Entrepreneur Rajdip Gupta sheds light on Route Mobile’s journey, from being bootstrapped to going public

Rajdip Gupta, CEO and Founder of Route Mobile, believes that funding and investments are not must-haves for a startup to be successful. What's mandatory? Clear fundamentals and conviction about the products.

Speaking about Route Mobile’s success journey, Rajdip said, “We realised long back the kind of potential cloud communication as a platform has... We always wanted to change the way people communicate, like how can I add more value to my enterprise customer to have a rich communication media so that they can engage with their end user.”

Founded in 2004, Route Mobile offers a cloud communications platform to enterprise clients that can be deployed and integrated with existing business applications and systems. The platform initially began as a pure-play SMS and kept adding new features to help customers to simplify communication.

In September last year, Route Mobile was listed at National Stock Exchange (NSE) with a 105 percent rise on day one of the listing. Its Rs 600-crore IPO was oversubscribed 74 times.

Speaking about the IPO, Rajdip said they realised listing was the best way to raise funds and create value for everyone.

“What I really felt good about it is that we never raised funds till the time we went for IPO... we were always cash-rich. We always wanted to create a startup that can get listed anywhere in the world. But I thought because I am from India, and it is better to listed in India. Two to three years back,  we realised that it was time to go public and started working on that,” he said.

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Building Route Mobile

Rajdip explains that Route Mobile is a cloud communication platform provider integrated with all channels of communications. Enterprise customers can choose the way they want to communicate with their end user to have a better user engagement. 

“For example, if you withdraw money from your bank account via ATM, you will get an SMS, or when you log in websites, you get OTP. That flows through our platform. The moment the OTP is generated or you withdraw money, you also get an email saying that as a fallback…that email is also part of our platform. There are various other cases use cases like if your flight is delayed by one hour, you get a voice call saying that your flight has been delayed; that is our voice API,” he says.

Rajdip said the company recently launched its WhatsApp and RCS API. 

“If you see our revenues, I think we are showing growth of more than 30 percent year-on-year basis from the last five years. We always wanted to create a sustainable business model, where the customer will be with the company for a longer period of time. That is why we started focusing more on core enterprise base, operator base, and OTT players. So, once we are very well integrated within the enterprise ecosystem, it is very tough for someone to replace,” he says.

Rajdip revealed that Route Mobile clocked in Rs 1,400 crore revenue last year and had already registered Rs 380 crore last quarter this year.

In this episode of 100X Entrepreneur Podcast, Rajdip Gupta, CEO and Founder of Route Mobile, talks about starting up from scratch and getting listed.

To know more, listen to the entire podcast here

Notes: 

01:53 – Creating a story and value from India

04:17 – Solutions for enterprise customers

10:02 – Scale and revenue breakup across geographies

12:25 – Benchmarking against Indian competitors

16:07 – Challenges during the early phase of building Route Mobile

22:19 – Work-life balance and unavoidable circumstances in a startup journey

36:11 – Future plans for Route Mobile

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