Exotel, a cloud communications platform, has recently announced that it has successfully raised $40 Mn in a Series D funding led by Steadview Capital.
The company plans to use this capital to expand its operations by investing in its core product, customer service and go-to-market initiatives. This will enable Exotel to further strengthen its position as one of the leading cloud communications platforms in the market.
Overview of Exotel
Exotel is an omnichannel customer engagement platform that enables businesses and startups to stay connected with their customers over phone, SMS, email, WhatsApp and other digital channels. The company’s platform offers features such as automated phone call routing, call tracking & recording and intelligent customer insights & analytics. Exotel has been designed to be easy to use and helps businesses manage their customer engagement with minimal effort.
The company uses a proprietary AI-driven algorithm that automatically routes every call according to predefined rules set by the business. This routing logic considers factors such as the type of product being sold, the customer complaint type or sales department, or both designated and non-designated numbers of team members who are most suitable to answer each inbound call.
Founded in 2011 by Shivakumar Ganesan, Siddhartha Jois, Shivakumar Pandey & Ishwar Sridharan, Exotel is headquartered in Bengaluru (India). The company recently announced its Series D funding led by Chiratae Ventures (formerly known as IDG Ventures India) with participation from existing investors Bharti SoftBank (BSB), Bessemer Venture Partners & Prime Venture Partners. With this new round of funding Exotel plans to expand its operations across multiple Indian cities and invest further in product innovations to expand its existing feature set.
Overview of Steadview Capital
Steadview Capital is a growth capital fund founded in 2013 with offices in Mumbai and Hong Kong. The fund is backed institutional investors from North America, Europe and APAC region as well as family offices and high net-worth individuals. Steadview invests across technology, financial services, logistics & commerce, consumer products & services and healthcare sectors in India.
The vision of Steadview Capital is to achieve long-term above market returns by partnering with leading entrepreneurs to create high growth businesses that can deliver immense value to the stakeholders. In this pursuit, Steadview prides itself on having a “no fear” environment that encourages people to think out of the box and give them space to experiment and succeed.
The investments made by Steadview are based on the firm’s deep understanding of markets, assessment of risk/return profiles for each deal enabling it to provide anticipated returns for its investors within an appropriate time frame along with facilitating access to customer networks and helpful advice when needed.
The Funding
Exotel recently announced that it had secured $40 Mn in a Series D funding round led by Steadview Capital. This investment will be used by the company to expand its operations and support its ongoing growth.
It is also expected to help Exotel in scaling its business and accelerate development of its products to meet the increasingly evolving needs of clients in the current scenario.
Size of the funding
Exotel, a cloud telephony platform from India has recently announced that it has secured $16 million in Series D funding, led by Tower Capital and Accel. This funding round also saw continued participation from existing backers such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lionrock Capital.
This new capital will help Exotel strengthen its foothold in the cloud telecommunications space in India. The company plans to use the funds to expand its offerings, hire talent across sales and products, and to enter new geographies.
The Series D round takes Exotel’s total investments since 2012 to over $36 million. Aside from the investments brought in by global venture capitalist firms like Accel and LightSpeed, angel investor Bejul Somaia had invested an undisclosed amount into Exotel in 2016 via his firm Quadria Capital, while global telecommunications firm CISCO had made a strategic investment into Exotel at the start of 2018.
This fresh round of funding affirms that business communication solutions will see lots of action in the coming years. The cloud telephony model is rapidly gaining ground across India as enterprises come to grips with the cost saving benefits associated with it. With this new capital injection, Exotel will be enabled to enhance its product offerings and investments into research and development initiatives; helping build larger awareness for their pioneering solutions both within India and on a global level.
Investors involved in the funding round
Exotel, a cloud-telephony gateway, recently announced a Series D funding round totalling $16 million. The round was led by Quona Capital, an early-stage fund focusing on financial technologies. Other prominent investors involved in the funding include existing investors Kalaari Capital and Sigma Ventures.
The funds will also be used to grow Exotel’s network of partners, which includes small businesses as well as large enterprises such as Flipkart and Ola Cabs. It will also expand the company’s operations outside India, focusing on Asian markets. Series D funding will help Exotel strengthen its foothold in the cloud telephony market by acquiring key resources and technologies.
How the funds will be used
Exotel, a leading communications platform for customer interactions, recently concluded its Series D funding of USD 16.4M. The venture was led by Waterbridge Ventures and Fundamentum with participation from existing investors such as Tiger Global and Kalaari Capital.
The funds will be utilized to expand Exotel’s customer outreach across all customer touch points, customer support and enhancing cloud telephony capabilities. This move will help Exotel serve more customers and add deeper insights to customer engagement and interactions.
The company will use these funds to build more localized product offerings, expand team globally and focus on driving innovation towards customer experience management (CXM). It will also look to double down on the efforts it has been making in empowering small businesses to grow through technology that seamlessly connects customers, agents and AI enabled bots on a single platform.
Exotel also plans to triple its user base while significantly scaling up its presence in India before entering global markets in the next 12-18 months. It is already closely working with marquee institutional investors who are likely make further investments into the techunicorn over the next 9-12 months. Therefore, Exotels current round concludes their total fundraising efforts for this fiscal year at over USD 30M which will enable the company to grow significantly by expanding its product capabilities, aggregating global partners and investing in stronger sales & marketing initiatives across multiple geographies.
Exotel’s Expansion Plans
Exotel recently raised $40 Mn in a Series D funding led by Steadview Capital, which will help the company expand its operations further. This investment will further accelerate the growth of Exotel and play a major role in its mission of becoming the communication backbone for businesses.
In this article, we will discuss the expansion plans of Exotel and how this round of funding will benefit the company.
