compared to snack food. It takes time.”

Soon, someone connected him to a senior executive in Capgemini, a multinational professional services and business consulting corporation. A long meeting in Pune and several questions later, the executive told Kapoor he wanted to invest in the company as an angel investor. Normally, this would be music to the ears of most entrepreneurs. But Kapoor didn’t want an investor, he was looking for clients. After some convincing, Capgemini came on board as a client and remained one for a long time.