HackerEarth, a leading SaaS-based innovation management software provider, plans to turn cash-flow positive in 2019. HackerEarth reported strong growth metrics and logged EBITDA positive for the third quarter in 2018. The company attributes this growth to its innovative hackathon platform which is used for innovation management. Since the last couple of years, hackathons have been increasingly used by large organizations as an instrument to rapidly prototype and crowdsource ideas from a large talent pool. Hackathons allow organizations to take ideas to production in a matter of days and hence there is a need for a platform that helps them run these hackathons at scale.
As of Q3 2018, HackerEarth marked impressive revenue growth and for Q4, it's expecting to increase its revenue by another 25% and a second straight quarter of positive EBITDA. The company is targeting aggressive growth next year and is aiming to grow 3x by the end of 2019. In the past year, international revenues have more than tripled and now constitute one third of HackerEarth’s revenues. The company will focus on increasing international revenue through large enterprise partnerships in the US. Riding on the back of this growth, HackerEarth is ramping up international operations by setting up offices in San Francisco. Sachin Gupta, CEO and co-founder of HackerEarth will be moving to the US as part of the expansion plans, while CTO and co-founder Vivek Prakash will continue to oversee operations in India.
HackerEarth started by doing external hackathons where companies crowdsource ideas from the open developer community which has grown to 2.5 million developers, making it one of the largest developer communities in the world. The company is aiming to have more than 3.5 million developers on its platform and add more users from US in 2019.
Founded in 2012, HackerEarth pioneered hackathons back in 2015 and transformed it into a SaaS offering, which allowed businesses to crowd-source innovation both internally in their organization and also from an open community of developers. In the last three years, the number of hackathons organized by HackerEarth has increased 6x, with half of all campaigns focussing on internal hackathons. Sprint, the innovation management platform created by HackerEarth has transformed innovation campaigns in technology-first organizations and has enabled 500 companies to conduct 1,200 internal and open innovation campaigns.
Today, companies run a mix of both internal and external hackathons using the HackerEarth platform. The company will be clocking over 400 hackathons in 2018 which translates to more than one hackathon a day! A typical hackathon sees about 20 prototypes being built, so that’s more than 8,000 prototypes being conceptualized across various industries (like healthcare, engineering etc.) and technologies (like AI, Blockchain).
Over the years, HackerEarth has become synonymous with India’s developing corporate innovation culture. The company works with more than 600 organisations and is planning to grow its customer base to more than 1,000 customers in 2019. HackerEarth has rapidly diversified its customer base, which initially was mostly software companies, to organizations across different segments like Government, BFSI organisations, Retail giants, Healthcare companies, NGOs and Startups.
Coming from the humble beginnings of an IIT-Roorkee dorm room, HackerEarth started out as a platform to help companies find the right candidates and has evolved into an enterprise product that is helping companies stay relevant and rapidly innovate in this age of Digital Disruption. Since its inception, HackerEarth has steadily become one of the most recognizable & reputable SaaS startups from India. The company has raised two rounds of funding till date. The company has raised $5 million till date and count Prime Venture Partners, GSF Accelerator, DHI Group among their investors.