Knowlarity to take PE route for expansion

The company had raised a $2-million angel fund five years ago, and $6.5 million in Series-A from Sequoia Capital in Jan 2012

Knowlarity Communications, a Singapore-based cloud telephony company with its development centre at Gurgaon in India,  is looking at going the private equity way to raise new funds for expansion, according to its founder and chief executive officer Ambarish Narayan Gupta.

The company had raised a $2-million angel fund five years ago, and $6.5 million in Series-A from Sequoia Capital in January 2012. It had secured $16 million in Series-B funding from Mayfield and Sequoia in 2014.

“We have been seeing a lot of inbound interests from investors. Our new fund-raising will be pretty quick. It will be much bigger than the previous one,” he said, while declining to share the quantum of the proposed fundraising and the stake that the company would dilute for the same.

Gupta was speaking to Business Standard on the sidelines of  Nasscom Product Conclave,  held here on Wednesday.

Knowlarity started its business by delivering seven million local calls to voters on behalf of Naveen Patnaik during Odisha Assembly elections in 2009.

The company currently has close to 10,000 small and medium businesses (SMBs) as customers globally, of which nearly 95 per cent are from India.

Cloud telephony enables enterprises to virtualise their business phone systems in the same way hosted web services (like Amazon) enable virtualisation of hardware and software. Knowlarity provides a highly scalable phone platform for startups, SMBs and enterprise markets, and is capable of handling over a million calls an hour.

“Of the 14 million SMBs in India, around half-a-million have the wherewithal to buy marketing technologies like cloud-based mobile telephony. This is the area that we are looking at tapping into. We expect a 300 per cent growth in our Indian clientele base this year,” Gupta said.

The company employs 500 globally, including 450 in India. It intends to hire 70 professional a month if the triggers come real-time, Gupta said.

Having a stronghold in India, Knowlarity is now looking at expanding its horizons to emerging markets like West Asia and Latin America shortly, he added.

Stating that India is a “difficult” market for large-volume distribution systems, Gupta said the telecom operators and the regulator here do not make things easier for cloud telephony companies.

“India, however, will continue to remain a large and attractive market. We are cautiously excited about it,” Gupta said.