India's SquadStack raises $17.5m Series B
India’s SquadStack, a telemarketing technology provider, has raised a INR 1.4bn (USD 17.5m) Series B round led by Bertelsmann India Investments.
Existing investors Chiratae Ventures and Blume Ventures also participated. They provided a USD 5m Series A in 2020.
SquadStack, formerly Squadrun, combines data science, artificial intelligence, and a decentralized network of sales professionals to help consumer businesses improve sales conversions. It positions itself as a “future of work” supplier and sales talent marketplace.
The idea is to facilitate access to skilled remote work via smartphone. Venkatesh Peddi, a managing director at Chiratae, described the model as “productising sales services to manage the challenges of fragmented supply.” The company claims to have achieved 3x year-on-year growth without specifying a timeframe.
SquadStack describes Indian telesales as a INR 800bn market that has experienced inadequate innovation in the past decade. Some 7m agents nationwide sell various products and services to 200m people daily yet vendors often struggle to retain sales talent. This is despite the pandemic introducing a new status quo of flexibility around work-from-home and cost structures.
Essentially, the company aims to fill demand in this space by creating remote sales jobs. It will use the Series B capital to hire additional staff and expand its network of sales talent, while exploring unspecified new verticals. The team, which currently operates across five cities, will expand into three additional cities in the coming months.
“We have a strong bullish thesis on future of work and SquadStack fits strongly in that as their technology provides ownership and flexibility to the large, diverse and distributed sales talent in the country,” Rohit Sood, a partner at Bertelsmann India said in a statement. “We instantly formed a connection with the founding team as we have strong convictions in their data and product-driven approach to this complex problem.”
Bertelsmann India Investments is a VC arm of German conglomerate Bertelsmann. Last month, the parent company doubled down on its India agenda with a commitment to invest USD 500m in the country by 2025. This compares to a total deployment of USD 285m since 2013.
The enlarged India program will step up investment activity to 6-8 deals a year for the next five years. The plan will also involve the opening of new offices for the VC business in Mumbai and Bangalore in addition to existing country headquarters in New Delhi.
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