Founding Team

A technology entrepreneur who has worked deep in the heart of the Indian retail industry for over three decades.

In 1986, Deepak Dhingra dropped out of college and began working in South Bombay’s niche retail shops, doing everything from product procurement to front-end sales.

After breaking off for two years to give India its first local cable TV network in Mumbai, he returned to retail as e-commerce arrived in India in the late-90s.

Deepak set up one of India’s first boutique digital agencies, M/s Nucleus Advertising and M/s Nucleus Internet, to offer marketing, advertising, communication, Internet and E-commerce solutions to scores of small to medium-size retailers. He has worked in Fashion, Food, Travel, Hospitality and the Beauty sectors, and his clients have included Intercontinental Marine Drive (a landmark Mumbai hotel), High Street Phoenix (India’s first premium shopping mall) and Cheryl's Cosmeceuticals (now a L'Oreal-owned brand).

No matter how big or small their companies were, Deepak saw a common problem that all his clients faced - how to use limited marketing budgets to reach out to the largest possible customer base for higher conversions and better retention. A growing digital-savvy middle-class with rising incomes meant that multiple businesses in different sectors were often targeting the same online customer base. Furthermore, ad fraud and lack of transparency in online advertising meant that companies couldn’t really measure the performance of their campaigns or know for certain that their ads were reaching actual human beings.

In 2012, Deepak and his team set up the online consumer video reviews platform RealReviews.in to explore the possibility of a more authentic and direct relationship between consumers and companies, not sullied by corporate interests and paid advertising.

This same vision was given another form with ShopLyne, which Deepak co-founded in 2015 under the partnership firm Nucleus Digital. ShopLyne was a hyperlocal marketplace app where local retailers were empowered with mobile technology - at a fraction of the cost of creating and maintaining their own mobile app - to sell and market directly to their customers. Retailers loved the idea and came onboard, but when it came to marketing themselves, they were again restricted by their ability to spend.

The way out of this conundrum came as a flash to Deepak, and eventually became the building block for the XIRCLS collaborative marketing technology as it exists today.

It was promoted as the Get Back All You Spend promise, where merchants on ShopLyne could pool in their offers to collectively reward their customers as well as acquire new ones. However, Deepak quickly realized the immense global potential of cross-marketing on a digital platform, not just for small to medium size retailers but also large consumer product companies, as well as other big players in the retail space, such as manufacturers and distributors. ShopLyne thus pivoted to XIRCLS in its present form.

Deepak has been at the helm of ideation, the technology build and charting a vision for XIRCLS, which has grown from just one product to multiple products catering to diverse industries.