By Line : Sanjib Mohapatra
Sanjib@accentinfomedia.com
There is a cliché reverberating the global market now that– “Change or ready to be Changed”; because the start-ups are coming and they can replace you from your stated position. They are nimble and ready to customise themselves for the customers’ requirements.
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“Understanding the environment in which the customers operate has led us to make investments in areas that are crucial for its customers.”
Ambarish Gupta
CEO & Co-Founder
Knowlarity
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Ancient India was called as Sone-ki-Chidiya, in other words a land of fortunes. True to the name the country embodies one of the oldest civilizations and has gifted many unique things to the world, if it is to be believed, including Zero, Geometry, astronomy, etc. All the cues justify that India was not only a land of abundant richness but also a land of fertile brains but due to some evil design of the outsiders the country lost its sheen. But with the evolution of Indian software and services industry in the 20th century, we could salvage our lost glory but now when there is a reverse brain drain of the Indian intellectuals to India and creation of million dollar enterprises is possible by Indian middle class without having any background the whole world is again starting to believe in the glory of India.
There are hundreds and thousands of Indian technologists working in Silicon Valley and needless to say their contribution to the global technology innovations is all for there to see. Today all these brains are behind the global start-up revolution. And the same minds from Silicon Valley and other parts of the world are making are now homeward bound.
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“We conduct fun activities off and on; the latest one was a collage making competition. Also on 1st April we had Bakra day in the Gurgaon office. It was good to play some pranks on our colleagues and have fun while at work. “
Teena Minhas
Head Corporate Communications
Knowlarity
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According to some sources India will be home to more than 11,500 start-ups 2020 from 3,100 in 2014. Some of the early start-ups are already enjoying the fruit and have been successful and proved their mettle not only in India but also in the global arena. For example: Flipkart, BookMyShow, Myntra, CommonFloor, Redbus, Housing.com, Zivame, Paytm, etc. are the big success in the consumer market. Not only are these companies inspiring others to start believing in their ability but also creating fine work places for the millions of young people to work in.
Alongside the B2C centric start-ups’ story, there is a strong story getting built around the B2B start-ups. Today, there are hundreds of B2B start-ups in the technology space of Cloud, IoT and Big Data popping up with the financial supports from various seeding funds and PEs. Out of many startups, there are a few who make it to the top and Knowlarity is one such, which shows potential of being at the top in a few years from now.
Founded in 2009, by two IIT Kanpur batch-mates – Ambarish Gupta and Pallav Pandey, Knowlarity is Asia’s largest cloud telephony company with 500 work force, powering more than 12,000 companies in India and 65 other countries. Two years back Pandey quit the company to chase his alternative dreams.
Funded by some of the VCs i.e. Sequoia Capital and Mayfield Ventures, Knowlarity is headquartered in Singapore and is present is 65 countries including India, Dubai, Turkey and the Philippines, etc. Its customers range from first-time entrepreneurs to multinationals such as Google.
Knowlarity’s flagship products, Super Receptionist and SmartIVR, can process over a million calls an hour. Using these products Knowlarity has been able to provide an array of services to the enterprises across Asia – Missed Dial, Virtual Ad Number, Click-2-Call, Super Toll-Free Number, K-Broadcast, Cloud IVR, Advanced Dual Bridge Number, Virtual PPC Number and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) solution.
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“Like some offices which knew that the only way to get employees to work on a match day was to screen it in office, Knowlarity screened the India – Australia World Cup match in Bangalore and Gurgaon offices.”
Amit Goel
Head Product Development
Knowlarity [/quote]
After completing his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, Ambarish worked with various countries including McKinsey and Co, before starting this company. It was in 2007-08, when he was working for a reasonably sized banking firm (which was also the last stint of his employment life), that he witnessed the entire US BFSI sector saw collapsing due to the faulty credit policy. This prompted Ambarish to do something else other than BFSI related things. Therefore in 2009, he along with his Kanpur batchmate started Knowlarity. While evaluating various options he realised that in the emerging market telecom market had good opportunity.
Ambarish says, “Consumer electronic market was growing 100% at that time. That was the time when everyone got mobile phone. I had a choice of doing Telecom business for consumer or enterprise. Consumers are always fickle minded and if you build up a consumer centric company you won’t know what is happening until five years down the line because there are too many variables and too much risk involved. While in the enterprise business, you can start immediately and can see the reaction from the market. So I wanted to do less risky because I had failed in 2003. That is how cloud telephony kind of idea came in.”
He added, “Another micro thing is that if the consumers have phones they will call businesses and business needs some mechanism to manage those calls. So business telephony remains always hot. India used to be IT service industry and telephony industry was to born at that point and we had to jump-start the industry.”
Hence in 2009 Knowlarity was born out of the necessity of the industry to manage their phone numbers in a more powerful way on a hosted automated manner. The company started offering two packages of solutions – one for the large enterprises and the other for the small business. Unbelievable but true, the first customer Knowlarity bagged was the present CM of Orissa, who used Knowlarity solution to support his election campaign during 2009.
But as the company started growing, it needed additional funds to manage the expansion – not only India but in overseas therefore Ambarish persuaded various global VCs to support him in his mission.
