Summary
We’re happy to share the news of our investment in Zinier, a company that wants to power the next gen mobile workforce.
One grew up by the tea estates in India while the other fought over cheerios with his quadruplet siblings in the DC suburbs. One was fascinated by telescopes and stars, the other designed luxury goods packaging and martini glasses. One went to MIT, the other to Stanford. One started an organization to support underprivileged children through photography , the other started one to support designers. Their career paths led them to working together in Singapore, where they decided to — transform the world of field operations! Huh?!
Arka Dhar and Andrew Wolf are, more than anything else, deeply passionate problem solvers. While in Singapore, they were witnessing how smartphones were changing the lives of consumers at a phenomenal pace. But one of the many things that intrigued them was the very weak leverage that businesses got from these incredibly smart devices that their employees were carrying around with them. Their journey of discovery led them to one of the world’s largest group of such people, field service technicians — tens of millions of workers who spend their day away from their office and their desktop, while trying to resolve their customer’s problems. Their curiosity even had them “incent” some service technicians to let them be shadowed for a few days (at a company that shall remain unnamed!).
Arka and Andrew launched Zinier, and started working closely with some friendly customers. It became clear that the first generation of desktop based solutions had done a great job of solving various problems — workforce scheduling and dispatching, trouble ticket management, knowledge repositories, and so on. However, this was creating a bit of a headache for the worker in the field who now had to interact with several of these systems, and that too from the confines of a small screen.
Zinier believes that there is a large opportunity to redesign and refactor how field operations should be done in the modern day world. Technology now gives us the ability to deeply understand the what+where+when of a field work order, and offer a dramatically more intelligent solution of who+how — who’s the best person to service that order, and how should (s)he get it done most efficiently. The next generation of mobile workers will look very different, and the folks at Zinier are very intent on playing a big role in that transition.
We are delighted to be a part of Zinier’s journey. We wish them all the success! (PS. Andrew, when are you sending us some of your martini glasses? 😃 ).
— Accel Partners -Dinesh Katiyar, Shruti Ghatge
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