Khadim Batti and the button that outgrew the business

The button was supposed to rescue the business. Instead, it became the business. Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar had built SearchEnabler to help small companies improve their visibility online. It could inspect a website and recommend changes. A sensible proposition, until the recommendations arrived in front of someone who did not know how to carry them out. The customer had bought an answer and acquired another question.

So the founders made a feature called “Fix it.” It guided people through the work. Customers began asking whether they could put that same help inside their own applications. Here was an awkward compliment: the most interesting part of the product was the part explaining how to use it. For Batti, the request would become a career-defining clue.

Whatfix grew from that clue. Its founding CEO, who led the company from 2014 to 2026, built his work around a deceptively ordinary moment: a person looking at a screen, wanting to finish something, and being unsure what to do next. The corporate software industry had plenty of things to sell that person. Batti paid attention to the hesitation.

Before the button, there were printers

Batti grew up in Mumbai and studied electrical engineering at the University of Mumbai. His early work included customer support, printer problems and machine configuration. Meanwhile, programming caught his attention. Watching other people write software made a different career look possible. He pursued postgraduate study in information technology at IIIT Bangalore, making a deliberate move toward the work he wanted to do.

At Huawei, he worked on network management and business intelligence. He helped grow an R&D team from a small group to nearly 100 people. That experience put him close to the machinery of product development: technical decisions, teams, and the long distance between an idea and something another person can use.

The distinction matters in his later story. Batti did not enter entrepreneurship with the comforting belief that software was easy to build. He already knew the work. The lesson waiting for him was that building could be the more familiar half of the problem. Understanding why someone would buy, stay, and use the product required another education.

A good recommendation can still be useless

In June 2010, the founders started QuickoLabs. SearchEnabler was its search-optimisation product, aimed at startups and small businesses. By 2012, it offered a $15-a-month starter plan and a $49 pro plan. The proposition combined website analysis with practical recommendations, including attention to social media and its relationship with search visibility.

The business exposed a gap between advice and action. In Batti’s later account, small-business owners needed more assistance than the founders had expected. The people most comfortable using the recommendations were professionals in search and social media. The intended customer often needed help simply getting to the point where the advice could pay off.

A recommendation can be accurate and remain unused. An instruction can be clear to its author and baffling to its recipient. The “Fix it” feature addressed that last stretch. Batti and Kumar’s opportunity lay in making the next step available where the customer was already working, rather than hoping another document or video would do the job.

The second attempt began with a sale

The pivot required more than adding a new product name. SearchEnabler had consumed years of work. Batti later described spending 14 to 15 months coding before showing it to customers, then discarding a substantial share of its features. With Whatfix, he changed the order: talk to potential buyers, demonstrate the idea, secure a commitment, and then build.

He sent hundreds of personalised emails. Instead of asking strangers to admire an abstract platform, he showed how their existing support material could become interactive guidance. An early customer paid before the production product was ready. The founders had made selling part of the experiment, bringing the customer into the decision about what deserved to exist.

There is a particular comedy in two experienced engineers discovering that the next useful tool might be an email. But it also shows what Batti learned. More time at the keyboard could make a product more elaborate without making the business more credible. A buyer’s commitment supplied a different kind of evidence.

Twenty-five dollars and a very large customer

One early enterprise customer arrived at a price that looked almost absurd beside its size: $25 a month for a Fortune 10 company. Batti returned to that episode in August 2025. The account captures an early founder’s dilemma. A familiar logo can help open doors while the invoice reveals how much the seller still has to learn.

Whatfix gradually moved toward enterprises, where complicated applications affected enough people for the guidance to carry a larger value. In that market, the buyer was considering a working process, training demands and software investment, rather than a helpful little feature. Batti had to learn to sell at that level.

The lesson is less tidy than simply charging more. The customer, the job being done and the consequences of confusion all changed. A product that felt optional to a small business could address an expensive problem inside a large organisation. Finding that setting became as consequential as improving the technology.

A passport, a calendar, a company

Batti stayed based in Bengaluru while building a company with customers abroad. By April 2025, he said the United States accounted for roughly 70 percent of Whatfix’s business, with the UK and Europe contributing about 20 to 23 percent. His co-founder had moved to the US. Geography had become part of the operating system of the company.

He described shifting the India team’s leadership hours later and encouraging earlier starts in the US to create several hours of overlap. A shared calendar was a practical answer to a familiar international-company problem: everybody can be available, yet nobody is available together. The decision treated working hours as something to design.

The company’s financial scale eventually changed as well. In September 2024, Whatfix announced a $125 million Series E led by Warburg Pincus, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 participating. Its plans included product development, acquisitions and expansion across markets. Batti’s project had travelled far from two engineers trying to explain a search recommendation.

An engineer’s eye for people

Discussing leadership with Atomicwork co-founder Vijay Rayapati in 2025, Batti spoke about colleagues who had grown inside Whatfix. Prakhar Jain, its first employee, had gone on to lead North American sales. Other early colleagues had moved into senior product and partnership roles. He described a leadership group whose average tenure ran seven to ten years.

That makes the people story more interesting than a list of executive hires. Employees who had lived through earlier versions of the company were being asked to lead later ones. Batti wanted a core team invested in the mission over a long period, and thought that kind of belief was difficult to assess in a brief interview.

Rayapati’s description of him was playful: “chief engineering officer.” It fitted Batti’s habit of applying an engineer’s approach beyond the product. Hours, sales, talent and customer support all became systems to examine. The risk in any system is forgetting its people; the durable relationships in his team offer another way to read his method.

“chief engineering officer”Vijay Rayapati’s description of Batti, April 2025

The mentor who expected to learn

His interest in founders extended beyond Whatfix. He was an angel investor and participated in SaaSBoomi’s governing council. Asked about his passions outside work, he described meeting entrepreneurs on weekends. “It energizes me,” he said. Those conversations also helped him stay current with what other people were building.

When a journalist asked whether he was mentoring so many founders, Batti said he probably learned more from them than they learned from him. That answer gives the relationship a useful symmetry. The experienced founder could share mistakes and contacts. The younger founder could bring a new problem, a new approach or an unwelcome challenge to an old assumption.

He could argue, too. In conversations about AI and the future of SaaS, he resisted the suggestion that software businesses were finished. His response put the emphasis on whether they adapted. A founder who had already abandoned one product had some standing to make that point. Reinvention was a decision he had paid for, rather than a slogan he had acquired.

“It energizes me.”Khadim Batti, on talking to entrepreneurs

The software should do some learning, too

Batti’s later ambition carried the name “userization”: software that adjusts to its users. In February 2026, he explained why automation through an application’s interface could matter when enterprise APIs were incomplete or limited. The concern was still the practical task in front of a person, now approached with tools that could help execute it.

He also described digital adoption platforms moving toward coordination: noticing where a workflow might falter and bringing assistance into that moment. The argument was that an AI tool placed somewhere else, requiring another visit and another habit, could inherit the adoption problem that older software already had.

By June 2026, his public conversations included Whatfix using its own guidance, analytics, simulations and AI internally. He discussed customer advisory boards and the possibility of moving from showing people what to do toward doing work on their behalf. These were directions he was exploring, with the same insistence that service and customer feedback belonged inside the product business.

Follow the story back and the continuity is striking. SearchEnabler offered a recommendation. A button helped someone carry it out. Whatfix put guidance inside other applications. AI raised the possibility of completing more of the task. Each step returned to the space between a tool being purchased and a job being finished. Batti made a company by taking that space seriously, beginning with a button his customers refused to overlook.