The Bangalore-based startup secured $35 million in funding three months ago, and has just raised $40 million in a financing round.
The startup had a Series D round. In the last year, the company has raised about $100 million in debt and equity.
To engage with their customers through touch points such as web chat, co-browsing and videos, Exotel offers its clients a full-stack platform.
Indian ride-sharing company, Ola, uses a platform to send text messages. When a delivery partner makes a call to a customer, the startup hides the phone numbers. Relationship managers at a large bank in India use a technology to engage with their customers.
Shivakumar Ganesan, co-founder and chief executive of Exotel, said that this engagement involves bringing together disconnected channels, bots, applications with siloed customer data across teams. This is the first time that this is being enabled over the cloud with our full-stack platform.
In recent years, the startup has attracted the attention of several major giants, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Twilio, and Salesforce, as organizations scramble to build or acquire tools to create one-store service centers.
In an interview with the website, the founder of the company said that there were two clear differentiating factors in the field. Unlike many of its global competitors, the startup focuses on serving customers in emerging markets and offers a wide range of services.
Everyone in India is a customer, he said. The startup, which has expanded to Southeast Asia and the Middle East in recent years, has over 4,000 customers, some of which it gained after its recent acquisitions of cloud center platform Ameyo. Shadowfax, City Mall, KrazyBee, Shadowfax, and TCS started to use the platform in the last year.
Communication technology has become a source of life for many businesses in banking, auto, and fintech industries, due to the Pandemic.
The importance of having effective communication strategy is increasing over time and Exotel executed this successfully by power communication to almost all internet unicorns in India. We like their vision of building an end-to-end communication stack to enable enterprises to engage with customers and are excited to be a part of their next growth phase.
The startup has an annual recurring revenue of $50 million. It wants to grow to $200 million as it broadens its offerings and wins more customers. It is looking to hire 200 people by the end of the year.
One of the buzziest deals it had won at the time was the investment in Exotel, according to the story shared by Karthik Reddy. The struggle the startup faced in its slow years is recounted in the post.
There was a lot of visibility for the company in digital and traditional media as it kept building beyond the odds. There was a regulatory scare. Good press can alert competitors. Others in the sector had similar scares. The company had to make sure they were above board and get licenses it needed. The bank balance was 14 lacs at one point.
>
The investors would show excitement and then leave. We lost count of near miss term sheets, half-hearted term sheets, merger and acquisition offers from everyone, Indian competitors to Asian telcos, and we will invest $3 mill contingent on another $3 mill being committed by a co-lead.
>
Clearly, the segment was interesting enough that we needed to see a desi Twilio emerge.
