Acies is known as a leading multinational firm in the technology and advisory space. The company strives to provide practical and tangible outcomes rooted in using new-generation technologies and applications. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Acies Head – Strategy, Finance, and Operations and Co-founder Muzammil Patel to learn more.
Muzammil Patel’s Background
Patel’s education has primarily been in accounting and financial risk management. And Patel said:
“I have spent most of my professional career prior to Acies at the Big 4 firms. In the initial parts of my career, I primarily worked with clients in the corporate treasury and financial markets space. Over time, my work evolved to working more closely with the broader financial services industry i.e., banks, para-banks, and insurers, as the industry started evolving and adapting to new technologies and new service delivery models. During this period, the focus of my work has been primarily on the financial technology, risk technology, and regulatory technology space. While building Acies, my focus has been a lot more on technology architecting and building scalable software solutions. At Acies, a large part of my role involves architecting and continuously improving our no-code platform Revolutio.”
Formation Of Acies
How did the idea for Acies come together? Patel shared:
“Acies was built by several of us who worked together over the last 15 years in the Consulting space. The initial idea of building Acies was to move the Consulting paradigm from advisory to end outcomes through technology solutions. Our initial efforts, therefore, focused on codifying expertise in a way it could be repeatably used with technology.”
“As our technologies matured, we realized that our potential for codifying expertise and building end-outcome oriented use-cases transcended beyond our expertise areas. That is when we developed our no-code platform, which enables us and anyone else to codify their expertise and experience into scalable software solutions without coding.”
“We then broadened our goals to make technology more accessible, simple, and affordable to a larger group of developers, creators, and end-users. Hence, our current mission is democratizing technology. My role at Acies today is to devise and implement the firm’s strategy and execute it with our management team, keeping our no-code platform at the center of our strategy. My role is also to keep incorporating newer technologies into our no-code platform and open up newer use cases for no-code development. A core part of my role is to make technology simpler and work with partners through our Ventures-Revolutio program to enable newer entrepreneurs to use Revolutio to deliver unique business models.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for Acies so far? Patel reflected:
“Building Acies has been a journey of discovering new possibilities with tech every day of the week. I would say, though, that my favorite memory was when we realized that we could truly eliminate coding to build enterprise-grade applications and expand the scope of what Acies can deliver to truly democratize technology.”
“After multiple variations and iterations of the architecture for Revolutio, when we built our first application on Revolutio and deployed it successfully at a client, that was in many ways a vindication of what until then was a dream. That was the most satisfying moment for our founding team.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have you faced in building the company, and has the current macroeconomic climate affected your company? Patel acknowledged:
“The primary challenge we faced from the outset was the need for each one of us to upskill and learn new things each day with respect to evolving technologies and how we would meaningfully incorporate them into end-use applications. Given that most of us did not come from a purely tech background, the biggest challenge was overcoming our own uncertainties.”
“In the initial days, we looked externally for tech talent but were unable to find a suitable match, given our vision of what we were looking to build. Our initial learning curve and overcoming our own uncertainties would qualify as the two biggest challenges in building Acies. The more operational challenges of explaining and demonstrating the capabilities of no-code and giving people time to believe and adapt to this new reality are an ongoing effort. Though, with new deployments and new use cases each day, this is a much easier challenge to work with.”
Core Products
What are Acies’s core products and features? Patel explained:
“At the core of Acies’ offering is our no-code platform Revolutio. Revolutio eliminates the need for coding and replaces it with a drag-and-drop interface, which allows end-business users or business analysts to build software without writing a single line of code. Different technologies that could be needed to build an end-use enterprise-grade application are pre-architected in a manner that the user doesn’t have to worry about which technology to use. They can focus on the end-use case. The end result is that Revolutio eliminates the need for coding and technical architecting.”
“As proof of the viability of no-code platforms, Acies TechWorks has developed a number of products on Revolutio in the risk tech, reg tech, finance tech, and treasury tech space. This has enabled enterprise-grade solutions to be delivered as near plug-and-play and fully customizable offerings. This is something that traditionally took months to deliver. Today Acies TechWorks has more than 40 deployments in highly regulated and mission-critical environments.”
“Acies Consulting is focused on working with clients to innovate new delivery models, automate operations, and enable compliance. Acies Consulting uses Revolutio to deliver more bespoke solutions and, where possible, helps in codifying these to become future standard product offerings for Acies TechWorks.”
“Acies LightHouse is focused on financial and tech literacy with a view to furthering our goal of democratizing technology. It offers a combination of traditionally delivered training and online platform-based learning to help a wide spectrum of people come up the financial and tech learning curve. The goal of Acies LightHouse is to help build a creator economy that can build and monetize assets and applications on Revolutio.”
