Advertisement

Fridays in Rocketlane’s Chennai office mark not just the end of the week, but also a ritual, where each engineer, senior or new, presents what they have built in the week. The practice is not about presentations, but ownership. “It allows a culture of accountability. It’s our way of setting the bar for what’s world-class,” says Vignesh Girishankar, the co-founder and chief product officer.

Related stories

Launched in 2021, Rocketlane is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that has become a one-stop shop for customer onboarding. Today, the company serves over 600 enterprises globally and has raised $45 million from investors, including Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India), Nexus Venture Partners and 8VC. While they didn’t divulge numbers, the founders claim revenues have grown 2.5x in 2024—data from Tracxn pegs the company’s India revenues at ₹28.5 crore for FY24, but a lion’s share of its business comes from the US.

When Pranay Desai, managing director at Z47 Ventures, met the trio of Rocketlane founders—Srikrishnan Ganesan, Girishankar, and Deepak Bala (chief technology officer), he was not just impressed; he was convinced. Says Desai: “We invest in founders rather than markets. Great founders build great markets and massive companies. This team had a fantastic mix of extreme technical capabilities and product expertise.”

For Desai, it wasn’t just the concept that struck him but the founders’ courage. “You don’t need to win here in India,” he adds. “You need to win in the US. To do that, you need to be world-class—create a brand, sell where you are a dark horse and build awareness for a new way of working. That is exactly what Rocketlane has done.” More than 80 percent of Rocketlane’s customers are from the US.

Rocketlane isn’t the trio’s first stint with entrepreneurship. In 2012, they had founded Konotor, a mobile-first B2B messaging platform, which was acquired by Freshworks, a global SaaS giant, in 2015.

Ganesan, co-founder and chief executive officer of Rocketlane, says, “Through Freshworks, we relaunched Konotor as Freshchat and saw our product get pulled into many mid-market and enterprise deals. The more we engaged with larger customers, the more we felt the customer onboarding phase was under-serviced.” The important first step of any enterprise relationship—customer onboarding—was disorganised and teams struggled between spreadsheets, project tools and disconnected communication. “We could see an opportunity to build a product that takes into account customer experience from the get-go,” he adds.

While most early-stage startups try to get a minimum viable product (MVP) up and running soon, Rocketlane did the opposite. Girishankar says, “One of the defining ethos at Rocketlane is that we build compelling products and often times it means that we take large bets and back ourselves to make the bet good.” In an internal memo they wrote early on, the founders aligned their team and investors on this principle: “No MVPs. Build what you’re proud to show the world.”

The initial lines of code were penned in 2020. By July, the core development team was on board, and within months, they had a private beta that included 15 customers. “They were impressed that we pulled it off,” says Ganesan. “Their feedback gave us validation.”

When Rocketlane launched in June 2021, it was not a scrappy experiment. It was a well-thought-through product ready to compete at a global level. Within the first two and a half months, the company had 30 paying customers. Subsequently, six-figure enterprise deals began to roll in. “That was our first real ‘this is working’ moment,” Girishankar remembers. “These deals are hard-won because customers in this segment are savvy and well-informed.”

Also Read: How Propelld is trying to solve the specialised education financing problem

Rocketlane’s basic observation was straightforward: Half of the projects on leading project management software were customer-facing; none of them catered to client delivery. The founders merged project management, collaboration, document sharing and visibility in a single space. “We set out to create a new kind of product that was ground-up built to be client-facing and all-in-one. We are experiencing tailwinds from the surge in AI implementations in enterprise,” Ganesan explains. “The fact that AI technology often needs more services to deploy has meant a lot of the new AI-native companies are also choosing us.”

Ganesan says while they have created a depth of capabilities married with innovation, they have also built a brand and a community around it. For a startup scaling globally, culture often becomes the first victim in the quest for scale. Not for Rocketlane. “Scaling rapidly need not be at odds with vision. An expansive vision energises the company. We are firm on the vision but flexible with the details of how it is achieved,” says Girishankar.

Srikrishnan Ganesan, co-founder and CEO, Rocketlane

The founders believe they have been recipients of the generosity of the Indian SaaS ecosystem. Now, they are paying it forward through community initiatives and open sharing. The founders refer to the “Freshworks mafia”—entrepreneurs who built new ventures after their time at Freshworks—and hope Rocketlane inspires a similar wave where their team members create something of their own.

As Desai of Z47 puts it: “With Freshworks, the playbook was about entering established markets. With Rocketlane, they said, ‘We’ll create the market.’ They have built awareness around a problem the world didn’t even know it had.”

In four years, Rocketlane has evolved from a product conceived as a solution to client project delivery and onboarding chaos, to a SaaS player on a global scale with hundreds of large clients and an expanding AI power. But ask Ganesan what fuels him, and it is not competition or valuation. It is something more basic. “We want our customers to look good in front of their customers,” he says.

First Published: Oct 28, 2025, 12:09

Subscribe Now

(This story appears in the Oct 31, 2025 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, Click here.)

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

Latest News