After stints at McKinsey and Evalueserve, Ashish Gupta, who is also co-founder of Plaksha University and Ashoka University, saw an opportunity in delivering knowledge projects to global customers. That’s how he co-founded Benori knowledge with an aim to also bring down `cost of knowledge by democratising it’. In an e-mail interview Ashish Gupta, who was among the early overs in the Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) space and now co-founder & CEO of Gurgaon based, Benori Knowledge, discusses the consultancy firm’s focus and more. Edited excerpts: What’s the focus of Benori Knowledge?Over the last few years I saw that companies across the world are stuck inside the very rigid `iron triangle’ of cost-quality-rapidity of insights and data around their customers, competition, markets and digital/technology disruptions that are happening in their industries. Covid further accelerated the pace of change at a global level, leading to not only massive threats to companies but also great opportunities for them to become more competitive and grow faster. This has implied that the decision support systems for these companies’ have to be extremely agile and global in nature.Benori is playing in this very space as a new age KPO. Through our agile, global, research/data solutions, we are delivering knowledge projects to clients both internationally and in India. Our client engagement approach is consultative in nature. Further, our 360-degree research methodologies span across secondary research, primary research (both B2B and B2C), data modelling and visualisation.Who all are the investors in Benori?The company is self-funded.What kind of clients do you serve and how does the business model work?We cater to a mix of global and local clients, that includes new age startups to large (including fortune 100/500) clients. The verticals we cater to include corporates (consumer & retail, technology & internet, BFSI & fintech, education & ed-tech, industrials, healthcare), consulting and advisory firms (management consulting, advisory and boutique consulting) and investment firms (private equity, venture capital, asset management and wealth management).In terms of our business model, we are a classical professional services firm with different engagement models that include project-based support, full-time support and rapid research support.There are already so many knowledge, research and learning platforms available to companies. What unique things does Benori bring to the table?The key differentiation is our vision to bring down the cost of knowledge by democratising it. We provide a variety of knowledge solutions to meet our clients’ strategic needs, that help in dealing with the current uncertain and dynamic business environment. Our ability to provide actionable insights with expert validation positions us uniquely in the KPO industry. consulting/advisory is our biggest segment and we are innovating in the direction of providing research/data solutions to this industry at a global level.Does Benori also provide analytics outsourcing services?The key solution areas around data analytics include -a) Discovery and database creation – quantitative and qualitative data collection, and data managementb) Analysis and interpretation – synthesizing and analysing data using advanced analytics techniques, and data interpretation by generating actionable insights targeted for different user groupsc) Visualisation and dashboarding – storyboarding, graphical user interface to provide easy to read display if KPIs, metrics, and key data pointsWhere do you see Benori Knowledge in the next 2 – 3 years?We believe that tough times don’t last long, but tough people do. Along these lines we managed to double our revenue with an employee count growth of 100+ in the last year. We have survived and sustained ourselves over the last two years. Now the time has come for us to scale up.