SaaS firm Kovai.co eyes unicorn status by 2030

CHENNAI: London-based Software as a Service (SaaS) firm Kovai.co has gained stature after a decade of building the bootstrapped entity, as it has quietly expanded its team and vying for the ‘unicorn’ status within ten years.

The founder-chief executive Saravana Kumar of the SaaS entity is upbeat about the business that has been scaled by him in a steady yet sure manner. “We set up our first India office at Coimbatore in 2013-14 with just 20 people. Today, we have a 300-seater 40,000 sq ft facility that caters to global clients,” he told DTNext, as he gave a lowdown on the evolution of the SaaS enterprise.

“The internal vision is to become the poster boy of Coimbatore as this region is yet to give birth to a unicorn,” says Saravana, adding that the company has spent $1.2 million on office infra as part of the efforts to align with the vision. The hiring at Kovai.co is gaining momentum as it has hired over 170 people in two years.

On fund raising, his response was if the growth of the $10 million entity became exponential, he would not be averse to it. The company’s ‘Document 360’ product has been successful as it now caters to over 1,000 customers globally, he says, adding presently 60-70 per cent of the investments were to onboard customers.

After Salesforce disrupted the CRM or the customer relationship management space with its user-based SaaS model, catering to cloud adoption, Azure and Amazon Web Services platforms have given edge to firms focusing on building products. “Since there is no need for any upfront investment, payment business is proving to be a lucrative model. The recurring revenue ensures that the balance sheet is never zero,” says the entrepreneur, who believes India is moving ahead as a product nation.

Noting that venture capitalists from the West were now betting on the Indian software ecosystem, Saravana says even if 20 of the 100-plus unicorns succeed, the stakeholders would be benefited immensely. For Kovai.co, 60 per cent of customers are out of the US and the ability to sell it to anywhere in the world, is working well for the SaaS enterprise, that is hopeful of turning into a unicorn by 2030.

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