Business Process Automation Startup SaaS Labs Raises $17 Mn From Base10, Eight Roads

Delhi NCR and US-based cloud startup SaaS Labs has raised a $17 Mn Series A funding round from US-based early-stage venture capital firm Base10 Partners and Eight Roads Ventures.

The startup will use the fresh capital to expand its customer base, hiring, launch new products and services, and research & development.

Founded in 2016 by Gaurav Sharma, SaaS Labs currently operates three products — Justcall, CallRoot and Helpwise.

• Justcall enables a contact centre for sales or support, integrating 70+ business tools.
• CallRoot tracks and records incoming calls, integrating with marketing tools for better insights.
• Helpwise, on the other hand, consolidates all communication streams in a single shared inbox to increase the efficiency of the customer support team.

The business automation products are aimed at remote work experience — especially Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS). The founder claims that the startup has witnessed an “unprecedented acceleration” of cloud adoption among SMBs in the last 12 months.

The startup counts Alibaba Group, Walmart, McGraw Hill, Jaguar, E&Y, among others, as its clientele.

Rise Of The CCaaS Industry

The Covid-19 pandemic has had huge impacts on various verticals from healthcare to foodtech, and every industry has faced major challenges in its way. Many organisations had thus put efforts into obtaining or building automation tools that would help them resume business processes.

The rapid adoption of productivity-enhancing tools by businesses is a testament to the trend driving contact centres to the cloud. In a post-Covid world, if SaaS startups can crack the SMB market, we estimate the sector to grow exponentially over the next five years. Accelerated by automation, it even has the potential to grow into an $8.7 Bn market opportunity by 2025.

On-premise call centres have been traditionally custom-built. But they require long implementation cycles and ongoing maintenance, with most of the inbound traffic telephone-based.

With Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) software, high-speed internet availability and efficient communication between enterprises and their customers — cloud-based contact centres are becoming mainstream.

According to the Mordor Intelligence report, the global CCaaS market has been currently valued at $16.1 Bn and is expected to reach $51.8 Bn by 2026. The report suggests that the Asia Pacific region (which also includes India) is the fastest-growing market at a CAGR of 21.8%.

The cloud-based contact centre market is currently dominated by NEC Corporation, Huawei Technologies, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Microsoft, Genesys, Salesforce, catering to industries across banking, IT, healthcare, telecom, government, others.

Some of SaaS Labs’ competitors include Stakeboat Capital-backed Ozonetel, Sequoia Capital and Mayfield-backed Knowlarity, Blume Ventures-backed Exotel, Chiratae Venture-backed Goodmeetings, and MyOperator.