Municorns – SaaS Companies in India

From 3000 startups in 2014 to a projection of more than 11500 by 2020, the startup meme in India is certainly not a passing trend – massive funding, loads of engineering talent, and nascent entrepreneurial nature.

Is it just a dot-com fad now in India? How have companies made their entry to municorns (milli unicorns) club in India? Are these funded? What did they do in this fairly small amount of time to make it into the municorn club?

The following companies (arranged alphabetically) have surpassed the magical figure of $1 million in ARR. They showcase not just successful innovation, but the country’s potential in delivering better value for money.

In terms of startup incubation, Chennai is leading followed by Bengaluru and Delhi NCR.

1. Agile CRM – Built With for Love for Small Businesses

About: Agile CRM is a Sales and Marketing CRM for small and medium businesses. It’s complete with everything from web popups and email templates advanced sales and marketing automation; and is designed to help small businesses sell and market like the Fortune 500, at a fraction of the cost. Agile CRM is trusted by 6500+ customers and fills in the space of a killer combo of CRM and Marketing Automation.

Team: Founded in 2013 by a serial entrepreneur Manohar Chapalamadugu. Their team size is 70 and they are based out of Hyderabad. 

Funding: Bootstrapped.

Revenue: More than $2 million. 

Source: 

2. Capillary – Enabling Omni-channel Commerce

About: Capillary’s Intelligent Customer Engagement (ICE) suite of products integrates all the essentials for customer engagement. With a robust combination of big data and cloud-based analytics engine, Capillary optimizes discounts, offers and increases the profitability to customers. The company now reaches out to 70 million consumers across 10000+ stores and serves 140 brands worldwide.

Team: Founded in 2008 by  Krishna Mehra, Aneesh Reddy and Ajay Modani. Their team size is more than 200 and they are based out of Bengaluru. 

Funding: $15.5 million Series A and $14 million Series B from Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners (NVP),  $45 million Series C from Warburg Pincus. 

Revenue: More than $1 million.

Source: 

3. Chargebee – The Smartest Way to set up your Subscription Billing

About: Chargebee is a recurring billing platform for subscription based SaaS and eCommerce businesses. It allows you to automate payment collection, invoicing, email notifications and customer management, by integrating with leading payment gateways. Their clients process $100 million in annual transactions through ChargeBee.

Team: Founded in 2011 by Krish Subramanian, KP Saravanan,Thiyagarajan T and Rajaraman. Their team size is more than 100 and they are based out of Chennai. 

Funding: $5 million Series B from Tiger Global and Accel Partners. The total funding is around $ 6.17 million.

Revenue: Estimated to be more than $1 million.

Source: 

4. Exotel – Never Miss a Business Call 

About: Exotel aims to help businesses, both large and small, manage their business phone system via a virtual phone system. The company is currently handling more than 1 million calls a day with over 18000 companies registered on its site and over 45000 users.

Team: Founded in 2011 by Shivakumar Ganesan. Their team size is more than 200 and they are based out of Bengaluru. 

Funding: $500,000 from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures.

Revenue: Estimated to be more than $1 million.

Source: 

5. Freshdesk – Customer happiness, refreshingly easy

About: Freshdesk is an online customer support software and helpdesk solution, which enables businesses to realign their customer support initiatives in a better way through chat, telephony, email, mobile apps, forums, websites and social media channels. The company crossed a milestone of 50000 customers across the globe. 

Team: Founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubhootam and Shan Krishnaswamy. Their team size is more than 500 and they are based out of Chennai.

Funding: $1 million Series A funding from Accel Partners, $5 million Series B from Tiger Global Management,  in 2012, $7 million Series C from Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management, $31 million Series D from Accel Partner, Tiger Global and Google Capital,  $50 million Series E from existing investors. Till now, the company has raised $94 million through five rounds of funding.

Revenue: More than $1 million.

Source:

6. FusionCharts – The most comprehensive JavaScript charting library

About: FusionCharts is a software provider of data visualization products (JavaScript Charts, Maps, Widgets and Dashboards). The company has the most comprehensive JavaScript charting library, with over 90+ charts and 1000+ maps, and is loved by 24,000 customers in 120 countries.

Team: Founded in 2001 by 16-year-old Pallav Nadhani. Their team size is more than 100 and they are based out of Kolkata. 

Funding: Bootstrapped.

Revenue: More than $4 million.

Source: 

7. Kayako – Taking the Helpdesk a long way

About: Kayako is a customer service software that scales with your business and makes it easy to deliver an unrivalled customer support experience. Today, Kayako is the leading multichannel helpdesk that helps 10,000+ businesses to delight millions of their global customers.

Team: Founded in 2001 by Varun Shoor. Their team size is more than 150 and they began their operations from Jalandhar. 

Funding: Bootstrapped.

Revenue: More than $1 million.

Source: 

8. KiSSFLOW / OrangeScape – Automate Work. Reduce Chaos

About: KiSSFLOW is a workflow engine designed for small and mid-size businesses in order to capitalize on their need for an organized system of mail and documents. Developed by Orangescape, KiSSFLOW is the #1 workflow app in Google Apps marketplace with more than 10000 customers across 108 countries.

Team: KissFLOW is a product of OrangeScape, which was founded in 2003 by Suresh Sambandam and Mani Doraisamy. Their team size is more than 100 and they are based out of Chennai. 

Funding: $1 million from Indian Angel Network.

Revenue: More than $10 million (for OrangeScape). 