“Acies Ventures has been focusing on helping our partners build innovative solutions on Revolutio. Our partners have so far been able to successfully complete more than 25 deployments. We are focused on building a broader partner ecosystem and enabling more innovative use cases under the Ventures- Revolutio program.”
Evolution Of Acies’s Technology
How has Acies’ technology evolved since launching? Patel noted:
“At the start, the focus of our tech had been purely to automate and codify pre-existing expertise. Applications were architected keeping in mind specific use cases and, therefore, served that limited purpose. As we evolved, we realized the importance of more scalable and more universal architectures. What we realized even more importantly is that the ability to deliver ideas into software today is delayed and costs a lot more because of the whole process of coding, technical architecting, levels of testing and deployment processes involved.”
“This is why we built Revolutio to eliminate the need for coding and technical architecting. It also enables near plug-and-play and one-click deployment in a containerized format. Our technology keeps evolving with the primary intent to remove the lag between an idea and the ability to convert it into a viable product and business.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Acies’s most significant milestones? Patel cited:
“We have had some reasonable successes in the past five years since our formation. We have been honored to be able to serve more than 125 customers across four continents. More than USD 12 billion of derivative transactions in India are processed on one of our applications – Kore. We have been able to successfully deploy applications built on Revolutio in highly regulated and mission-critical environments.”
“More importantly, we have been able to bring down average deployment and go-live time to under a month for enterprise-grade and mission-critical applications. Going forward, we will measure our success a lot more by how much we are able to truly democratize technology i.e., how many partners and creators we can work with to enable building on Revolutio and delivering a wide range of use cases across industries.”
Customer Success Stories
Upon asking Patel about customer success stories, he commented:
“One of the stand-out customer success stories for us has been the ability to transform the product offerings for the life insurance industry in India. By working closely with life insurers and banks, we helped devise and implement a hedging program that has enabled the industry to grow the non-par product offering by more than 2.5 times. The program has enabled providing a viable long-term savings product for the end-consumer in a volatile interest rate environment while reducing systemic risk in the insurance industry.”
“We have worked with more than 17 insurers to set up their program and use our technology to manage the derivative transaction lifecycle, including regulatory compliance and risk measurement. Today, more than $12 billion of derivative transactions are processed on our applications.”
Funding/Revenue
After asking Patel about the company’s funding and revenue, he revealed:
“We have been self-funded from inception and have not raised external funding to date. We have been cash flow positive from the first year of operations and have been able to reinvest our surplus cash into product innovation consistently.”
“We are looking at potential equity partnerships primarily for our TechWorks business over the next two years. This is primarily to enable expansion across geographies and help improve our global footprint. In general, however, we would look to keep re-investing our surpluses into Revolutio to keep innovating and make Revolutio accessible to a broader audience.”
“Annual revenue growth rate is approximately 40% year-over-year over the last two years and we expect this to increase at a faster pace in the next 2-3 years as we are able to expand access to our products to a wider audience.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Acies pursuing? Patel assessed:
“The no-code market is estimated at nearly $27 billion annually, as per Gartner. However, we do believe that the addressable market comprises the entire enterprise application software market, which is estimated at roughly $275 billion.”
“We strongly believe that no-code development will be the only acceptable form of software development for new projects in the near future. We also believe that as the benefits of no-code become increasingly visible, the addressable market size will increase beyond the traditional estimates.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Acies from its competition? Patel affirmed:
“We use our own technology to build applications in areas where we have traditionally built expertise. Our focus has been to deploy applications built on our no-code platform in mission-critical use cases to cement no-code as a frontline technology.”
“What differentiates us is our focus on using no-code platforms to build mission-critical enterprise applications and not just fringe development or MVPs. More importantly, our focus is on being truly no-code and not just low-code. Our platform eliminates coding entirely. Ultimately, we see ourselves as an ecosystem player who is focused on making our no-code technology available to everyone to make no-code development a way of life for software development.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Acies’s future company goals? Patel concluded:
“We are committed to our mission of democratizing technology. Our key goals for the near future remain to make Revolutio simpler and more accessible to a wide variety of users. We are looking to make the technology available to people at large and creators to enable anyone to build and monetize applications without coding.”
“One of our key endeavors, therefore, is to graduate to natural language interaction in place of drag-and-drop symbols to build software. We have started working with generative AI to assist in building and improving apps by recognizing end-user behavior patterns while engaging with software. The end goal is to enable software development purely by communicating one’s thoughts to Revolutio in the most natural way possible.”
