The effects of global pandemic has significant impact on several industries including the technology and software sector. But, it did not slow down growth in the software sector. The growth of enterprise software and SAAS products has been quite good. The expenditure of Information Technology on enterprise software is estimated to reach 672 billion USD in 2022. The Enterprise Software Market is forecast to reach $545m by 2025. SaaS products and enterprise software have become essential in a cutthroat business environment. They provide accessibility, functionality, scalability, and versatility to businesses. Kovai.co is a multi-product company that has a global reach in more than 70 countries. Read to know about Kovai.co products, founders, business model, marketing, and the complete journey of its growth.
Kovai.co - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Kovai.co |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | London |
| Industry | Enterprise Software & SaaS |
| Founder | Saravana Kumar |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Website | kovai.co |
Kovai.co - About
Kovai.co - Founder and Team
Kovai.co - The Idea and Startup Story
Kovai.co - Name, Tagline, and Logo
Kovai.co - Products
Kovai.co - Business Model and Revenue Model
Kovai.co - Customer Acquisition
Kovai.co - Challenges Faced
Kovai.co - Marketing
Kovai.co - Growth
Kovai.co - Acquisitions
Kovai.co - Competitors
Kovai.co - Tools Used to Run The Startups
Kovai.co - Recognition and Achievements
Kovai.co - About
Kovai.co is a bootstrapped & profitable multi-product enterprise SaaS company specializing in enterprise integration and knowledge management space based out of Coimbatore, India and London, UK. Kovai.co is a technology partner of choice for many of the world’s leading enterprises to manage and monitor their Microsoft BizTalk and Azure Serverless environments. Kovai.co’s product team consists of thinkers and innovators who are re-defining the way robust Enterprise Software and SaaS products are built.
Their mission is to create a successful global technology product company out of their home city - Coimbatore. Their vision is to be a SaaS Unicorn within 2030.
The core value of the company is #TogetherWeGrow. They identify necessities and create opportunities. Enjoy their growth in all aspects and continue the journey to scale.
Kovai.co - Founder and Team
Saravana Kumar is the sole founder of Kovai.co ably supported by a leadership team of experts from various domains. The current team size is 240+. They coach and empower people thereby enhancing their performance. They are against command and control. All their leaders are friendly and approachable. They believe in doing the tasks first, get mature, then delegating, and elevate.
Kovai.co has its offices in London, UK and Coimbatore, India. Saravana Kumar is born and brought up in Coimbatore. He chose to give back to his hometown through his contributions on economic and skills upliftment. Kovai.co under his dynamic leadership has grown organically from a single product to multi product company with over 240 employees majority of them based out of Coimbatore. The company is bootstrapped and has crossed $10 MN ARR in 2020.
Kovai.co gives opportunities to freshers and expats who wish to come back closer to their hometown. For freshers there is a Kovai.co Connect initiative where in students from different educational institutions are hired as interns and given in-depth classroom & on the job training for a period of 6 months after which they are taken on rolls as full-time employees. Over the last two years the company has trained nearly 100 students under this initiative.
Kovai.co - The Idea and Startup Story
Saravana Kumar, Founder & CEO, Kovai.co was a Microsoft BizTalk Server Consultant for 10 years and during that time of building solutions for all their clients, he noticed there were some gaps in the BizTalk Server. He started off by building a solution to fill these gaps more as a passion in the year 2010. He presented the first version of the product to his peers at the MVP conference in the US and received very positive feedback. With the kind of positive feedback, he realized the importance of this solution in the commercial sense and decided to launch as a business. Within the first 2 months he was able to get his first customer all the way from Hongkong with whom he did not have any prior connection. Within the first three years of the launch, he was able to get about 150 customers and hence decided to go into the business full time & hire a team. Until the first three years he was running the company with a small 4-member team from the living room of his residence.
As the product started to grow both technically and commercially, he built & launched their second product Serverless 360 for managing the Azure platform in the year 2016.
Sometime in the year 2017 when the team was looking for a knowledge base solution to write and organize all their technical product documentation, they realized that there was not any suitable solution in the market to fit their needs and the ones that were there was very expensive. Thus, Saravana brainstormed with the team and decided to build a solution to solve this business problem there by launching their knowledge base solution Document360 in the year 2018.
Document360 is a knowledge base platform that is engineered for growing companies. It helps companies to instantly create an online self-service knowledge base for their customers or employees accessed either publicly or privately.
Kovai.co - Name, Tagline, and Logo
When the company was growing organically and the opportunity came to set up an engineering & marketing development center in India, back in 2013, Saravana ignored all the counsel from his peers to set up the facility in Bengaluru, Chennai or Hyderabad and started the office in Coimbatore.
The town Coimbatore was called Kovanputhur (pre independence days) with a shorter version called Kovai. The use of the word Kovai for Coimbatore is still in existence, and it has an emotional attachment to people of Coimbatore.
Hence when Saravana started the company, he registered the company name as “Kovai Limited” in the UK (in 2009) and “Kovai Systems India Pvt Limited” in India (in 2013). Even though the registered names were Kovai, the company was known as BizTalk360 (the first product) for a long time.
When the company was going through the re-branding exercise after evolving into a multi-product company, they decided to bring Kovai as the prominent brand name.
In 2018, they called the company Kovai.co.
In 2020, with continuous persistence, they managed to acquire the domain Kovai.com owned by its previous owner for nearly 20 years.
