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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.
Updated Jan 02, 2021 | 20:51 IST
2020 has not been the best of years, but it has definitely been a boom for the internet economy. Representational Image
2020 has not been the best of years, but it has definitely been a boom for the internet economy. Despite the economic impact of the covid-19 pandemic, India saw more than 10 startups bag the unicorn tag. India also saw 11 startups cross the $1 billion mark in valuation and bag the unicorn tag versus only 9 in 2019.
Google gave India two unicorns as a Christmas present by investing in Dailyhunt parent company VerSe Innovations and Glance. VerSe has raised $100 million from giants like Google and Microsoft. On the other hand, Glance which aims to dominate the lock screens of the world raised $145 million from Google and existing investor Mithril Partners.
Choose your customers, don’t let them choose you, says Zenoti CEO Sudheer Koneru
India s newest unicorn software startup Zenoti has built a billion-dollar business catering to spas and salons. CEO Sudheer Koneru tells us why he only works with big businesses, how the coronavirus pandemic has proved him right, his IPO plans and more.
Zenoti CEO Sudheer Koneru.
Subscription-based software may be the norm today but that was not the case in 2011 and certainly not in the niche salon and spa business. Few multibillion-dollar companies were paid for specialised software solutions but that’s what Zenoti CEO Sudheer Koneru wanted to change. In the week gone by, Zenoti was valued at a billion dollars when it raised $160 million led by private equity firm Advent International.
Zenoti, a Bellevue, WA-based enterprise cloud platform for the beauty and wellness industry, closed a $160m Series D funding round at over a $1 billion valuation.
The round was led by Advent International, through Advent Tech and Sunley House Capital, an affiliate of Advent. Tiger Global and Steadview Partners also participated in the round. To date, Zenoti has raised a total of approximately $250m.
The company intends to use the funds to continue scaling operations, support research and development and to accelerate further A.I. innovations, including advanced algorithms leveraging its enterprise system data to optimize customer employee scheduling, inventory management, marketing and dynamic pricing to enhance profitability and efficiency, and pursue inorganic growth opportunities.