OSlash and the art of the ‘tiny URL’

Anuj Raina | NT
Bengaluru, Nov. 6

On October 27, OSlash, a software company founded by Shoaib Khan and Ankit Pansari, raised USD 2.5 million in a seed funding round led by Accel Partners. The Bengaluru-based start-up was founded in 2020, making a well-timed arrival and carving itself a niche in the midst of the pandemic and the myriad changes that came with it. Khan is a well-known name in the start-up ecosystem – at the age of 22, as he graduated from BITS Pilani he was already in the midst of selling his first company for a whopping $75,000 to a U.S. investor.

About a year after it was founded, OSlash is already synonymous with efficiency in SaaS applications. The Bengaluru-based enterprise software start-up has designed a product that helps users transform long URLs into easy-to-remember shortcuts that are accessible on all devices. As Khan puts it, “You type in the world and go where you want to go. So if I say O/health insurance, I can pull up my health insurance policy. I don’t need to route it through H.R. or I.T.” The self-service culture has found its way to the way in which white-collar professionals work.

For Khan and Pansari, it has been a serendipitous partnership.

“I began a setup to train folk on how to become really good developers. Once training was done, I also wanted to place them in companies. And that’s how I met Ankit. He was working on the demand side and I was generating supply, so we thought, this looks complementary, why don’t we work together?” says Khan. The pandemic arrived shortly after and businesses crumbled with it. Hiring leads dried up, but Khan, now a seasoned entrepreneur, was quick to spot a new opportunity. “We saw certain trends accelerating in the market – more people going remote and communication tools like Zoom becoming important. The changes we expected to see in a decade were happening much sooner. So the questions we asked were changed too – where do we position ourselves? What market do we go after?” That’s how the idea of OSlash came about. Navigating company roadmaps, accessing data and sharing files – which, granted, have been transformed through cloud computing – are still time consuming when it means hunting through URLs. “Everybody has eight hours in a day. How you spend that time makes all the difference,” Khan says. Software as a Service, or SaaS tools, mean data can be accessed from anywhere, through any device. And the pandemic summoned a new era in the white-collar mode of working. Each one is in its own environment, which means a certain amount of manoeuvring is necessary to get to where one wants to be. “Some large tech companies like Google, Twitter and Stripe recognized this issue for a while,” says Khan. “They built their own internal hacks by creating shortcut naming conventions. Employees could easily remember the shorthand to find anything that was accessible via a URL.” OSlash lends itself to high-pressure environments, where every moment counts. “If they face any issues, they can give us a call. Companies like Google or LinkedIn have these tools internally and their employees are used to them. For those of us who aren’t accustomed, it takes a bit of explaining.” That has, in fact, been a sizable challenge – “We have to educate users and a lot of our effort is going in that direction,” Khan observes. Their recent seed funding, saw participation from angel investors like Figma’s Dylan Field, Akshay Kothari, CEO, Notion and Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshworks Inc. Top executives from Quora, Stripe, and Airtable also pitched in. The next steps are in beefing up the distribution network and increasing awareness around the product. “Number one is to build the product and streamline distribution – for example, adding it as a mobile app and desktop platforms. As for the future, OSlash plans to beef up its distribution network and increase awareness about this product. “Our priority would be to build the product, in a particular distribution.’’