It’s day one again.
Our life as a bootstrapped startup ends today and a new life as a VC funded startup starts.
We were bootstrapped, profitable and safe. But it was not enough.
It was a tough call for us, having been bootstrapped for the past 10+ years. But I think we made the right call. We have not been against VC funding. It’s just that it didn’t happen. We had tried once, back in 2011. But we were not able to convince investors of the market size in India for the contact center market. After that we stopped trying to raise and instead focused on customers.
We introduced CCaaS in the India market in 2010–2011. We have been serving customers in India for the last 10 years. More than 100,000 contact center agents use our CCaaS platform on a daily basis making us one of the largest CCaaS players. We have handled more than 3 billion calls and currently handle more than 10 million calls per day. More than 10,000 developers use our CPaaS platform.
It was tough till 2016. But after that things settled down and we created the CCaaS market in India. We have achieved a part of what we started out to achieve. Now in India, you cannot start a business without thinking of setting up a contact center for sales and support.
So why this fund raise now?
The simple answer is because we could :)
As they say, raise when you don’t need the money.
No, but seriously, we did the fund raise because a lot of things were falling in place at the right time. I will list out some the main reasons below.
Reason 1: US expansion
We launched in the US in 2019. As we were bootstrapped we did not hire any team in the US, but we founders started making some sales personally. We tried to onboard partners and enter the US market. During the pandemic, just like all communication software saw a windfall, we also got some very good deals. This year we crossed the $1 Million ARR in the US and we are well on our way to $2 million ARR. During this time, what we realized is that its very hard to scale in the US without investing in sales and marketing, especially for a high sales touch point product like ours. The CCaaS market was also hot. Talkdesk was valued at $10 Billion. Five9 was almost acquired at $15 billion. And we were replacing these products in contact centers. The feedback we received was that we were much more flexible and feature rich than Talkdesk and Five9. So it was clear there was a product market fit and we needed to expand in the US market as early as possible.
Reason 2: Pandemic created work culture changes
The pandemic has changed the way enterprises are approaching their contact center operations. Agents working from home is now the norm. When we launched CCaaS in 2010 no one knew that contact centers could be deployed in the cloud. Over the last decade we had slowly sensitized enterprises on the advantages of moving to the cloud. But still we couldn’t crack the big enterprises. The pandemic changed all that. Forced by the lockdown, businesses had to adapt. And we were ready. But catering to large enterprises was a different beast. We had to upscale our data centers and invest a lot more in hardware. We realized that to get enterprise customers we had to invest in high touch sales. We now had case studies, but we needed some seasoned enterprise sales people to close more deals. So we had to look for funding.
Reason 3: AI driven Omnichannel product development(sorry, couldn’t avoid the buzzwords)
When we first launched our cloud telephony platform, people were talking about how the phone call is dead.
Well, its been more than a decade now and in this decade we have handled more than 3 billion calls on our platform. So we can safely say the phone call is not dead.
That said, other channels have also come to life. Channels like chat, WhatsApp, email etc are playing a major role is sales and support operations. Voice conversation has been our mainstay for the past decade. But we cannot rest on our laurels. We have already integrated all the channels into our platform. But some development work was needed to integrate everything and make it seamless. With that in mind, we have been working on a completely revamped experience for contact center agents and supervisors since the last year. We will be launching this in a couple of months. We seriously believe that this will disrupt the customer conversation experience space.
The new revamped Cloudagent will have more emphasis on customer experience management as the contact center industry is also moving in that direction. We are calling it as our Unified Channel Experience Management(UXCM) platform. This complete new approach also needs a lot of investment as we will now be going after conversational AI space.
The above 3 reasons contributed to us finally taking the plunge and raise some institutional money. But more than all this, I would say it was a gut feel. All 3 of us founders felt the timing was right and we needed to raise money to make this big.
The above were professional reasons for us to raise some money. The following are some soft personal reasons why we finally raised.
- Free PR. No matter how many innovations you do, a funding news item will get you covered in almost all publications.
- Improved hiring. The free PR will make you noticeable among talent. So hopefully our hiring should improve.
- Unmarried people in our startup can finally get alliances now that they are part of a “funded” startup :)
- Market salaries for management :)
- Get invited to startup panels as experts :)
We are a leader in the CCaaS space in India and we have had steady growth for the past 6–7 years. We could have stayed content and made a lifestyle business out of it. But the heart of a startup founder never rests. It wants more. When we saw there was a gap in the US market and innovations to be made in the digital communication space we could not stop ourselves. We needed to scratch that itch to see if we can disrupt the communication space one more time.
Please wish us all the best!
