Exotel, a customer engagement platform, raises $40M from Steadview Capital

Bengaluru-based Exotel, which operates a full-stack customer engagement platform, has raised $40 million or Rs 298 crore in a Series D funding round led by London-based Steadview Capital.

The funding announcement comes three months after it raised $35 million from a group of investors, including Sistema Asia Capital, IIFL, CX Partners, Blume Ventures, A91, and Singularity Growth Opportunities Fund.

With this round of funding, Exotel will focus on building 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.

Exotel, which has now raised approximately close to $100 million in funding, helps its clients to engage with their customers through touchpoints such as web chat, co-browsing, and videos. The platform offerings include a contact center, APIs, voice, and chatbots.

Founded in 2011 by Vijay Sharma, Shivakumar Ganesan, Ishwar Sridharan, and Siddharth Ramesh, With its SaaS offerings, Exotel has hooked many big corporate names like Ola, HDFC Bank, Quikr, Swiggy, and Zerodha, to use its platform to engage with the customers.

Exotel claims to have annualized recurring revenue (ARR) of $50 million, which is growing at a rate of 70% and aims to hit an ARR of $200 million over the next 4 years. Besides this, The startup had also acquired more than 1300 customers in the last 12 months including ITC Salaam in Saudi Arabia, Bajaj Allianz, City Mall, Krazybee, Shadowfax, and TCS.

“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,” said Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku), CEO & Co-founder of Exotel.

Commenting on the deal, Ravi Mehta, CIO & 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," he adds.

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 200 by the end of 2022.

Also Read:

• Hevo raises $30M in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital India

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