With Series B Funding Done, Here's What Lies Ahead for Zenoti Sudheer says he is not building Zenoti to be acquired by another company
By Sneha Banerjee •
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When funding is scarce, a new round of funds led by marquee industry investors comes as a breath of fresh air. Software maker Zenoti raised $15 million in Series B round led by Norwest Venture Partners along with existing backer Accel India.
With Zenoti's all-in-one solution, spa and salon managers are more easily able to manage all aspects of their business from managing their appointment book, billing through a POS, CRM, employee schedules and payroll, inventory, running marketing promotions, enabling online booking and online sales and more.
Speaking to Entrepreneur India, Founder Sudheer Koneru spoke about "what it takes to build a global company and how he managed to secure a new round of funds amid funding winter.'
"Even though the environment is not very conducive and people are very cautious to make new investments, I think when they see a good platform for new investment, everybody wants to kind of jump on it," Sudheer said speaking on his new round of funds.
Accel already backs SaaS market cheerleader Freshdesk, which is into cloud support software solutions. Zenoti's platform is engineered for reliability and scale, using enterprise-level technology made available to businesses of all sizes from the single location brand to chains with over 200 outlets. Zenoti currently powers thousands of spas and salons in over 32 countries.
Funding done, now what?
Sudheer expects the new funding to help them reach profitability by the end of next year. "From India companies like Zoho, Freshdesk, Capillary and a couple of other B2B software companies, that have emerged and shown, that it is viable to build a software company from India. Our goal is to build a category leader. In our category of wellness industry, we do believe we can be a category leader for software for large wellness businesses," Sudheer said.
Sudheer, who claims that his company was very prudent about their expenses throughout, said that today profitability is a big focus for SaaS companies today, earlier there was more focus on growth.
Tracing Sudheer's entrepreneurial journey
Sudheer, previously a former Microsoft executive, had sold his previous venture Intelliprep to Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's Click2learn in 2001. He has also invested in Hyderabad healthcare chain Latitudes Pro.
Sudheer said he felt more protected as an employee at Microsoft, whereas his entrepreneurial stint taught him a lot about marketing and sales as he and his small team were pretty much on their own.
Not for Sale this time!
However, this time around Sudheer says he is not building Zenoti to be acquired by another company
