Plans to invest 10 million USD in the next two years
Exotel announces its global ambition. To start with, the company will make an entry into the Southeast Asian market including Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The company is primarily targeting the tech-enabled service industry which can benefit greatly with their developer-first approach; with an aim to help businesses talk to their customers with accountability, tracking and privacy intact.
An initial investment of USD 10 million is planned for the next two years, a majority of which will be operational and sales spends.
Exotel will be launching their API platform globally as opposed to the product that is available in the Indian market, as the API is easily scalable and customisable for any tech-enabled service. The overseas operations will be overseen by Varun Raj, who was the co-founder of Voyce, a customer-feedback firm that Exotel had acquired last November. Singapore will be the headquarters for Exotel’s Southeast Asia operations.
Speaking on the expansion, Shivakumar Ganesan, Co-founder and CEO, Exotel said, “When we were thinking of our expansion plans, we first wanted to target markets similar to India. Both in terms of culture and population, Southeast Asia is therefore the logical first step. The propensity of people to use the service of tech-enabled companies in this region to go about the daily lives, is high. In India, we estimate that people in the metros use tech-enabled services 0.27 times a day. This tech-enabled service could be anything ranging from booking a cab to ordering a meal online to buying something from an e-commerce website. In Singapore for instance, we estimate the same to be at least 0.7 times a day per day. This makes the addressable market for Exotel in Singapore over 50 million SGD.”
Many players in these verticals are looking to optimize their operational efficiency thereby saving money, and Exotel plays an important role in helping them do this. For the current customers looking to expand, Exotel is their preferred partner and many are already in talks with the company for support in the new markets as well.
“We are going to be adopting a developer-first approach globally. As a behind-the-scenes ecosystem enabler, we will also support early-stage startups by offering them Exotel for free. We will look at these startups as fellow entrepreneurs and not customers, helping them in whatever little way we can,” Ganesan added.
The Southeast Asian market already has a couple of international players whose platform, however, is primarily tuned to the US market, and not so much region-focused. Exotel’s infrastructure has been designed in such a way that the call quality and reliability will be far superior for the local market.
About Exotel:
Exotel is the most reliable and scalable cloud telephony platform in India. Founded by Shivakumar Ganesan, Ishwar Sridharan and Siddharth Ramesh in 2011, we power voice communication for over a 1000 businesses including brands like Ola, Uber, Flipkart etc. Our aim is to help businesses talk to their customers with accountability, tracking and privacy intact. This provides for a better customer experience and also improves operational efficiency.
Every day, the company enables over 3 million conversations between businesses and their customers. The number of calls handled by the platform grew by 400% in 2015.
Nasscom’s Emerge Product conclave picked Exotel as one of the top 10 emerging startups in India. We were also named as one of the “Top 5 preferred B2B startups to work for” by YourStory in 2015.
Follow Exotel on Twitter @Exotel
For further information contact:
Exotel
Gayatri Krishnamoorthy
+91-9900-097-288
gayatri@exotel.in
Text100
Antara Singhania
+91-8277-683-447
antara.singhania@text100.co.in
