This Hyderabad-based startup aims to simplify working from home

With work-from-home set to become the norm even after the COVID-19 threat abates, companies today are actively on the hunt for intelligent business continuity tools that can not only help their employees keep in touch in an organised way, but also make processes and communication more systematic and secure.

Troop Messenger aims to be all those things, and more.

Conceptualised in 2017, the startup was founded by Sudhir Naidu as a one-stop solution to cater to the various needs of the workplace, right from providing instant messaging and conferencing services, to scheduling projects, and using several in-built tools to help boost productivity.

The bootstrapped startup expects to breakeven by the second quarter (July-September) of 2020, and plans to raise funds once it achieves its self-imposed milestones.

Its clients include companies like Caspers, TripleJ Holdings, Lehua Group, St James Investment Advisors, Classic Air Charter, and Horsesmouth LLC, among others. The company also provides its services to Netherlands’ Ministry of Defence.

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Why Troop Messenger?

Troop Messenger is a team messaging and collaboration application that caters to the multitasking professional needs of a workplace. From swift messaging to smooth and efficient interface, the app works towards providing a safe and secure realm for data and documents sharing, while not compromising on integrated and unified communication.

“From one-on-one messaging to group conversations, file previews, voice-video calls, screen share, Burnout, Forkout, etc, we entail smooth navigational flow for each feature,” says the 45-year-old Founder and CEO Sudhir.

“The platform is designed to serve enterprises, governments and defence for which seamless exchange of data and documents are a prerequisite that Troop Messenger leverages, and incidentally helps them make informed decisions within the premises of safest environment, having the speed of light seconds,” he adds.

Troop’s easy texting and emailing platform including features like respond later, flagging important mail, docs and texts, and 24-hours technical assistant for support, among others.

The startup's operational model primarily revolves around customer experiences and their pain points.

“We have five important branches to our operational model: identifying industry-specific collaboration needs; research and development; product development and upgrade processes; sales and marketing and its automation; customer support and operational efficiencies,” says Sudhir.

How did it start?

An MBA graduate from ICFAI Business School, Gurugram, Sudhir has over 16 years of work experience. Before he became an entrepreneur, he had worked in companies such as Citibank, and AT&T.

In 2003, he set up a systems integration and consulting services firm, ‘Tvisha Technologies’, where he and his team were forced to use several applications for different functionalities, as was the norm.

“We used CRM, HRMS, accounting, billing and quotations and much more to add on to the never-ending list. It was very chaotic, as well as time consuming to keep track of multiple platforms, and frequently created a lot of confusion, making us susceptible to mistakes,” says Sudhir.

This forced the team to look for platforms that could combine all the various workflow processes of a business on a single interface, so that employees would not need to log into different applications.

“We tried various products available in the market that provided a solution to our problem but didn’t come across one that fulfilled our needs. It was then that we took the lead to provide the professional sphere with an efficient communication podium that supported collaboration."

Tvisha Technologies is the parent company of Troop Messenger.

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Industry perspectives

The global team collaboration software market size is estimated to reach $18.3 billion by 2026, according to a Fortune Business Insights report. But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, those numbers have been revised upwards, as more and more companies give up their offices to permanently switch to a work-from-home format.

“Since the past two months, there has been a consistent increment of 60 percent to 80 percent in the business owing to an increase in our customer base. Consequently, most of the clients have been renewing their services each month, and 60 percent of them have already signed annual contracts with us,” says Sudhir.

While Troop Messenger considers Slack and Microsoft Teams as its competitors, it believes its features are unique in itself.

The USP of its app is the distribution model:

“The app provides both SaaS and on-premise models in our single platform which otherwise is independently available in other apps. While SaaS model is hosted focussing on SMEs, the latter – being self-hosted – targets large organisations and governments for whom data ownership is the paramount requirement.”

For now, Troop Messenger is working on client acquisition and turning to profitability. Further, the startup plans to integrate well-known third-party products into its platform.