Exotel raises $40 million led by Steadview Capital

Bengaluru-headquartered full stack customer engagement start-up Exotel has raised $40 million in a Series D funding round led by Steadview Capital. With this funding, the total investment into the platform now stands at $100 million, which was raised over last 15 months across various debt and equity rounds.

 
Besides raising capital, Exotel in 2021 has made a mark by establishing itself as the biggest and only “full stack” customer engagement player in emerging markets after merging with Ameyo, a contact center platform in June and acquiring Cogno AI, a conversational AI platform in November last year.
 
Exotel’s annualised recurring revenue (ARR) is $50 million, and it claims to be growing at 70 per cent with a target to hit an ARR of $200 million over the next 4 years. Exotel acquired more than 1300 customers in the last 12 months including ITC Salaam in Saudi Arabia, Bajaj Allianz, City Mall, Krazybee, Shadowfax, and TCS.
 
 
The fresh infusion of funds will be primarily used to build the future of customer engagement by investing more into the Middle East and Southeast Asia markets, for potential acquisitions that add more omni-channel and full-stack capabilities to the platform and to enable growth.
 
 
"Enterprises want to unify their customer journeys to deliver connected experiences across touchpoints like web chat, co-browsing, video, etc., This involves bringing together disconnected channels, bots, applications with siloed customer data across teams. For the first time we are enabling this over the cloud with our full-stack platform," Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku), CEO & Co-founder of Exotel said.
 
The company’s various cloud—based suite powers 40 million engagements daily for over 6000 companies in India, SE Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.  India’s big start-ups including Byju’s, Urban Company, HDFC Bank, Zomato, OYO have been using Exotel’s omni-channel contact centre, the company stated.
 
“Customer engagement is critical to businesses across India, APAC, and EMEA, especially in light of the ongoing impact of the pandemic. Exotel has grown rapidly to emerge as the clear category leader for solving such problems, enabling its customers to more easily communicate with consumers across engagement channels. Steadview couldn’t be more excited to support Exotel in the next phase of its journey,” Ravi Mehta, CIO and Founder of Steadview Capital, said.