Bhavin Turakhia eyes enterprise suite for SMBs, bags $30 mn to fuel expansion

After taking his banking technology firm Zeta to the unicorn club, serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is now doubling down on the enterprise suite of products with Nova Inc. 

The entity which operates messaging and collaboration tool Flock and recently announced professional email suite Titan, was valued at $300 million in its first equity round from WordPress parent, Automattic.  

Automattic has invested $30 million in Nova as a strategic investor, nearly 60% of which will be used to scale up product and engineering for Titan, Turakhia told TechCircle. 

Nova currently has a team of 150 people across Boston, Dubai, Mumbai and Bengaluru, with plans of scaling up the team to 200 people in the next year and half.

“Intention is that Titan will serve businesses of different sizes across the globe but for the time being the focus is on small businesses.

An ideal client right now is a small company, with a few employees…typically pre-revenue businesses – businesses from a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue to a few million dollars,” Turakhia said. 

The primary markets for the product will include North America, Latin America, Europe, India and Indonesia. 

The enterprise suite of products is currently hosted on AWS said Turakhia adding that the data was hosted across three regions, with ability to host across other regions for compliance and legal requirements.  

As part of the strategic investment, Titan will be bundled with any website hosted by WordPress.com. 

Some of Titan’s features includes a certain ‘scheduled send’, a feature through which users can time their new emails to be sent when the receiver is most likely to read them. 

Other features includes follow-up reminders, email templates and recurring responses that can reduce the necessity of drafting emails from scratch.   

Turakhia added that Titan already has customers from nearly 70 countries. 

“We are competing with GSuite and Microsoft in some sense and our objective will be to facilitate all communication and collaboration products that businesses need. It won’t be a replica, but the goal is to provide multi-dealer products and services to the entire base,” said Turakhia, adding that Nova will be rolling out other enterprise collaboration tools.