How 3 Indian engineers turned this IT company into India’s newest unicorn
- LeadSquared was founded by Nilesh Patel, Prashant Singh, and Sudhakar Gorti in 2011
Sales automation software-as-a- service (SaaS) platform LeadSquared has become India's newest unicorn with a fresh fundraise of $153 million (around ₹1,194 crore) from WestBridge Capital in a Series C round, the company announced on Tuesday.
"With this financing, we will double down on growth investments in India and North America, start building in APAC and EMEA, add new offerings to our product portfolio, and fund acquisitions. To support our growth, we plan to double our headcount in the next 18 months," said LeadSquared CEO and founder Nilesh Patel.
LeadSquared, founded by Nilesh Patel, Prashant Singh, and Sudhakar Gorti in 2011, claims to have more than 2,000 customers, including high-growth organisations from edtech, higher education, financial services, healthcare, marketplaces, etc.
Bringing his decade long experience in sales and marketing, Nilesh was previously the founder of Proteans, which was later acquired by Symphony Teleca Corporation in 2010. Post-acquisition, Nilesh served as Vice-President of inside sales at Symphony before he decided to start LeadSquared. Nilesh has a degree in engineering from Delhi University, and before founding Proteans spent four years in IBM with their microprocessor test tools division.
"Our revenue doubled to ₹200 crore in the financial year 2022 from about ₹100 crore in 2020-21. Now we are looking to increase our revenue to about ₹400 crore in the next five years. We have 1,200 employees at present which we will double in the next 18 months," Patel said.
Prior to co-founding LeadSquared and currently designated as the company's chief operating officer (COO), Prashant was also the co-founder of Proteans. He is alumnus of IIT Delhi with degree in in Mathematics and Computer. Prior to founding Proteans, he was part of several product development teams in Telesoft, i2 technologies and Oracle.
Sudhakar, co-founder and chief product officer of LeadSquared, heads the product design and development. Sudhakar has a degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. Prior to founding Proteans, he served in various software development roles at IBM, Talisma Corporation and Oracle Software.
LeadSquared had previously raised $32 million led by Gaja Capital in 2020, and $3 million during its Series A led by Stakeboat Capital in 2019. The company has built a global CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform which eliminates the guesswork from sales execution and makes efficiency the focus of every customer interaction.
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First Published:22 Jun 2022, 10:20 AM IST
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