[Funding alert] Cloud-based customer engagement startup Exotel raises $35M in Series C round

Exotel on Wednesday announced that it has raised $35 million as a part of its Series C funding round from IIFL AMC, Sistema Asia Fund, CX Partners, Singularity Growth Opportunities Fund, and Vodafone ex-CEO Arun Sarin, 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. Bengaluru-based investment bank IndigoEdge was the exclusive banker for the transaction, as stated in the press statement.

According to the official statement, this fresh infusion of funds will be used primarily to boost the company's product offerings.

Exotel and 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 provide conversational AI capabilities for improved customer experience.

The organisation claims to be currently growing 70 percent YoY and is at an ARR of $45 million.

Incorporated in 2011, Exotel was co-founded by three engineers — Shivakumar Ganesan, Ishwar, and Anil Kumar — to help businesses bring order and efficiency to customer communication. Working with some of the fastest-growing companies in the emerging markets (Ola, Flipkart, Gojek, HDFC Bank, Quikr, Redmart, etc), Exotel using its voice and SMS infra, and Ameyo with its omnichannel contact centre capabilities, help manage their customer engagement over the cloud.

Speaking about the new development, Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku), CEO and Co-founder of Exotel, mentioned,

“Our desire to enable enterprises with the best in customer engagement is one step closer to reality. 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.”

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Commenting on how the product suite enables enterprises, Shivku said, “The platform will offer an easy way for businesses to communicate with customers over voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and video without losing context.”

Commenting on the investment, Sumit Jain, Senior Partner, Sistema Asia Fund added,

"CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) is a $6 billion market in India and SEA, and one of the fastest-growing technology areas in the post-COVID-19 world. Exotel has quietly emerged as the CPaaS platform of choice in India through its market-best reliability and comprehensive product suite. We are delighted to partner with them and expect them to become a globally relevant platform in the years to come.”

Speaking of creating an offering on unified customer data, Sachin Bhatia, CEO of Ameyo, mentioned,

“This is a step in the right direction that 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.”

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