Steadview leads $40m Series D for India's Exotel

It comes less than four months after a $35 million round featuring Russia’s Sistema Asia Fund and Indian investors A91 Partners, Blume Ventures, CX Partners, IIFL Asset Management, and Singularity Growth Opportunities Fund. A91 has participated in three rounds since December 2020, according to AVCJ Research. Blume has joined three rounds since March 2012.

Exotel claims to be the only full-stack customer engagement player in the developing world. It started as a relatively limited communications platform provider in 2011 and gradually developed a comprehensive suite of adjacent services. This process was accelerated last year by the acquisition of two local businesses: chatbot provider Cogno AI and call centre software company Ameyo.

The idea is that businesses and end-consumers have started using new communications and transaction channels in recent years, especially since the onset of the pandemic. This has led to business processes involving more complicated combinations of tools and apps, which in turn creates significant expenses for companies and poor experiences for customers.

Exotel aims to consolidate various customer engagement channels into a single platform that can also facilitate more seamless transitions between chatbot and live agent interactions. There are plans to develop big data systems to provide agents with live recommendations and prioritise service requests according to urgency rather than first-come-first-served.

More than 1,300 customers have been acquired in the past 12 months across South and Southeast Asia, as well as the Middle East. Puneet Kumar, a managing director at Steadview, said Exotel is now serving almost all internet unicorns in India. They include Ola, Swiggy, Flipkart, Gojek, Byju’s, Finnov, Zomato, and Oyo. HDFC Bank and Bajaj Allianz are also clients.

The fresh capital will be used to push into Southeast Asia and the Middle East, explore further acquisitions, and add about 200 staff to a currently 1,000-strong team by the end of 2022. The company claims its revenue is growing at 70% a year and currently tracking at USD 50m on an annualised basis. Revenue is hoped to hit USD 200m in the next four years.

“Customer engagement is critical to businesses across India, APAC, and EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa], especially in light of the ongoing impact of the pandemic,” Ravi Mehta, founder and CIO of Steadview, said in a statement. “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.”

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Support services
• Expansion
• India
• Steadview Capital
• professional services
• enterprise software
• artificial intelligence