Exotel gets Rs 45 crore funding from A91 Partners, Blume and others

Exotel has raised Rs 45 crore more in a funding round led by venture capitalists A91 Partners and Blume Ventures as the cloud telephony platform looks to keep up with a rapidly expanding market amid a pandemic.

The nearly decade-old bootstrapped company, which raised Rs 40 crore in December last year, has raised more money to step up hiring and product innovation to keep up with the demand in the market.

“We felt we needed more money because we’ve had to significantly change the number of people we wanted to hire and the number of things we wanted to build,” said Shivakumar Ganesan, co-founder and chief executive at Exotel. “We’re struggling to catch up with how far the market has gone.”

Ganesan said the company will also utilise the capital to open local offices and hire talent in Southeast Asian markets as the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic has added to uncertainties around international travel.

Apart from A91 and Blume, the latest funding round also saw participation of Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, Reliance Jio President Vikas Choudhury, MakeMyTrip CEO Deep Kalra and ICICI Labs head Rohan Angrish, among others. Additionally, Exotel is onboarding former Facebook and Snapdeal product leader Anand Chandrasekaran as adviser and mentor.

“We are expecting high growth in the coming year. We are targeting to exit the current fiscal with an annual recurring revenue of $35 million,” Ganesan said, adding that the company, which has made profits for all but one year since its inception, might fall into the red this year as it invests heavily in tech and product.

Exotel claims it currently has a topline of $25 million in annually recurring revenues. The Bengaluru-based company is looking to hire 200 people in product, engineering and customer-facing roles, and will utilise the capital to do so as salaries for tech workers has gone through the roof in the last few months.

“Watching Exotel grow 150x from when we joined the journey eight years ago has been a pleasure. And we do believe the best is yet to come and want to double down on our commitment for the 10x+ journey from here,” said Kathik Reddy, managing partner at Blume Ventures.