Creating flagship enterprise SaaS products by combining technology expertise with domain experience, Kovai.co has become a technology partner of choice for many of the world’s top enterprises
The pandemic has been has been an eye opener in many aspects. It has forced a tectonic shift across sectors over the last two years. Thanks to the rapid advancements in the field of deep-tech and digital technologies, despite standstill conditions, organizations prodded on.
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”13″ font_style=”italic” color=”#262626″ bgcolor=”#f9f9f9″]
“We built a successful global product technology company out of our home city – Coimbatore; I’ll call that out as Kovai.co’ team’s unique competence.”
Saravana Kumar,
Founder and CEO,
Kovai.co
[/quote]
Notwithstanding the surrounding gloom and severe despondency, the unthinkable happened! India managed to incubate over 2,250 startups in the year 2021, over 600 more than what was added in the previous year, according to a report by Nasscom and Zinnov. The Indian startup ecosystem remained vibrant and dynamic, despite the pandemic. Although 2022 is projected to be a promising year, the lessons learned in the last two years will be pivotal for the startups, as they navigate through the new normal.
In a series of features on the Great Indian Startup ecosystem, we shall present exclusive interactions with the most promising, innovative startups, based on three key pillars of innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship.
As a first in a series, we present here the story of Kovai.co – a leading Coimbatore-based multi-product enterprise SaaS startup.
In an exclusive interview to SME Channels, Saravana Kumar, Founder and CEO, Kovai.co, provides insights into his company’s mission, stress on innovation, differentiation technology, the innert drive, business-critical early traction, state of current revenue, ways to mitigate risks, and last but not the least, growth projections
What is your company’s stated mission? What’s the background of your founders?
Kovai.co is a multi-product enterprise SaaS company specializing in enterprise integration and knowledge management space based out of Coimbatore, India and London, UK. Kovai.co is a technology partner of choice for many of the world’s leading enterprises to manage and monitor their Microsoft BizTalk and Azure Serverless environments. Kovai.co’s product team consists of thinkers and innovators who are re-defining the way robust Enterprise Software and SaaS products are built. Over the years, we have grown organically to 5 products – 240+ of our team members are currently serving 2000+ customers across the world. Creating flagship enterprise SaaS products, combining technology expertise with domain experience is our forte. Additionally, we built a successful global product technology company out of our home city – Coimbatore; I’ll call that out as Kovai.co’ team’s unique competence.
Kovai.co’s mission is to create a successful global technology product company out of Coimbatore. The main notion behind starting this global company in a Tier 2 city such as Coimbatore is to bring more employment opportunities to the residents of the city and put Coimbatore on a global SaaS map. While the city has plenty of academically renowned institutions, Kovai.co aimed at bringing opportunities to these students. This has been the company’s main mission since inception.
Saravana Kumar, the Founder and CEO of Kovai.co, worked as a software consultant in London for 10 years before identifying a gap in the availability of necessary tools in the market when it comes to managing and monitoring Microsoft BizTalk Server environments.
What is your unique value proposition or competitive advantage?
Over the last ten years, Kovai.co is recognized by Microsoft as “Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional,” this pushes our technology experts to a higher level of value within the tech community. Last year, Kovai.co was awarded the “Bootstrapped SaaS Startup of the Year” by SaaSBoomi. The same year we reached $10 million in annual revenue and acquired 1500+ customers globally.
Organizations like McDonald’s & Virgin Mobiles chose Document360 for their knowledge base development for their employees. They considered many products but onboarded with Document360 for its speed of deployment and ease of use for editors and contributors. The feedback in general was that Documnet360 is fast and intuitive to use.
What positive early traction has your company achieved? What innovation do you bring into the marketplace? Does your brand have differentiated technology?
In terms of technological innovations, Kovai.co conducts various technical activities to sharpen our people’s skills esp. in enterprise software and SaaS.
Our products are problem solvers, simply said. But this has come with years and years of developing innovative technology. Here are some of our differentiated offerings:
- BizTalk360 – is for Microsoft BizTalk Server analytics, administration, and management. It helps administrators to work more efficiently with BizTalk server and be in control of its environment. Over 650+ customers globally are using BizTalk360 on top of their BizTalk environment. Some of the key aspects are that it makes testing cycles more efficient, sends alerts when there is a problem, and helps to track different processes within business applications.
- Serverless360 – is a support platform engineered for Microsoft Azure resources. Serverless360 brings the best in class features and solutions from business perspective to empower your Microsoft Azure support team. From business applications, activity monitoring to Azure documenter – Serverless360 provides supporting capabilities to all of Microsoft Azure Services including Logic Apps, Event Grid, Service Bus, Azure SQL, and API apps, etc.
- Document360 – helps companies instantly create an online Self-Service Knowledge Base for both customers and employees that can be accessed either publicly or privately. Key features include technical documentation, online user guides, FAQs creation, internal knowledge base, and building SOPs that can be used as employee handbooks or sales/marketing playbook.
Is your company still pre-revenue or has broken even?
Kovai.co has a revenue of over $10 million USD and is bootstrapped.
Kovai.co is a profitable bootstrapped company since inception. We generate an ARR of more than $10 million.
What is the biggest risk you face, and how do you plan to mitigate that risk?
I would say our biggest risk is probably people oriented. Attrition is an issue for any company as people get new opportunities and tend to move on. How we try to mitigate this risk is by taking good care of our people. We believe that every employee is likely to remain with us until retirement.
So, we try ensuring that our people always have something new to work on and constantly find themselves growing. If there are performance issues, we go deeper to find the root cause and offer them any assistance they may require or change their role based on their interests, so they can start optimizing their performance.
What is your growth projection for FY 2022-2023?
Kovai.co’s balance sheet is looking healthy with a double-digit growth year on year and we are targeting an ARR of $30 million by 2025.
