Mumbai: Remote desktop-support firm iYogi Technical Services Pvt. Ltd is on course to generate $100 million (Rs470 crore) in annual revenue by fiscal 2012, growing at roughly 300% a year.
Founded in late 2006, iYogi expects to close the current fiscal year (FY), ending March 2011, with $70-80 million in revenues, the firm’s co-founder Vishal Dhar said.
“We continue to see a growth rate of 200-300% for the foreseeable future, reaching well beyond $100 million in the first five years of commercial operations,” Dhar said. iYogi had revenue of $1.9 million in FY08, $7.1 million in FY09 and $19 million in FY10.
IYogi offers basic desktop support to home users and small businesses at a flat fee of $139.99 per year plus incident-based repair/support services including installation or configuration of computer peripherals such as printers, scanners or wireless routers.
IYogi currently has around 140,000 subscribers and is adding customers at the rate of nearly 20,000 per month.
“Given the current momentum, we expect the customer base for the annual subscription service to reach 400,000 by the end of the year,” Dhar said.
Well over 60% of iYogi customers are older citizens of 50-plus years of age, who “comprise over 55% of the US population” according to Uday Challu, co-founder and chief executive of iYogi.
With almost all of their technical support staff based in India, iYogi considers itself an “in-the-face Indian company”. and does not believe in using US aliases. “We don’t do accent training, we don’t use aliases. We sell as an Indian company and don’t try to hide our accent,” said Challu. “Our customer satisfaction levels of over 90% is proof enough, at least for us, to know for certain that we are on the right track.”
IYogi’s main competitor is Geek Squad, a subsidiary of electronics retailer Best Buy Co. Inc. Unlike, iYogi, Geek Squad is an on-the-ground tech support firm with about 24,000 personnel.
The firm has around 4,000 technical support staff but is in the process of scaling up to 7,000 by the end of the year, with around 50% of them being outsourced from partner organizations such as International Business Machines Corp. Currently, iYogi’s services are available in the US, the UK, Australia and Canada, and the firm is expanding operations to at least 12 new countries in the next 18 months.
The firm has raised around $26 million in funding in three rounds from Canaan Partners and SVB India Capital Partners, SAP Ventures, SVB Financial Group and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ).
“Uday and his team have consistently met or exceeded operational and revenue forecast,” said Mohanjit Jolly, DFJ’s India managing director. Jolly recognizes that scaling up comes with its own challenges. “It is critical to be able to scale up without losing out on customer intimacy and comfort level, the key differentiators for iYogi.”