SaaS Labs, a cloud-based platform that develops productivity and business process automation solutions for SMBs and enterprises, announced a $17 million Series A funding round led by Base 10 Partners and Eight Roads Ventures.
The company has been bootstrapped until this stage and will leverage the capital to strengthen its customer base, hire new employees, and launch new products and services.
Gaurav Sharma founded the India-based startup in 2016 to build software for sales, support, and marketing teams, along with contact centers, to improve efficiency. Since its inception, the company has been bootstrapped and is currently profitable, growing the company to millions in annual recurring revenue with more than double year-over-year.
This Series A funding is the company’s first external investment. SaaS Labs, which currently employs 70 people in India and the Philippines, intends to more than double its workforce by the end of 2021. The company at present offers its services to about 6000 companies globally, which include Divvy Homes, Ernst & Young, Jaguar, and Walmart.
Gaurav Sharma, founder, and CEO of SaaS Labs commented on the fundraise saying, “We have seen an unprecedented acceleration of cloud adoption among SMBs in the last 12 months. We are going to deploy this fresh capital into product development, R&D, and hiring talent globally.”
Sharma is a 2010 NIT Warangal graduate and a veteran entrepreneur who has founded and exited numerous ventures in the past. His previous company was acquired by the New York Times in 2016.
Justcall and Helpwise are the two main offerings from SaaS Labs at the moment. JustCall enables SMBs to implement a cloud-based contact center for sales or support in minutes, with native connectivity with over 70 extra business solutions. Helpwise, is an advancement of this concept toward centralized customer engagements, allows customers to centralize all communication streams into a single unifying inbox, thereby boosting the quality and efficiency of customer support teams.
Traditionally, call centers were custom-built, on-premise solutions that required significant implementation phases and continuous maintenance, with the majority of inbound traffic being telephone-based. Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) software has facilitated numerous high-speed, efficient channels of contact between businesses and their customers. As a result, cloud-based contact centers are gradually becoming popular.
The transition propelling contact centers to the cloud is illustrated by corporations’ increasing adoption of productivity-enhancing solutions. If SaaS startups can penetrate the SMB market in the post-Covid landscape, we expect the sector to grow tremendously over the next five years. It has the potential to turn into an $8.7 billion market opportunity by 2025, thanks to automation technologies.
The global CCaaS market is currently valued at $16.1 billion and is predicted to reach $51.8 billion by 2026, according to the Mordor Intelligence report. The Asia Pacific region (including India) is the fastest-growing market, according to the report, with a CAGR of 21.8 percent.
The cloud-based contact center market is primarily dominated by Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Genesys, Huawei Technologies, NEC Corporation, Microsoft, and Salesforce, serving across industries such as banking, IT, healthcare, telecom, government, among others.