Ambarish says, “We raised a $2-million angel fund five years ago, and $6.5 million in Series-A from Sequoia Capital in January 2012. We have also secured $16 million in Series-B funding from Mayfield and Sequoia in 2014.”
Today, the market is growing fast therefore it is hard to put any number on this. However, the cloud telephony market is estimated to be a $600 million market in the US alone, and it is estimated it to be worth over $60 bn globally. Knowlarity is presently the market leader in Asia for cloud telephony services with 80-90% market share in India. Ambarish adds, “We are already 10x the size of our competitors. We expect to grow by 5x over the next 3 years and our interim goal is to be a billion dollar company.”
When everyone was refraining from making any investment during 2009, Ambarish and his friend took a very bold step of investing in the market, although there were advantages too in terms of quality.
Ambarish says, “We are happy to have done so in a challenging time. Creating a startup itself is a difficult task and second most difficult thing is to attract investors. However, we are blessed with very strong in-house technology, dedicated team, big customers and last but not the least we have a strong media presence and support.”
Although there were many companies today in the competition but Knowlarity has created its presence better than others. If there is any comparison Knowlarity out smarts others. Ambarish maintains, “We have built our own technology- Knowlus right from scratch. We have structured our services around our customer – we understand that SMBs want to access technology without having to deal with it. Whether it is providing a single dashboard for managing multiple marketing campaigns at one go or providing SR App on Android, Knowlarity aims at maximizing user utility by providing simple yet powerful cloud based solutions.”
He adds, “Understanding the environment in which the customers operate has led us to make investments in areas that are crucial for its customers – a large support team, a large in-house consulting team and investments in reliability and scalability – that our more technology-focused competitors have not realized as yet.”
Knowlarity’s does not owes its success in the market to its superior product development but also its quality manpower, which is well supported by its unique HR practices. Knowlarity does many fun activities to help people work together and have fun with their colleagues. Two of the main practices which could be worth mentioning include:
Walk with the CEO – Ambarish being a health conscious CEO expects that his employees also would take care of his health. Ambarish usually walks wherever possible, as a practice. In Walk with the CEO, the whole staff at Knowlarity are invited to walk down 14 floors (from where Knowlarity is located) and around in the Cyber Hub Campus for a small walk and talk. Post this the CEO takes everyone for Chai/Kulfi on the campus.
Chai pe Technology is a weekly get together of Technology Team over a chai party, where they talk about new trends in technology, whats exciting and general stuff and not day to day work stuff. It happens every friday @ 4:00 PM.
Teena Minhas, Head, Corporate Communications, Knowlarity, says, “We conduct fun activities off and on; the latest one was a collage making competition. Also on 1st April we had Bakra day in the Gurgaon office. It was good to play some pranks on our colleagues and have fun while at work.”
Similarly, Amit Goel, Head, Product Development, Knowlarity, echoes, “Like some offices which knew that the only way to get employees to work on a match day was to screen it in office, Knowlarity screened the India – Australia World Cup match in Bangalore and Gurgaon offices.”
The healthy working atmosphere at Knowlarity is evident from the fact that when the attrition rate of the Indian IT industry is 20% plus, it has less than 10 %. A satisfied workforce always yields good results for the business outcome of the employer. Therefore today Knowlarity has a healthy customer base and it has grown 150% over the year with 200% revenue growth; and channel partners growth has been 400%.
Ambarish maintains, “Our powerful technology, coupled with tireless customer service, has drawn appreciation time and again. Sumeru Technologies, which used our voice solutions, admired the dedication with which Knowlarity’s support team worked at odd hours to help them meet tight deadlines during projects and delivered on their promises. Fortis Healthcare, one of the more prominent hospital chains in the country, has been able to bring down its error rate by 90% using Knowlarity’s emergency response solution, ERCC. We also introduced the Customer Bill of Rights, which empowers our clients and sets a benchmark for the industry.”
“Our international clients include Easytaxi, Zipdial (whom we have partnered with to provide the robust infrastructure and flexible technology needed to scale their mobile marketing and analytics platform), Chope, Fareast Flora, Esynchrony and Telserv,” he concludes.
Finally…
Today, Knowlarity might be growing at a rate of 200% year on year but the potential of the market is too large to major with any number, only thing to see is how Knowlarity pushes its limits to access those markets and offer them the solutions that they seek.
Facts about Knowlarity
- Grown from a garage set-up to a 500+ strong team
- National and international awards – Nasscom top 10 companies in 2012, Deloitte 11th fastest growing company in India to Red Herring top 100 companies in Asia, Edison award 2014 Nominee to name a few.
- Built our own in-house technology- Knowlus
- Expanded globally to all possible business verticals
- Fastest growing Tech Startup in Asia
Major Clients:
- Common Floor
- Siemens
- Bisleri
- SYSKA Gadgets
- CBSE Board HRD Ministry
- Reliance Big FM
Products:
- Supersreceptionist – a plug-and-play virtual call center
- SmartIVR- an enterprise-grade cloud communications platform
- Superconference – SuperConference is a free offering
- Nowlus
