Learn more about Plivo here: https://www.plivo.com/
In this podcast, we sat down with Venky Balasubramanian to talk about
the story of Plivo, a cloud communications platform that simplifies and
personalises businesses’ customer communications. Every kind of
business, from startups to public companies, can benefit from Plivo’s
enterprise-grade communications platform, which includes a premium
carrier network with connectivity in more than 190 countries, an API
platform for messaging and voice calls, and solutions for sales and
support teams.
Venky Balasubramanian started Plivo in 2011 along with his co-founder
Michael Ricordeau. Initially, Plivo was an open-source GitHub project,
but after attending a developer conference in Chicago, the co-founder
duo decided to commercialise their voice-based app communication
framework.
Initially, they applied for Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 Batch, but were
rejected. