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Startup Snapshots
Ashish Gambhir, MBA '09: newBrandAnalytics
What's that Buzz?
If you've ever kvetched on Facebook about the hotel your company
books for its annual meetings, or reviewed the incredible taco place
next door, Ashish Gambhir is all ears.
His startup, newBrandAnalytics (newBrandAnalytics.com), harvests
customer feedback on businesses in the hospitality industry (also in the
works: retailers, casinos, and spas). The company gleans customer feedback
from social media and traditional sources (such as guest surveys)
and develops proprietary
customer satisfaction metrics
and insight to help service
providers improve operations
and revenue.
Gambhir, who had an
entrepreneurial bent
even before embarking
on his MBA, found his
calling in the fall of 2007
while chatting with retail
and software veterans
Neil Kataria and Kam
Desai. Kataria and Desai mentioned that the Web was growing in importance as a source of
customer feedback. At the time, Gambhir, whose experience was
in finance and consulting, was intrigued with the idea of analyzing
Web content to help students make more-informed application
decisions. They synthesized the two ideas and launched newBrand-
Analytics in 2008.
NewBrandAnalytics' focus on the hospitality industry, specifically
from an operations perspective, has led to its rapid growth. The
company can, for example, turn thousands of unsolicited and unstructured
customer comments per month into a "food presentation" score
for a restaurant or a "concierge service" score for a group of hotels. "Our
technology can identify, read, and catalog every single word of every
single credible mention on the Web about a specific store to extract
industry-specific performance feedback real time," says Gambhir.
He has found a great source of support in his Johnson classmates
throughout the startup process, and tapped into faculty expertise
during the company's infancy. “Three members of the Brand
Passport program are members of our advisory board; and we have
new team members and advisors from the Cornell School of Hotel
Administration,” adds Gambhir.
Gambhir has helped his company secure over $18m in venture
financing to date, including a Series B led by NEA.
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