How will the recent funding of $1.5 million help ShepHertz become a global success
ShepHertz Technologies has closed their next round of funding totaling to $1.5 million. Existing investors Blume Ventures, Mumbai Angels and Kae Capital are joined by Sashi Reddi Investment Capital Fund, growx ventures, LetsVentures and India Quotient in this round. Sashi Reddi has joined Sasha Mirchandani on the board of ShepHertz after the funding.
Delhi-based ShepHertz Technologies was started by Siddhartha Chandurkar in 2010. ShepHertz provides a mobile backend as a service for app developers offering cloud APIs, a multiplayer gaming engine, an office administration tool and a mobile app building. They had raised an angel round almost an year back from Mumbai Angels and Kae Capital.
The funding will be used for expansion in local markets of North America, Northeast Asia and Latin America along with strengthening the sales and marketing of the company.
Siddhartha said,
In the last few quarters ShepHertz growth has been accelerating at tremendous speed. We are now one of the largest players globally in the mobile and cloud computing and gaming space, servicing API calls in billions with thousands of apps developed on our Platform. With the new infusion of funds from our existing as well as new investors we will be aggressively increasing our presence in other geographies and in GTM activities. We are lucky to have great investors on board who believe in our vision and other than funds, help us reach our goals and beyond.
Current status of the company
ShepHertz technologies process billions of API calls on their platform. Over 75% of their customers are from geographies other than India which includes North America, Latin America and Northeast Asia.. The company has server presence in six zones of which two zones lie in North America and one each in Ireland, Sau Paulo (Brazil), Japan and Singapore. They also plan to open servers in South Korea and China zones in future.
The company is headquartered in Gurgaon, and has a local office in the bay area (Redwood City, California) as well. ShepHertz enjoys the distinction of becoming profitable in a very short span of time. Current team strength is 40 people.
Competition
Apple has Cloud Kit which offers PaaS support for iOS app developers and similarly there are other PaaS providers as well. But ShepHertz has carved out its niche among the gaming app developers. Their platform has building features for games like avatar, buddy management etc tailor made to serve the community in a better way. In fact, top 2-3 players of gaming apps use ShepHertz technologies to build their apps exercising the edge provided by the platform over others. The company is also seeing a lot of monetization taking place for the app developers in their platform.
Behind every succcessful startup there is a great team
Siddhartha admits that the main reason for ShepHertz success so far is because of the committed founding team (i.e. Sushil Bhadouria, Ajay Tiwari, Naveen Goswami, Daljeet Mehta and Dhruv Chopra) and all the ShepHertzians. He said, “These people have put their blood, sweat and tears to take the company forward against all odds. To become successful globally in a highly dynamic environment requires a strong, agile, innovative and enthusiastic team and we are lucky to have such a team at ShepHertz. It proves the point once more 'Behind every succcessful startup there is a great team."
Indian Product story
Siddhartha feels that the next decade belongs to the product companies. He spoke about the Indian product story,
Lots of product companies from India are now selling globally and taking leading positions in their respective areas. Last two years has seen many 'Made In India selling Globally Companies’ having their development offices in India and local sales office in other geographies. While the last two decades were for service companies, we definitely see the next decade belonging to product companies.
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