SaaS Startup Hiver Raises $4 Mn From Kalaari And Kae Capital

SUMMARY

Gaurav Chaturvedi and Rajesh Raju, manning director at Kalaari Capital, will be joining the Board of Hiver

The startup will use the funding for product development, as well as expanding its global customer base

The startup earlier raised $130K from the Citrix Startup Accelerator and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma in 2012

Bengaluru-based SaaS platform Hiver (previously Grexit) has reportedly raised $4 Mn (INR 30 Cr) in a new round of funding led by venture capital firms Kalaari Capital and Kae Capital.

“We believe Hiver has the potential of becoming a product that is synonymous with productivity for businesses,” Gaurav Chaturvedi, venture partner at Kae Capital, said. Both, Chaturvedi and Rajesh Raju, manning director at Kalaari Capital, will be joining the Board of Hiver.

The startup will use the proceeds from the new round of funding for product development, as well as expanding its global customer base, Niraj Ranjan Rout, co-founder and chief executive of Hiver, said in a media statement.

“With this investment, we will fuel our efforts to realise our vision of making Gmail a powerful collaboration platform that businesses can use for sales, support and their internal functions,” Rout said.

The startup earlier raised $130K in seed funding from the Citrix Startup Accelerator and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma in 2012.

The SaaS platform was built on the central idea of the knowledge database. The first 1,000 customers were using the platform to collate workflows and figure out tasks that needed execution.

The company had introduced a new product – Mailflo – in 2014 that was a more intuitive, standardised version of the existing platform. It was incepted as a helpdesk solution and was later integrated into Hive post one year.

The company became profitable in the first one and a half years of operation.

The company counts international behemoths such as HelpScout, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics as well as local incumbents such as Zoho, Freshdesk as competitors. But the one thing that the company has always banked on is the fact that it is completely Gmail-based.

“Shared mailboxes and all the functionalities that came with it, really helped us pit Grexit/Hiver against the competition. In fact, we have an instance where Helpscout’s customers publicly chose us over them,” said Rout in an earlier interaction with Inc42.

[The development was reported by ET.]