January 4th, 2022, Bengaluru: Bengaluru-based full stack customer engagement platform Exotel has raised $40 million in its series D funding round led by Steadview Capital. Exotel has in total, raised approximately $100 million in the last 15 months across multiple 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 annualized recurring revenue (ARR) is $50 million growing at 70% 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 omnichannel 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,” commented Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku), CEO & Co-founder of Exotel.
Speaking on their association with the new investors Steadview Capital Shivku said “Steadview Capital operates like a startup. They’re fast-paced and are willing to take bets on bold visions like the one we have. The team we interacted with is sharp and complements one another well. We’re excited to be working with them.”
Commenting on Exotel’s business, Ravi Mehta, CIO and Founder of Steadview Capital, said “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.”
Expressing their trust in Exotel, Puneet Kumar, Managing Director at Steadview Capital said “The importance of having effective communication strategy is increasing over time and Exotel executed this successfully by powering 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 intelligently with customers and are thrilled to be part of their next growth phase.”
Exotel recently announced changes to their leadership to their Product team. Currently, at a team size of about 1000, the company is targeting to increase the headcount by 700 by the end of 2022.
Bangalore-based tech-focused investment bank, IndigoEdge, was the advisor to Exotel across transactions over the last 15 months.
Commenting on working with Exotel-Ameyo team Mohammed A AlQahtani, Projects Manager – PMO & Governance at ITC Salam said “I would like to deliver my highest appreciation for Exotel-Ameyo and their outstanding efforts for our projects. They truly went above and beyond what was expected from them to overcome all the challenges day & night. We reached them at all times and we always find them in the other end with the will & capabilities to propose solutions, take action & support.”
Speaking of the success of Exotel’s Cogno AI chatbot Murali Sakthivel, CIO at Sundaram Mutual said “They have been the real game-changer in digitizing our support initiatives and up-scaling our customer service with their AI-driven chatbot. Their journey so far has been nothing but fruitful with a constant focus on elevating the customer experience at scale with industry-first initiatives and always improving the support channels to add more value to our customers. We’re moved by the young and energetic team’s proactive implementations and business knowledge and wish to continue this journey to unravel the true potential of digitizing our entire customer support suite.”
About Exotel
Exotel is the emerging market’s leading AI-powered cloud customer engagement platform. Incorporated in 2011, Exotel’s world-class cloud-based product suite powers 25 million calls daily simplifying customer engagement for over 6000 companies in India, SE Asia, Middle East, and Africa. Today, some of the fastest-growing companies in the emerging markets (Ola, Swiggy, Flipkart, GoJek, Byju’s, Urban Company, HDFC Bank, Zomato, Oyo, etc.), manage their customer engagement with Exotel’s omnichannel contact center and a suite of voice and messaging APIs over the cloud.
For more information, please visit http://exotel.com