The company has planned an initial investment of $10 million (approx Rs 66.5 crore) in the next two years, stressing more on operational and sales expenditures.
“When we were thinking of our expansion plans, we first wanted to target markets similar to India. Both in terms of culture and population, Southeast Asia is therefore the logical first step. This tech-enabled service could be anything ranging from booking a cab to ordering a meal online to buying something from an e-commerce website,” said Shivakumar Ganesan, CEO of Exotel.
Exotel’s API platform will relish a global launch as the API is easily scalable and customizable for any tech-enabled service. The overseas operations will fall under the vigilance of Varun Raj, who was the cofounder of Voyce, a customer feedback firm that Exotel had acquired last November. Singapore will be the headquarters for Exotel’s Southeast Asia operations.
“In India, we estimate that people in the metros use tech-enabled services 0.27 times a day. This tech-enabled service could be anything ranging from booking a cab to ordering a meal online to buying something from an e-commerce website. In Singapore for instance, we estimate the same to be at least 0.7 times a day per day. This makes the addressable market for Exotel in Singapore over SGD 50 million,” Ganesan added.
Given that the nature of this project is highly ambitious, Ganesan further announced, “We are going to be adopting a developer-first approach globally. As a behind-the-scenes ecosystem enabler, we will also support early-stage startups by offering them Exotel for free. We will look at these startups as fellow entrepreneurs and not customers, helping them in whatever little way we can,” Ganesan added.
The Southeast Asian market has already made room for a couple of international players whose platform, however, is primarily tuned to the US market, and not so much region-focused. Exotel’s infrastructure has been designed in such a way that the call quality and reliability will be far superior for the local market. Now that’s good news for start-ups and SMBs !
