Cloud Telephony Expert Exotel Strengthens Leadership Team

Exotel, Indian cloud telephony company, today announced the appointment of Anandakumar as the Chief Finance & Strategy Officer, and Rashmme Eshwar as Head, People Operation, further strengthening its leadership team.

Commenting on these appointments Shivakumar Ganesan, CEO & Co-founder, Exotel said, “We’re very excited to have Rashmme and Anand on board. They bring together close to 25 years of experience to the company and that would help us in achieving two of our biggest goals for the year - growth and expansion.

Anandakumar is a computer science engineer from (BITS) Pilani and MBA from IIMB with close to 10 years of experience in consulting and technology. He has been associated with Yahoo! and Alvarez & Marsal among others. He is a whiz at performance improvement techniques and restructuring projects. At Exotel, Anand will be the brain behind the expansion and growth strategies. This, of course, is in addition to heading the Finance team of Exotel. He is a finance buff and literally nothing escapes his keen eye.

“I am excited to be part of the team that is building an innovative communications platform. We want to be known as one of the best home-grown engineering startup success stories in India. Businesses are successful only when value is created for all stakeholders.  I hope to contribute to our journey by laying a solid foundation in terms of strategy, planning and execution that will ensure we reach our goals,” said Anandakumar.

Rashmme Eshwar is an HR professional with 14 years of experience across multinational organizations including Citrix, Yahoo!, SAP and Convergys. She has held diverse leadership responsibilities in her long career, notably a six-year long stint as the International HR Manager at CITRIX. She holds an MBA from Birla Institute of Management. At Exotel, she will be looking after talent acquisition and employee management.

"I am lucky to be working with some of the best engineering talent in the industry. We have a very young, energetic and vibrant workforce at Exotel. Building a positive work environment where ideas are freely exchanged is a priority, we value diversity and believe that ability is more important than experience. My goal is to ensure Exotel is an employer of choice," said Rashmme Eshwar.

Image Source: ShutterStock

Exotel Acquires Customer Feedback Platform Voyce

Exotel, one of India’s leading Cloud Telephony Companies, today announced the acquisition of Voyce, a platform that allowed businesses to gather customer feedback. This acquisition is a move to strengthen the customer service offerings of the business.

Two of the co-founders of Voyce Varun Raj and Nikhil Kumar, will now be part of Exotel team and the duo will lead the alliances and partnerships efforts at Exotel.

Voyce started operations in 2014 with a team of five members namely Nikhil Kumar, Arun Raj, Varun Raj, Satendra Singh and Sushil Shah. Voyce enabled businesses to engage with customers in real time, through their intelligent on-premise customer feedback system.

Before the acquisition, Voyce worked with over 20 enterprise hospitality chains across the country.

Commenting on the acquisition Mr Shivakumar Ganesan, Co-Founder and CEO, Exotel said, "We were first introduced to Voyce when they used Exotel for voice and SMS integrations on their platform. I found the product interesting and was excited by the possibilities that Voyce presented. With the acquisition of Voyce, Exotel's customers will soon be able to collect valuable customer feedback easily with a few clicks."

Nikhil Kumar, Co-Founder, Voyce said, "From our journey of building a B2B product, we realised early on, that to be successful in India, one has to solve a problem in depth. Our idea of being a communication channel between businesses & customers was perfectly in sync with Exotel’s vision & product. In fact, it fuelled our hunger!"

“We strongly believe that customer engagement & empathy is the secret sauce for any successful business. Exotel has been innovating to serve this need & the sheer possibilities of the platform excited us. Joining Exotel opens a whole new set of possibilities and we are very excited to be a part of this growth story.” said, Varun Raj, Co-Founder, Voyce.

Prior to starting Voyce, Nikhil & Varun worked together to manage Tally's strategic alliances. Nikhil later moved to Intuit to manage partnerships & Varun went on to redesign Tally's partner framework. A bad experience at a restaurant, brought them back together to solve the pain point.

Exotel is one of India’s leading cloud telephony companies with over 1000 clients. They recently moved to a larger office in Bangalore and plan to triple their headcount by the end of 2016.

Bangalore-Based Exotel To Buy Singapore Startup Croak.it

Bangalore-based cloud telephony startup Exotel Techcom Pvt Ltd, has acquired Singapore's voice-based social media startup Croak.it! This is the first acquisition for Bengaluru-based Exotel, which is targeting to achieve a revenue of about, Rs 185 crore in next two years. Exotel chief executive Shivakumar Ganesan confirmed the deal, but declined to disclose the purchase price and terms of deal.

As per the deal, Croak.it's founders Protik Roychowdhury and Srinivasa Teja will join the board of the company.

"We liked the team and the product at Croak.it," said Ganesan, CEO, Exotel. "There was a good overlap in the nature of the problem we were solving. Voice will continue to remain at the centre of most business communications."

Exotel replaces expensive communication hardware system with affordable cloud-based telephony solutions for customers like taxi aggregator Olacabs, bus ticketing site redBus and online lingerie retailer Zivame. The acquisition will help it improve its services.

Founded in 2012 by IIT Kharagpur alumni Protik Roychowdhury and Srinivasa Teja, Croak.it! is an online platform where one can express oneself using their voice instead of text. Every unique voice stamp is called a croak on the platform.

Exotel which competes with Gurgaon-based, Sequoia-backed startup Knowlarity plan to acquire more startups which operate in the voice space. Last January Knowlarity bought Delhi-based cloud telephony start-up Unicom Techlabs, for an undisclosed amount.

In March 2012, Exotel had secured Rs 2.5 crore ($0.5 million) from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures.