[Funding alert] Hiver raises $22M in Series B round from K1 Capital, others

Hiver, a software as a service (SaaS) startup, has raised $22 million in Series B round from K1 Capital. Existing investors including Kalaari Capital, Kae Capital, and AngelList have also participated in the round, according to a release shared by the company.

SaaS startup Hiver plans to use the freshly raised capital to accelerate marketing and sales, and hire people in the tech and other verticals.

"We have always been a revenue generating firm as we were bootstrapped for a while. These funds will help us take up the next leg of expansion," Niraj Rajan Rout, Founder and CEO of Hiver, told YourStory in an interaction.

Started in 2012 by IIT-Kharagpur graduates Niraj and Nitish Nandy, Hiver is a software startup, which works with firms that primarily use emails for servicing their customers.

"If there is a company, which employees 25-500 people, then they would have an email id where the company would be getting a lot of queries. Most businesses still rely on email for customer service and customer communication because email is very strong for many reasons. We make it really simple for companies to handle their customer communication by email. In addition to making it simple, we provide a lot of activities to automate the process," says Niraj.

ALSO READ

IPO-bound Delhivery acquires US-based drone technology company

Run by Grexit Inc., Hiver has always been building software in the email space. But the current version of their product only came into existence in 2017, according to Niraj.

Hiver currently works with over 1,500 companies, including Harvard University, AppsFlyer, Upwork.com, Vacasa and Kiwi.com, across 30 countries. While starting in Bengaluru, the firm also has headquarters in the US where it draws more than 50 percent of its revenue share. Hiver gets a "minuscule" revenue contribution from India.

This is common among many SaaS firms, which may be founded in India but find a wider market in the US and other countries outside India.