I am a serial entrepreneur with 15 years of experience in the Saas industry, an angel investor with 13+ startups, a marathon runner, a plant parent, and a movie buff.

I co-founded Kaleyra (Previously Solutions Infini), a B2B Saas company after college, bootstrapped and scaled it to $35 million and led a 150-member team, listed it on NYSE.

I am building my second company Fyno.io which is simplifying customer communications. When not building companies, I train for Ironman, be a reluctant photographer for Shruti, my fitness influencer spouse, tend to my terrace garden and advise fellow founders.

Education:

I pursued a brief Transforming Small and Medium Enterprises (TSME) course at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Before that, I graduated with a Bachelor of Computer Applications (BCA) from Sri Bhagawan Mahaveer Jain College, Bangalore.

My passion drove me to break free from the traditional Marwari family business and start something on my own. So after my graduation in 2008, I co-founded Solutions Infini with my batchmate Ashish Agarwal.

Early Days:

Ashish Agarwal, a batchmate, had started a company called Solutions Infini as a proprietor in 2007 while still in college. Ashish and I were close friends studying Bachelor of Computer Application at Sri Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain College. Despite being a sought-after course, I found, much to my disbelief, that companies were not ready to hire. That was 2008, the year of the recession that saw an employment downturn across the world.

There were a lot of campus placements happening but with the market down there were hardly any chances of getting a job. I was offered a job but they did not inform me of my joining date. It was common in those days.

Faced with the choice of whining or bouncing back, I chose to bounce back by rebooting a college project we had done together. In our final year, we developed a system that could send text messages via SMS to parents if students were late or if their attendance was low. It also enabled the college to send parents bulk texts of any important information the college wanted to convey. 

I handled sales, customer relationships and looked at ways to expand the project into a business. Ashish worked on the technical aspects by trying to take the project to a level where commercial establishments would also want to use it. Around December 2008, we decided to formalize our partnership and converted Solutions Infini from a proprietor to a privately held company with equal ownership. 

We managed to raise ₹4 lakhs from our families and were operating out of a room on the terrace of Ashish’s family apartment in Koramangala, We spent about two months trying to get the business started while our friends continued to hunt for jobs.

That’s how Solutions Infini, a bulk SMS service provider, was born.

Scale

This evolved to Solutions Infini Technologies, a B2B company that was bootstrapped and grew organically to $35 million annual revenue with a team of 150. Through my team and my tireless efforts, I managed to bring fresh opportunities every day by implementing strategic planning, and partnership, and driving marketing & sales. As the CEO, I continually focused on bridging the communication gap of my clients to effectively reach a larger target audience. This was achieved via a multi-channel cloud communication platform that was extremely easy to use thus empowering clients like Practo, Ola, Flipkart, and Aditya Birla.

As a leader, my key strengths have been product management, business process automation, and sound strategy with brilliant execution. His thoughtful initiatives helped him build and nurture winning teams with a global approach to make all business communications less complicated. 

I have consistently been working towards building effective teams to meet organisational goals.

Merger and listing:

In 2016, Italy-based IT and telecom services provider Ubiquity acquired a 51 per cent stake in the startup. Combining the technology and expertise of Italian enterprise Ubiquity, and Indian company Solutions Infini, an International group – Kaleyra, emerged in 2018. Soon after this, Kaleyra acquired an American-based CPaaS platform – Hook Mobile and successfully entered the American market. Today, Kaleyra has a diversified portfolio with over 3,000 enterprise clients. With the public listing, the company plans to expand its product portfolio and capture a bigger cloud communication enterprise market share.

I was overseeing all activities of the company, from marketing and product ideation to enhancement of cloud-based messaging and voice platform, We ended up being one of the fastest-growing global cloud communication platforms in the world with a turnover of $110 million.

Ashish and my vision of empowering businesses globally by providing seamless business communication through continuous innovation are what drove a bootstrapped startup to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Hobbies:

My wife Shruti, a yoga instructor and runner introduced me to running. I ran 10 km in 2015 at Bengaluru 10K and the rest as they say is history! I have since completed 3 Full Marathons: TMM ’19, ’20, and ‘23. And 15+ half marathons like ADHM ’18 & ’19 and TSK ’18 & ’19. I am also a dedicated member of a popular running club in Bangalore.

Besides, I am very fond of cooking, travelling, playing cricket, and networking in my leisure time and have been interested in Numismatics since childhood.