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From left: Barath Shankar Subramanian, Abhinav Chaturvedi and Prayank Swaroop, partners at Accel
Image: Hemant Mishra for Forbes India
Chennai, circa 2011: Shekhar Kirani had sniffed an untapped opportunity. Kirani, who joined global venture investment firm Accel as a partner the same year after stints with two Silicon Valley-based startups, knew the nuances and magic of the subscription business. Both his former companies (LightSurf and StarFish) made loads of money and got eventually sold to Motorola and VeriSign. So when the young venture capitalist (VC) started hunting for his maiden investment, SaaS (software as a service) turned out to be his first segment of choice. He zeroed in on Freshdesk, a SaaS-based social customer support startup co-founded by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy in 2010. “I knew what SaaS meant, and how powerful subscriptions could be,” he recalls.