Source: 

9. Knowlarity – Giving Business a Voice

About: Knowlarity Communications is the leading cloud-based communications provider in emerging markets. With the capability to process over a million calls an hour, Knowlarity is a trusted brand for more than 12000 companies worldwide, SMBs as well as enterprises. The flagship product of the company is SuperReceptionist – a plug-and-play virtual contact center.

Team: Founded in 2009 by Ambarish Gupta and Pallav Pandey. Their team size is more than 300 and they are based out of Gurgaon.

Funding: $6.6 million Series A from Sequoia Capital, $16 million Series B from Sequoia Capital and Mayfield.

Revenue: Estimated to be more than $1 million.

Source: 

10. KooKoo – Communication in the cloud

About: KooKoo is an interface between your web application and the caller. It takes phone commands from you and executes them on your behalf to the caller. KooKoo rightly fills the gaps of lack of time, manpower and inefficiency of the current communication setup and and minimizes the loss of business.

Team: KooKoo is a product of Ozonetel, which was founded in 2007 by Murthy Chintalapati, a serial technology entrepreneur, and Atul Sharma, a product architect. Their team size is more than 100 and they are based out of Hyderabad. 

Funding: Bootstrapped. 

Revenue: More than $4 million.

Source: 

11. PubMatic – Helping the Publishing Industry Thrive

About: PubMatic is the leading marketing automation software company for publishers. The company’s marketing automation software platform provides a global roster of comScore publishers with a single view into their advertiser relationships across every screen, every channel and every format.

Team: Founded in 2006 by Amar Goel, Rajeev Goel and Mukul Kumar. Their team size is more than 700 and they are based out of Gurgaon.              

Funding: $13 million Series E from Nokia Growth Partners. This brings the total funding close to $76 million.

Revenue: More than $130 million.

Source: 

12. Vizury – Marketing Made Personal

About: Vizury is a premier Big Data marketing firm that helps marketers secure customers-for-life through personalized conversations across channels. Vizury has evolved into a marketing powerhouse with three products: Convert, Vizury Engage App and Engage Enterprise. This company has a presence in over 50 countries with over 600 clients.

Team: Founded in 2008 by Chetan Kulkarni, Vikram Nayak and Gourav Chindlur. Their team size is more than 300 and they are based out of Bengaluru.                                   

Funding: $16 million Series C from Intel Capital, Ascent Capital, Nokia Growth Partners and Inventus Capital Partners. This brings the total funding to $27 million.

Revenue: Around $100 million. 

Source:

13. WebEngage – Engage. Retain. Grow

About: WebEngage is a multi-channel user engagement platform which automates communication across users’ life-cycle. The company builds enriched user profiles for every single user (registered, as well as anonymous) using your website and/or mobile app. Moreover, you can ‘segment’ these users based on their behavior, and engage with them via multiple channels.

Team: Founded in 2011 by Avlesh Singh and Ankit Utreja. Their team size is more than 50 and they are based out of Mumbai.              

Funding: Undisclosed seed money from Google India MD Rajan Anandan, Rs 2.5 crore from Blume Ventures and GTI Capital.

Revenue: Estimated to be more than $1 million.

Source: 

14. Wingify – Building Globally Admired Products from India 

About: Wingify claims to pioneer easy A/B testing and is now focusing heavily on the future of testing and optimization. The company’s flagship product is Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), which helps sales and marketing professional in increasing sales and conversions on the website. It uses a wide array of techniques such as A/B testing, heatmaps, behavioral targeting, usability testing, etc. VWO’s popularity has spread across the world and it’s used by 4000+ businesses across 80+ countries.

Team: Founded in 2009 by Paras Chopra. Their team size is more than 80 and they are based out of Delhi. 

Funding: Bootstrapped.

Revenue: More than $10 million.

https://vwo.com/downloads/wingify-story.pdf

15. Zoho – The Operating System for Business

About: Zoho takes its love for small businesses to next level with its smart software offering. The company enjoys a worldwide user base of 15 million, and has 33+ products that help you achieve your sales & marketing, support, finance and recruitment needs with a deep focus on business. The company’s flagship product Zoho CRM is pitted as India’s answer to the behemoth grandpa of SaaS – Salesforce.com, and emerges a clear winner in terms of price comparison with the latter.

Team: Founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas. Their team size is more than 2500 and they are based out of Chennai. 

Funding: Bootstrapped.

Revenue: More than $500 million (for Zoho Corporation). 

Source: 

What’s Next for Indian SaaS Startups?

When you can deliver quality products at a lesser price than the foreign competitors, you automatically create a huge market. Many companies have crossed the first milestone of achieving $1 million, but the question here is how many would actually reach the mighty mark of $1 billion. The initial push to the $1 million marks the ideation stage, thereon the product grows when it crosses the $2 million milestone. From there, it becomes unstoppable with a year-on-year growth trajectory to surpass $4 million and much more. With most of the startups following a similar approach to grow in the market, the Indian SaaS landscape will reach into more verticals and a wider array of business targets.

An interesting observation about this list is their distribution based on source of funding. 9 out of 15 companies are backed by venture capitalists. The scaling of their operations and growth is dependent on the funds received by VCs. The other 6 companies are bootstrapped, fuelling their growth on their own.

The Indian SaaS revolution has seen a remarkable turnaround with more cloud-based technologies adorning the software space. In a sense, it’s all about smarter, more affordable solutions. Let the success stories I’ve shared in this post be an inspiration for those who are aiming for the stars. The sky’s the limit!

NOTE: My original article was published on Tech In Asia. I am reposting the same on this blog to add more companies to the list of $1 million Indian SaaS companies. If you are an Indian SaaS company with more than $1 million in annual revenue and not featured on this list, please drop a comment with your details so that I can update the list. Thank you.