Exotel raises $35 mn to expand its cloud customer engagement platform

The customer engagement company is looking to hit an annual recurring revenue of $200 mn over next 5 years and plans to increase its headcount by 200 over next 12 months

Exotel, a leading customer engagement company, has raised $35 million as a part of its series C funding from IIFL AMC, Sistema Asia Fund, CX Partners, Singularity Growth Opportunities Fund, and Arun Sarin, ex-CEO of Vodafone who has also joined the round as an angel investor and a mentor. Existing investors Blume Ventures and A91 Partners also participated in this round. The Bengaluru-based investment bank, IndigoEdge, was the exclusive banker for the transaction.

This fresh infusion of funds will be used primarily to boost the product offerings of the company. Exotel and tech firm Ameyo recently announced their merger. The combined entity will focus on building a full-stack customer engagement platform in the emerging markets to accelerate communication to the cloud and providing conversational AI capabilities for improved customer experience. The organisation is currently growing 70 per cent year-over-year and is at an ARR (annual recurring revenue) of $45 million.

“We’re building the market's first cloud-based full-stack engagement suite by bringing in Ameyo’s contact centre capabilities on top of Exotel’s cloud communication infrastructure,” said Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku), CEO and co-founder of Exotel. “The platform will offer an easy way for businesses to communicate with customers over voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and video without losing context.”

Sumit Jain, Senior Partner, Sistema Asia Fund said “CPaaS (communications platform-as-a-service) is a $6 billion market in India and SEA (Southeast Asia) and one of the fastest-growing technology areas in the post-covid world.

“Exotel has quietly emerged as the CPaaS platform of choice in India through their market-best reliability and comprehensive product suite,” said Jain. “We expect them to become a globally relevant platform in the years to come.”

Sachin Bhatia, CEO of Ameyo said the new funding allows Exotel to invest further in bringing seamless customer engagement on the cloud to emerging geographies. “The convergence of customer data coupled with conversational AI capabilities will enable enterprises to monitor conversations, build smarter bots and assist customer service teams in real-time,” said Bhatia.

Exotel was co-founded by three engineers to help businesses bring order and efficiency to customer communication. It is working with some of the fastest-growing companies in the emerging markets such as Ola, Flipkart and  GoJek.  Exotel with its voice, SMS infra, and Ameyo with its omnichannel contact centre capabilities help manage their customer engagement over the cloud. Exotel’s cloud-based solution simplifies customer communication for over 6000 companies in India, the USA, SE Asia, Middle East, Australia, and Africa.