ETtechBengaluru-based cloud telephony company Exotel has raised Rs 40 crore in fresh funding in a mix of primary and secondary share sales from A91 partners, to ride a wave of accelerated growth in digital adoption created due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
After nine years of largely growing by investing its earnings back into the business, Exotel is an oddity in India’s startup sector as it has posted profits in all but one of those years. Prior to this round, the company had raised just Rs 2.5 crore in seed funding from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures.
“One of the things that happened around Covid times, is the rapid adoption of cloud communication technology. We realised we had a much larger role to play in this new normal world,” said Shivakumar Ganesan, cofounder and CEO at Exotel. “I feel that our impact, vision and charter has changed. It’s become much bigger.”
Now, the company is looking at utilising the fresh funding to invest in building newer products faster and better, apart from entering new global markets. Currently, Exotel earns 80% of its revenues from India, but says the contribution of markets such Southeast Asia would grow in the coming years.
It reported a revenue of around Rs 120 crore in FY20, and says it has posted around two-fold growth in revenue over the last few years.
Part of the incoming capital will be used to provide exits to several of the angel investors in Exotel, Ganesan said. Another Rs 1.5 crore is being earmarked towards the buyback of employee stock options, which will be the first such exercise in the nine-year history of the company.
“As the digital transformation of India and Asia accelerates, Exotel has a wonderful opportunity to realise its vision to power customer communication for modern companies. While they started with a focus on tech companies, we have been enthused to see increased enterprise adoption both before and during the pandemic,” said Gautam Mago, General Partner at A91.
While the first big adopters of Exotel’s products were e-commerce, ride hailing and other such businesses, Ganesan said that he estimates that the company has now garnered almost 40% of all remote communications in the BFSI sector. Growth from the auto and FMCG sectors is also strong, with the company planning to roll out products tailored to their needs in the near future.
Exotel will also invest in deep technologies that can power chatbots, translate voice from one language to another seamlessly, automatically gauge the mood of callers, and even do call quality assessment automatically.
“People have fundamentally understood the importance of cloud and digital adoption, so more and more enterprises are coming to us and asking what can we do, how can we do it and how can they go completely on the cloud?” added Ganesan.
Exotel claims it now facilitates around four billion cloud calls a year and in the past few months has facilitated the transitioning of around 15,000 agents or employees to the cloud, as work from home became the preferred choice for employers due to the pandemic.
After nine years of largely growing by investing its earnings back into the business, Exotel is an oddity in India’s startup sector as it has posted profits in all but one of those years. Prior to this round, the company had raised just Rs 2.5 crore in seed funding from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures.
“One of the things that happened around Covid times, is the rapid adoption of cloud communication technology. We realised we had a much larger role to play in this new normal world,” said Shivakumar Ganesan, cofounder and CEO at Exotel. “I feel that our impact, vision and charter has changed. It’s become much bigger.”
Now, the company is looking at utilising the fresh funding to invest in building newer products faster and better, apart from entering new global markets. Currently, Exotel earns 80% of its revenues from India, but says the contribution of markets such Southeast Asia would grow in the coming years.
It reported a revenue of around Rs 120 crore in FY20, and says it has posted around two-fold growth in revenue over the last few years.
Part of the incoming capital will be used to provide exits to several of the angel investors in Exotel, Ganesan said. Another Rs 1.5 crore is being earmarked towards the buyback of employee stock options, which will be the first such exercise in the nine-year history of the company.
“As the digital transformation of India and Asia accelerates, Exotel has a wonderful opportunity to realise its vision to power customer communication for modern companies. While they started with a focus on tech companies, we have been enthused to see increased enterprise adoption both before and during the pandemic,” said Gautam Mago, General Partner at A91.
While the first big adopters of Exotel’s products were e-commerce, ride hailing and other such businesses, Ganesan said that he estimates that the company has now garnered almost 40% of all remote communications in the BFSI sector. Growth from the auto and FMCG sectors is also strong, with the company planning to roll out products tailored to their needs in the near future.
Exotel will also invest in deep technologies that can power chatbots, translate voice from one language to another seamlessly, automatically gauge the mood of callers, and even do call quality assessment automatically.
“People have fundamentally understood the importance of cloud and digital adoption, so more and more enterprises are coming to us and asking what can we do, how can we do it and how can they go completely on the cloud?” added Ganesan.
Exotel claims it now facilitates around four billion cloud calls a year and in the past few months has facilitated the transitioning of around 15,000 agents or employees to the cloud, as work from home became the preferred choice for employers due to the pandemic.