Armed with $32 mn, SaaS startup LeadSquared lines up deeper overseas market push

Early on, Bengaluru-based sales automation platform LeadSquared faced a chicken and egg situation as it could not show dollar revenues from customers to generate investor interest and could not raise the capital to expand to geographies outside of India. 

The SaaS platform crossed that hurdle with its Series A round in 2019 and has now announced raising $32 million in a Series B round to go deeper into the North America and South East Asia markets.

The round, led by Gaja Capital, also saw participation from returning investors Stakeboat Capital which led its Series A in 2019 and early investor and founder of AppDynamics, Jyoti Bansal. Prior to its Series B round, LeadSquared had raised $3 million in equity capital, according to a statement issued by the company.

The firm, which provides sales execution CRM (customer relationship management) and marketing platforms, counts India as its largest market and works with close to 1,000 clients of which 100 are in the US. It focuses on education and BFSI sectors. With the new round of funding, the company will add customers in new sectors and hire talent.

“We will also look at bridging gaps in the sales tech platform through relevant acquisitions, depending on the use case,” Nilesh Patel, CEO of LeadSquared told TechCircle.

Patel with cofounders Sudhakar Gorti and Prashant Singh founded the platform in 2013 under the banner of their agency, MarketXpander Services. The company, which has a significant client base in the education and ed-tech sector including Byju’s, saw a spike in business from June as companies are increasingly embracing digital lead generation. 

“Apart from edtech firms, we also saw demand in the education sector from colleges, coaching institutes, and others. Also classic businesses reached out to us for their inter-departmental initiatives such as graduate trainee programmes, investor education programmes in case of trading businesses, etc,” Patel said. 

Helping build a layer of communication on the basic product, integration with Zoom for recording of audit and similar services has also helped the company make inroads into offline-focused businesses like real estate, since the pandemic. 

The company has also added a suite of tools to digitize application processing, focused on edtech and BFSI segments and its no-code workflow builder has seen great adoption with customers, said the statement. 

“Indian IT industry has matured from providing services to delivering best-in-class SaaS products to the world. LeadSquared’s exceptional success across business segments in India and consistent global growth demonstrates the trust that their customers have placed in them,” said Gopal Jain, managing partner at Gaja Capital in the statement.

LeadSquared competes with the likes of Zoho, FreshWorks and others in the CRM space.