How sales automation SaaS platform sharply focussed on India, roped in a clutch of angels and PEs and barged into the coveted $1 billion-valuation club
(From left to right) Sudhakar Gorti, Nilesh Patel and Prashant Singh, Cofounders LeadSquared
“Palo Alto, California, United States.” That’s how the LinkedIn contact information of Nilesh Patel reads now, in June 2022. A decade ago, though, it was something else. The second-time entrepreneur from Indore, who completed instrumentation engineering from Delhi Institute of Technology, worked at IBM for four years till 2002, sold his maiden venture Proteans to Symphony Teleca Corporation in 2010, and didn’t have Palo Alto or California, or the US on his bio, CV or credentials. “It was just Bengaluru, India,” recalls the co-founder and chief executive officer of LeadSquared, a Bengaluru-based sales automation SaaS platform.
In 2011, Patel along with his friends, Sudhakar Gorti, Prashant Singh and Sukhbir Kalsi, started B2B marketing and lead generation company MarketXpander, and two years later, in 2013, they rolled out LeadSquared. Over the next few years, the sales execution, marketing automation and field force management platform helped clients in improving efficiency in end-to-end customer journey. From marketing, call centre, inside sales, field sales, feet-on-street teams, verifications, collections, and vendor onboarding, LeadSquared did all, and scaled up handsomely within the country.
From a few lakh in operating revenue during the formative years, LeadSquared closed FY17 at Rs 11 crore, FY18 at Rs 19 crore and FY19 at Rs 33 crore. The bootstrapped startup, which had raised money from a bunch of friends since inception, was now growing at a fast clip and managed to grab the attention of Jyoti Bansal, who sold his application monitoring company AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017, a day before the company was due for its IPO. The same year, Bansal invested in LeadSquared as an angel. In spite of having a big name from Silicon Valley, LeadSquared still didn’t have any trace of US operations till 2018. “There was so much to do in India,” recounts Patel, who started scouting for maiden institutional funding.
Back in early 2019, LeadSquared had the right kind of numbers—one might call it degree—to attract venture capitalists (VCs). What, though, the SaaS company lacked badly was pedigree. “How much does US contribute to your sales,” was a recurring question faced by the founder. “SaaS companies can’t go big in India,” was another feedback. “You don’t seem to have a global vision,” was yet another criticism. “Investors liked our team, praised our work but shied away from investing,” rues the founder who found the entire fund-raising process ridiculous. “Arey interested ho to paisey kyon nahin daalte ho [if you are interested then why don’t you invest],” he used to ask irritatingly.