Skip to main content

Ozonetel year in Review.Scaling from $1M ARR to $6M ARR

By C Chaitanya
This chapter in Ozonetel's life is called scaling. Moving from the surviving phase to scaling phase is deeply satisfying. I do this blog post generally during October. But I held out as we had couple of big announcements to make and I wanted to include them in this post. So here are our major milestones of the year(in no particular order):

1. KooKoo powers Hindustan Unilever's mobile radio platform KKT. This was a huge win for us which proved the efficiency of the platform. It tested our scalability to the limits what with more than 50,000 hours of content getting consumed every single day on the platform. After that entry, we now power campaigns for a lot of brands like Wheel, Lifebuoy etc.

2. Ozonetel featured in the Deloitte fast 50 coming in at 18th. This was validation of our revenue growth. Last year we closed at $1M ARR. This year we will close between $5M-$6M ARR.

3. Zoho Partnership. Ozonetel is the only Indian company which has a phone bridge integration with Zoho CRM. We hope to see this partnership grow this year.

4. Yantrasoft Acquisition. To improve the platform capability, Ozonetel acquired speech tech company Yantrasoft. The speech technology is getting integrated into the KooKoo platform and the speech services will be fully enabled on the cloud. Watch this space for some really cool speech applications we are going to release soon.

5. Missed call world record. Ozonetel platform, KooKoo has powered the world record for "Maximum missed calls received in 120 hours". This was done by HUL for their Kan Khajura Tesan project.

6. Taking cloud contact center main stream. Slowly but surely contact centers on the cloud has gained acceptability because of Cloudagent. BPOs like Rural Shores, Suma Soft and enterprises like HDFC Life have opened up in adopting the cloud for their contact center solutions.

There have been a lot more achievements like crossing a billion calls handled on the platform. Our happiest moment was when a favorite customer of ours who had gone to competition for some reason, came back to us within a couple of months.

This year was hard on the personal front for a lot of our employees. Three employees lost their father. Many others dealt with other personal issues which always seemed to come at the wrong time. But as a team we survived. This was especially true, when for a couple of months in the middle, there was a point when all founders had some or the other personal issue and were not able to fully contribute. But the team got together and delivered on the promises made to customers. That was the time, I think we realized we had grown from being a startup.

Sorry for being a little emotional there. But now we have the next year to think about. Next year, we are gonna travel the world :)
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

By C Chaitanya
Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...
Read more

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

By C Chaitanya
Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE .   Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive.  Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...
Read more

Telugu ASR speech data collection

By C Chaitanya
Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures.  While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...
Read more