This Coimbatore AI start-up gave ₹14 crore bonus to 140 employees, founder explains why

Saravanakumar, the founder of business-to-business software solutions (SaaS) AI start-up named Kovai.co, has given 140 employees a bonus of ₹14 crore, according to a report by News18. His reason was simple: “Why do people work in startups? They hope to become rich.”

Employees Get ₹14 crore bonus — ‘Hope to become Rich…’

Speaking to News18 about the unusually generous bonus, 48-year-old Saravanakumar said, “Why do people work in startups? They hope to become rich, but in most startups, employees get shares, which are only on paper.”

He added that the big bonus was part of a promise he made employees, “I thought of giving something concrete to my employees. Three years ago, I said that if they stay with us, they will get a bonus equal to six months’ salary in January 2025.” He has now fulfilled that promise.

About Kovai.co…

Founded in 2011 and named after his hometown of Coimbatore, Kovai.co is a B2B SaaS start-up which was bootstrapped by Saravanakumar himself, as per the report. Its clients today include news corporation BBC, airline giant Boeing and oil mega Shell, among others.

Solutions provided by Kovai.co are three-part — Document360 (which creates and updates help pages for organisations), Biztalk 360 (which connects back-end applications such as Salesforce and SAP on a single platform), and Turbo 360 (which cuts down cloud costs by up to 30 per cent), as per the report.

From IT employee to founder of $100 million startup

On the name of his company, Saravanakumar said he was an ordinary IT worker for 10 years and moved to London 25 years ago. However, Coimbatore is his hometown, and he recognised a gap in the market which he filled by founding Kovai.co.

Kovai.co has an annual revenue of $15 million and its total value is estimated to be $100 million. Now, after fulfilling his promise to employees, Saravanakumar wants to fulfil his dream of generating $100 million in revenue and making the startup a unicorn.