Global VCs buy minority stake in CloudCherry for $6 million
Global venture capital funds Vertex Ventures, IDG Ventures and Cisco Investments have picked up a significant minority stake in CloudCherry, a SaaS-based platform for customer experience management owned by Customer Analytics Technologies for $6 million. The series A funding raised by company will be used to expand the business outside India in markets such as US, South East Asia and the Middle East, senior company executives said.
Founded by Vinod Muthukrishnan, Vijay R Lakshmanan, Prem K Viswanath and Nagendra CL, CloudCherry raised angel funding from Girish Mathrubootham of Freshdesk among others.
Since its first client in 2014, the company has seen a year on year revenue growth of 7x.
“The company is looking at expanding its footprint in North American market and will also enter the South East Asian market,” said Vinod Muthukrishnan, co-founder of CloudCherry in an exclusive interview with ET.
“The Series A funding is all primary capital and none of the existing angel investors will exit through this round,” Muthukrishnan added. The $6 million raised by CloudCherry is the largest series A for a SAAS start up this year, as against the general funding slowdown that Indian start-ups are seeing.
CloudCherry provides an Omni-channel, SAAS based Customer Experience Management (CEM) platform that helps brands track, measure and improve customer experience.Currently, CloudCherry works with brands in various sectors such as BFSI, retail, e-commerce, healthcare, manufacturing and hospitality. Some of the company’s clients include prominent brands like World of Titan, HDFC Bank, Central, Voonik, Caratlane and several others.
“Globally recognized investors like Vertex Ventures, and a leading corporate investor like Cisco Investments recognize the massive potential in the space of Customer Experience, and what our product offers,” said Muthukrishnan. Vertex Ventures venture capital arm of the Singapore Government-backed investment company Temasek, Cisco Ventures is the investment arm of Cisco and IDG is a leading venture capital investor with significant exposure to India.
“We believe the next generation of global SaaS companies will be built out of India. CloudCherry is one such company that has been able to leverage India’s deep technology talent to build and sell products in a global market,” said Ben Mathias, Managing Director and India Head of Vertex Ventures.
India-based SaaS companies are expected to show robust growth over the next few years. According to a joint study by Accel Partners and Google published in March 2016, Indian SaaS startups would earn 20 fold revenues of almost $10 billion and be worth $50 billion by 2025.