Expansion into new markets
Exotel’s Series D funding will allow the company to pursue its plans of expanding into new markets. With access to significant capital, Exotel is looking to invest in strategic initiatives in Southeast Asia and Africa, two of the company’s most promising markets.
To help reach these goals, Exotel plans to hire more key personnel, including business development managers who will help identify and establish strategic alliances with leading players in new markets. The human resources team at Exotel plans on significantly increasing its recruitment activities in these regions.
In addition, the company is planning to build local teams on-the-ground in our target countries which will be responsible for executing specific campaigns and initiatives that help establish our presence within these markets. This includes recruiting potential partners with expertise in different industries and training local personnel with high-level knowledge on Exotel’s platform.
These are just some of the strategies that Exotel intends to pursue with its Series D funding. By investing early in this expansion plan, the company stands a better chance of delivering long-term accelerated growth across different parts of the world.
Plans to launch new products and services
Exotel’s Series D funding received in March 2021, which included participation from Tiger Global and Steadview Capital, will help the company to further expand its global presence and launch new products and services. The company has already established its presence in seven international markets, including Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Africa.
Exotel plans to use the funding to grow in its existing markets and enter new countries. The plan is to establish offices in Europe and the US to launch their product suite into those regions. Exotel wants to continue offering high-quality products that meet customer needs across these different markets with assistance from its partners such as AWS, Nexmo by Vonage API Platform & Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
The funding also comes when digital transformation is evolving at an accelerated pace worldwide; allowing companies of all sizes to access AI-driven contact center solutions powered by natural language understanding (NLU). To stay ahead of this technology curve and drive success with aggressive growth plans, Exotel is investing heavily in research & development of its cloud contact center platform. This includes introducing chatbot technologies derived from NLU frameworks via integration of conversational AI components such as automated speech recognition (ASR) along with optional support for tasks such as automated mails or messages etc
Exotel is also exploring ways of leveraging data analytics products which offer enterprises extended visibility into communication channels operations so they can drive better business outcomes across their customer interactions. The team at Exotel believes these investments will be essential for scaling up their platform capabilities over the coming months to offer customers increased options for customized services on their omnichannel cloud contact center.
Plans to hire more staff
Exotel announced plans to hire more staff to expand their operations, following the completion of its Series D funding round. With the new resources, Exotel intends to double its employee base and build more partnerships with telcos, mobile money providers and other companies in India and Southeast Asia.
Exotel plans to use its new resources to introduce new products and services, such as advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities, modernised API infrastructure, open source options for developers, multi-language support options as well as custom enterprise-grade solutions. This will enable Exotel clients to enhance customer engagement experiences from anywhere across the country.
The expanded team will also help develop stronger strategic capabilities around product implementation and channel management with partners. With enhanced capabilities such as data science expertise for advanced analytics features for customers, Exotel’s expansion could enable it to become a major player in the communication service provider (CSP) space across Asia. This could potentially impact how organisations build customer relationships through messaging channels in India and beyond.
Benefits to Exotel
Exotel, India’s leading cloud-based customer engagement platform, recently raised USD 40 million in a Series D funding round led by Steadview Capital.
This funding will provide the company with, much-needed capital to expand its operations.
In this article, we will look at some of the benefits Exotel will gain from this funding.
Increased financial stability
Exotel’s recent Series D funding will add layer of financial stability for the company. It will provide Exotel with the necessary capital to expand operations, invest more in development, hire additional staff and continue to aid customers as they switch to cloud telephony solutions.
Furthermore, the capital raised in this financing round will help Exotel build strong partnerships with local and global vendors, as well as expand its sales and marketing efforts. This will further strengthen the company’s foothold in the cloud telephony space and provide it with more resources to further its mission of helping small businesses grow.
The additional funding will also invest in research and development at Exotel’s advanced technology lab and ensure that the high-performance solutions currently offered are further developed for wider use amongst enterprises all over India. With a top-down approach to innovation, emotional intelligence systems can be built which can better interact with customers on behalf of businesses easing customer service queries which arise from daily operations or incidents where emotional intelligence is needed such as introducing new products or services.
Ability to launch new products and services
Some of the benefits that Exotel will gain from its Series D funding include their ability to launch new products and services. The funds will enable the company to take full advantage of emerging technologies, acquisitions and partnerships. This will enable it to create and expand its existing product portfolios quickly and effectively.
Furthermore, Exotel can invest in research, development and testing for new products or services. These investments will help them develop innovative products or services tailored to customer needs and provide superior value in the market. Additionally, Exotel can also invest in marketing activities designed to reach existing customers and potential new customers.
The funding also allows Exotel to scale up operations, expand geographically into other markets where additional revenue can be generated, or acquire additional resources or technologies through strategic partnerships. The company can tackle untapped markets with innovative models and utilize big data analytics to better understand customer preferences and needs going forward. With the extra financing they receive through Series D funding, Exotel is uniquely positioned for success by being able to take advantage of all these opportunities more effectively than before.
Ability to hire more staff
Exotel’s Series D funding will allow it to hire more staff, open a larger office and expand its operations. The company, already present across India and Singapore, plans to set up offices in Dubai and South East Asian markets.
The company also aims to further develop its product offering by investing in AI-driven operations intelligence solutions which will help improve customer experience. With this capability, Exotel can better serve its customers with accurate calls routing and analytics support.
The additional funds raised will also add industry-leading features like advanced analytics and real time insights, creating a powerful software suite for the telecommunications industry.
Conclusion
Exotel’s recent Series D funding round of $40 Mn led by Steadview Capital will help propel the company’s growth and expansion of its operations. The funding is a testament to the company’s success in the cloud telephony and artificial intelligence.
In this conclusion, we will discuss the impact of this funding and what it means for Exotel’s future.
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