Shameel
Abdulla
reads the room.

Clootrack is a Voice of Customer analytics platform, which is a category of software that reads what customers say about a brand across reviews, support tickets, call transcripts and social channels and then tries to say something useful back. Most tools in this category produce word clouds. Shameel Abdulla thought that was insulting, or at least commercially inadequate, so he and his co-founder Subbakrishna Rao built one that produces themes, drivers and dashboards enterprises can put in a boardroom.

The company was incorporated in 2017. The customer roster now includes Xiaomi, Deloitte, Wipro, HSBC and TATA. The Delaware address on public filings is Claymont. The team is in India. The market it sells into is largely North America. This arrangement is common in modern enterprise SaaS and Clootrack is a fairly clean example of it.

Abdulla is the CEO. He raised a $4 million Series A led by Inventus Capital India in September 2021, alongside Unicorn India Ventures, the IAN Fund and Salamander Excubator. Total disclosed funding stands at roughly $8.5 million. An investor described him at the time as, in a nice bit of understatement, "a complete CEO in terms of being a sales guy and serial entrepreneur." He is both.

Before Clootrack, Abdulla did the classic Indian software engineer's opening act, first at Wipro Technologies and then at EMC, both times as a senior software engineer. In 2012 he co-founded Kode Blink, a mobile app studio that became a preferred partner for several multinationals. In 2013 he sold the services division of Kode Blink to one of those multinationals and turned his attention to Jiffstore, a marketplace for local grocery stores.

Jiffstore is the interesting one, because Jiffstore is where he met Subbakrishna Rao. In 2015, PepperTap acquired Jiffstore and Abdulla joined the buyer as AVP - Product for Special Projects, running product development for the reverse logistics business. It was a soft landing that ended when he decided the real product he wanted to build had almost nothing to do with groceries and everything to do with what those grocery customers were saying to nobody in particular in reviews, in tickets, in Twitter replies, in call transcripts. He called Subbakrishna Rao. They started Clootrack.

He studied Applied Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering at the College of Engineering Trivandrum, graduating in 2005. He later spent some time at the Indian School of Business and left without finishing, which he lists on his own bio as "dropout." He holds two patents, both filed during the productization years.

Abdulla's public argument, made in various venues over the last five years, goes like this. Traditional market research assumed that a company's customers only spoke to it in a small number of controlled channels, mostly surveys. Around 2015 this stopped being true. Customers now speak to a brand in twenty places at once, most of which the brand does not read, and the fastest way to notice something is going wrong is to notice it in a channel nobody was watching.

"The number of channels has increased," he told TechCrunch in 2021, "which means customers are talking to you, expressing their feedback and what they think in multiple places." The implication is that the shortage in modern customer research is not data. It is filtering. Clootrack is, at heart, a filtering company that dresses itself in dashboards.

He is not evangelical about this. He talks like an engineer who thinks the interesting problem is throughput. In his LinkedIn essays and interviews he keeps returning to the phrase "unbiased insights," by which he seems to mean the specific unglamorous work of removing noise before analysis begins. This is why the platform's marketing collateral tends to lead with filtering algorithms rather than headline features.