SaaS Labs raises $17 mn to expand customer base, hire team members globally

SaaS Labs, a cloud-based platform that builds productivity and business process automation software for SMBs and enterprises said that it has raised $17 million in Series A funding from Base 10 Partners and Eight Roads Ventures. The company has been bootstrapped up until this point and will use the funding to expand its customer base, hire people, and release new products and services.

Founded in 2016 by Gaurav Sharma, the India-based company develops products for sales, support and marketing teams as well as contact centres to enhance productivity. The company has been bootstrapped since its founding, growing the business to millions in annual recurring revenue and achieving profitability, while still managing to more than double year-over-year. This Series A funding marks its first initial investment from outside investors. With a 70-member team in India and the Philippines, SaaS Labs plans to double headcount by the end of 2021. The company currently serves over 6000 companies globally, including Divvy Homes, Jaguar, Ernst & Young, and Walmart.

“We have seen an unprecedented acceleration of cloud adoption among SMBs in the last 12 months,” said Gaurav Sharma, founder and CEO of SaaS Labs. “We are going to deploy this fresh capital into product development, R&D and hiring talent globally.”

Sharma is a 2010 graduate from NIT Warangal and an experienced entrepreneur having built and exited multiple businesses in the past. His last business was acquired by New York Times in 2016.

Call centres have traditionally been custom-built, on-premise solutions that required long implementation cycles and ongoing maintenance, with most of the inbound traffic telephone-based. Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) software has opened the door to multiple high speed, efficient forms of communication between enterprises and their customers. As a result, cloud-based contact centers are fast becoming mainstream.

SaaS Labs currently has two main products: Justcall and Helpwise. JustCall allows SMBs to set up a cloud-based contact centre for sales or support, within minutes with native integrations with over 70 other business tools. As an extension of this move towards centralized customer interactions, Helpwise allows users to consolidate all communication streams in a single shared inbox thereby improving the quality and efficiency of customer support teams.

“For companies across a variety of industries, business communications are critical for delivering a strong customer experience but remain a major challenge to manage at scale for inbound and outbound communication,” said Chris Zeoli, principal at Base10 Partners. “SaaS Lab’s modern, customizable communication system is particularly exciting for international sales and support calls that benefit from this customisability,”

Whether teams are distributed geographically or due to remote work, SaaS Lab’s product suite offers near-unlimited flexibility with its cloud-based experience. The company said the contact centre industry’s incumbents remain heavily reliant on hardware-based systems which simply don’t meet the needs of today’s enterprise teams that demand tools that they can rely on, no matter where they find themselves working.

Aditya Systla, partner at Eight Roads Ventures, said the rapid adoption of productivity-enhancing tools by businesses is driving contact centres to the cloud.

“It is becoming a theme that we believe has huge potential. SaaS Labs has grown significantly over the last few years and is well-positioned to serve the needs of the SMB segment, as they increasingly seek cloud-based solutions,” said Systla. “The high quality of the product and Gaurav’s (Sharma) vision to be a one-stop-shop for all SMB contact centre needs will be the company’s differentiating factor.”

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