Success is the tip of an iceberg

Even with the right qualification, right place and perfect idea, Ambarish Gupta's first venture was a failure.

If you think failing at business is the end of the line for you, think again. The success of Knowlarity, the fastest growing cloud communications platform in emerging market across Asia, is just the tip of an iceberg, but beneath its surface lies a long journey of hard work, struggle, planning and a lesson from a failed startup venture.
Even with the right qualification, right place and perfect idea, Ambarish Gupta's first venture was a failure.
After graduating in Computer Science in 2000 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Gupta proceeded to Australia, Germany and finally arrived in Silicon Valley. During his time in Silicon Valley, he conceived the idea of "rent.com". He quit his job and launched his venture in Bangalore in 2003, unfortunately, he fell victim to the Dotcom.
"It was a bad time to start a company. When you don't get what you want, what you get is called experience. And it was an incredible experience," Gupta says.
He decided to get an MBA degree from Carnegie Mellon University. After graduating in 2007 he joined McKinsey & Company as a Strategy Consultant in the United States.
He had no intention to start a company again, however, a technocrat at heart, he truly believes technology holds much potential for changing how the world does business.
"I had no plan to come back to the startup world. But in 2009, when I was in New York the idea of cloud communication clicked in my mind. It looked like a billion-dollar opportunity that I could work on. The communication sector in emerging markets was growing at 100 per cent. So, the chances of success were high," Gupta says.
He launched Knowlarity in 2009 with a vision to enable small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises' productivity with cloud communication solutions.
"Since then, we have successfully launched products that have been sold in various sectors of the SME industry. We offer simple and useful products that help businesses to improve their bottom-line. Today, we not only help SMEs but also large enterprises grow their businesses with effective communication using technology," Gupta says.
Knowlarity, headquartered in Singapore, is the largest provider of cloud-based communications solutions to businesses in Southeast Asia and Middle Eastern markets.
Knowlarity has more than 15,000 paying business customers across 65+ countries. It helps the business grow their revenue faster with its proprietary customer communication technology platform SuperReceptionist.
In the last seven years, the company has grown from scratch to a global venture of 550+ employees. Knowlarity's flagship product SuperReceptionist can process over a million calls an hour. It has offices in Singapore, Dubai, India, Turkey and the Philippines.
In November 2016, Knowlarity raised $20 million in its Series C funding round. This latest investment was led by the renowned Dubai-based private equity firm Delta Partners.
Dominic Halfpenny, partner at Delta Partners Capital says, "Knowlarity has established itself as the leading player in the consumer-to-business communications industry in India and is now exporting this expertise internationally."
"We are excited to participate in this fascinating and fast-evolving industry and look forward to actively supporting the management team at Knowlarity," he says.
"By pioneering cloud communication, we managed to bring advantages of cloud communication to tens of millions of SMEs and their customers in emerging markets. Using the Knowlarity's API, we built a variety of potent voice solutions offering several deep features which they needed to run their day-to-day business, while staying resilient against operator downtimes," Gupta says.
He says he sees huge potential in the UAE market. He set up his office in Dubai in January 2016.
SMEs represent 95 per cent of all firms registered in Dubai, 42 per cent of the labour force and 40 per cent of the emirate's gross domestic product, according to government data.
"The UAE has a huge appetite for could-based solutions. We see many SMEs are facing problems that could be solved by cutting edge business-to-customer and customer-to-business cloud communications software," Gupta says.
He says Dubai businesses are widely using Knowlarity solutions for savings, revenue growth, as a tool to capture leads, to provide analytics, to prevent revenue leakages and measuring CMOs.
He says Knowlarity's one-year journey in the UAE has been great. "We are very happy to say that we have faced zero challenges and resistance"
Deepro Ganguly, marketing head says: "Being a pioneer in cloud communication, Knowlarity has brought the advantages of cloud communication to millions of SMEs and their customers in emerging markets."
"We build and ship the best software and we always listen to our customers," he says.
Ganguly said: "We are different and unique, because we manage the largest assets for hosted cloud communication solutions. We offer deep interactive voice response customisations with IVR studio and we are 10X cheaper than on-premise solutions."
-riaz@khaleejtimes.com