Their mission is to create a successful global technology product company out of their home city - Coimbatore."
Kovai.co - Products
Kovai.co is a multi-product company with 4 different products and over 2000 customers spread across globally in more than 70 countries.
BizTalk360
BizTalk360 bundles over 50+ features into one single solution to make BizTalk server monitoring and administration super-efficient and secure. BizTalk360 provides everything enterprises need for BizTalk operations, monitoring, analytics, and more. Operations dashboards, widgets, advanced event viewer, data monitoring dashboards, notification channels, and throttling analyser and new relic integration are some of the features of BizTalk360.
Serverless360
Serverless360 is a portal focused on Operations and Support for Microsoft Azure Serverless resources, a Complementary tool to Azure portal in supporting Azure Serverless Application. Enterprises can better manager their business applications through Serverless360 and do end to end tracking on the message flowing through the Serverless Resources, and more.
Document360
Document360 is a Knowledge Base platform, engineered for growing companies. Businesses can instantly create an online Self-service knowledge base for your customer & employees (accessed either publicly or privately).
Cerebrata
Cerebrata Cerulean provides out of box support for a number of commonly used Azure services. It also provides deep integration with Azure Portal and Azure Cloud Shell to manage other Azure services.
Kovai.co - Business Model and Revenue Model
The business model of Kovai.co differs for each of their products based on its respective target audience. For instance any company with BizTalk server are their potential targets.
For Serverless360, that target is vast – Anyone with Azure resources in their integration platform, can use this application.
For Document360, this is also a vast adoption platform and basically anyone who needs documentation in SaaS or in On premise model is their target audience.
Kovai.co - Customer Acquisition
The first activity they undertook once they got a prototype of the product was to reach out to all their connections (experts from technical writing community, CXOs of companies etc) requesting them to try out the product and share their valuable feedback. The feedback received were evaluated, prioritized, and then passed on to the engineering team for development. Their marketing teams had begun writing blogs on showcasing the use cases of the product thereby generating prospective leads from readers. The sales team would then showcase demos of the product to these prospects and encourage them to take a trial of the product so that they can use it firsthand to understand the value it creates. They were frugal in their approach as they did not want to spend too much money and resources until the first 100 customers were acquired.
Kovai.co - Challenges Faced
In any business typically challenges are with people, like core people leaving at wrong times, wrong hires, people you trusted leave and they take away a few of your core members etc. These challenges will continue to remain and it’s the passion the founder has for building products and solving business user problems that drives the startup forward. Its also has the ability to impact so many people’s lives and create something big in the community, especially in Coimbatore which is a tier two city & the founders’ hometown. Moreover, challenges are never permanent. Any adversity that comes your way will subside over time. They have lost some crucial members at critical moments, but if they look back, it’s a short-term pain. There will be struggle for a while but eventually things will turnaround.
Kovai.co - Marketing
Content marketing has been the most successful marketing campaign. They write some high quality blogs focusing on multiple use cases of their product and enable their audience to clearly understand the value they will get out of the Kovai.co products.
Kovai.co - Growth
The last two years (2020 & 2021) has been a moment of many milestones for us.
- Kovai.co hired over 175 people during this period
- They made the first acquisition with Cerebrata in 2020
- They crossed $10M in ARR in 2020
- Document360 acquired over 500 customers in a year
- In 2021 they have focussed on growing their products to the next level in terms of new features, enhancements, acquiring new customers, etc. They also put together a separate team & started working on a new product which will be launched in Q2 of 2022.
Their medium-term plan is to generate a $30M ARR within the next 3 years and their long-term plan is to be a SaaS Unicorn by 2030.
Kovai.co - Acquisitions
Kovai.co acquired Cerebrata in the year 2020.
Kovai.co - Competitors
Their enterprise products BizTalk360 & Serverless360 do not really have any prominent competitors.
The competitors for Document360 are:
- Bloomfire
- Helpjuice
- ProProfs Knowledge base
- Confluence
- Help Scout
- Help Docs
Kovai.co - Tools Used to Run The Startups
Microsoft OneNote captures all my to-do lists, ideas, notes, etc. It is a flexible tool - to manage my day-to-day tasks efficiently. Microsoft teams for communication and collaboration within teams. It is one of the powerful tools that helped us get going during the pandemic. Their integration with third-party collaboration tools makes them a very robust tool.
The team uses Adobe Photoshop extensively for designing dashboards and elements. It is their go-to design tool for image creation and graphic design. Microsoft Azure DevOps practices and tools provide support in building and deploying applications. It offers reliable support during each development lifecycle.
Kovai.co - Recognition and Achievements
Kovai.co has won the following awards in the last two years
- Bootstrapped SaaS Startup of the year 2021 by SaaSBoomi – a community of SaaS Founders in India
- Bootstrap Champ 2021 Award by The Economic Times Startup Awards
- Document360 recognized under the SaaS Category as part of Nasscom Emerge 50 Awards.
FAQs
What type of company is Kovai.co?
Kovai.co is an Enterprise Software & SaaS products company.
Who is the founder of Kovai.co?
Saravana Kumar is the founder of Kovai.co.
When was Kovai.co founded?
Kovai.co was founded in 2011.
What are the products of Kovai.co?
Kovai.co has four different products. These are:
- BizTalk360
- Serverless360
- Document360
- Cerebrata