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In the year 2000, I was 30 years old and was happily running my first business. I had started this business in 1993 right after graduating from college. My father was my mentor and with his experience and zeal backing me, I had created a successful project engineering business at a very young age.
An American friend from my college days in USA, sent me an unsolicited US$ 200,000 to start a tech company in India. He had raised a ton of money during the dot com boom. Unfortunately, he went bust one year later, with which ended all the promises made for future funding.
My second venture (ACL) was born in the year 2000 as a consequence of a small sum of unsolicited money. As I needed someone who understood software (I was a mechanical engineer from UT Austin) I went to meet a dear school friend from childhood, who instantly without any questions or doubt agreed to co-found the company with me.
It was an era of very early days for tech start-ups in India. Little or no risk capital was available. Moreover you could not convince smart people to join start-ups and practically there was no trained talent available for product management and large scale platform development.
After a terrible start and facing multiple shut downs in the first 2 years, we conceived and started developing the first of its kind messaging platform. The goal was to enable Indian businesses to communicate with their customer via SMS. We were told that it would be impossible to build a business out of 160 characters of text. Also at that time there were only a few million mobile phone users in India and businesses were very reluctant to adopt new technologies.
Fast forward to 2022, our platform evolved in to a highly scalable and trusted multichannel system managing over 100 billion SMSes, Voice calls, Emails & Whatapp messages per year. Over 500 leading enterprises of India including the largest banks and financial institutions were using our services to manage their real time missions critical communication, OTP (One Time Password) being just one popular use case. Our key customers included names like HDFC Bank and large telecom operator such as Airtel were our connectivity partners. We had offices in every major city of India as well as in a few other countries.
During our 22 year journey we won several awards and recognitions. One notable one was winning three years in a row – 2005, 2006 and 2007- the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India & Fast 500 Asia Pacific” award. This was an objective award given to the fastest growing technology companies in India and Asia Pacific.
Our external funding story is even more unique and dramatic – starting with an unsolicited 200K from a friend, to receiving our first 1 million USD from an American VC in 2002 (at that time we had no clue what venture capital meant) to being the first company to be invested in India by Naspers (a global giant of risk capital) and finally buying out both the VC firm and Naspers with our own funds.
In early 2020 (just a few weeks before Covid) we agreed to be acquired by the global leader in our space, for a sum of USD 75 million in cash + USD 25 million in stock options. We had no plans to sell the company. We were solidly profitable and growing at 20% per year. We had created a world class communications platform and had the country’s marquee businesses as our customers. We had no external investors left and hence there was no pressure on us to exit.
In 2022, at the time of successfully transitioning the management control to the new shareholders, ACL had a revenue run rate of over INR 1000 crores (USD 125 million) with matching profits and free cash flows.
The story of ACL would not be complete without mentioning the numerous innovations and first of its kind concepts, platforms and services we created during the 22 years. Each one had a varied life span, from a few years to decades of success. The first one being our SMS Chat service developed in 2001. It was hugely popular across emerging markets and its success supported the company financially for the first decade and attracted all the external capital.
Our other innovations included a social networking service for the pre-iphone era which saw success for a few years but had to be discontinued due to poor monetization, an operator billing service for payments which didn’t make much sense in light of the growing popularity of mobile wallets and a Toll Free Data service which was banned by regulators just days before its launch. Looking back, only two of our innovations really made any commercial sense and the majority of them were financial failures.
I hope you have enjoyed reading an abridged version of the story of my past ventures and hopefully captured a few learnings too. By no means is the above a complete account of my entrepreneurial journey. Soon I plan to write a more holistic story which can be more fun to read for everyone as well as useful for young entrepreneurs wishing to pursue a similar path.
Money, you can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. You turn friends into enemies and enemies into friends. You free us from our worries and you return other worries to us at the same time.
Money – what are your thoughts?
I am the seal of the heart – a heart sealed by me will love me exclusively.
Money – what will become of the one who loves you when you leave him?
I print a mark on my lover’s heart which will remain a wound forever.
Money – what do you love most?
To change hands.
Money – where is your place of abode?
In the heart of the one who adores me.
Money – whom do you seek?
The one who seeks me.
Money – whom do you obey?
To the one who has elevated himself above me, I shall become his slave and lie like dust at his feet.