Cloud Telephony Startup Exotel Raises Rs 2.5Cr From Mumbai Angels, Blume Ventures

Bangalore-based Cloud telephony startup Exotel Techcom Pvt Ltd, which offers Cloud-based business phone systems to SMEs, has secured a series A funding of Rs 2.5 crore ($0.5 million) from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures.

The capital raised will be primarily used for building Exotel's infrastructure, stabilising its product and expanding the team.

Exotel has been launched eight months ago by Shivakumar Ganesan, who teamed up with Ishwar Sridharan, Siddharth Ramesh and Vijay Sharma to start the venture.

An alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Ganeshan had earlier launched Roopit, a real-time micro classifieds tightly integrated with Voice and SMS. Before exploring the entrepreneurial space, he had worked with companies Yahoo! and Flipkart.

Currently a team of seven, Exotel enables companies to manage customers on inbound voice calls and SMS without getting into the hassles of setting up a full-fledged call centre.

As of now, the tech startup has over 65 clients and a monthly revenue run rate of Rs 4 lakh.

Two months ago, Gurgaon-based Knowlarity Communications Pvt Ltd, which is also in Cloud telephony business, raised $6.6 million from Sequoia Capital. Knowlarity had plans to use the funding to strengthen its R&D activities and expand marketing operations. After establishing its presence in India and Indonesia, Knowlarity is also planning to extend its solutions and services to other international markets.

Resolvity, Inc, which is a provider of on-demand IVR and speech recognition in the USA, has also forayed into the Indian Cloud telephony and IVR market with the launch of VoiceGain. This Cloud telephony solution enables Indian SMEs to store, manage and track telephone sales enquiries and leads. The company is also backed by Nadathur Holdings and Investments, a private equity fund founded by NS Raghavan, who also happens to be the co-founder of Infosys.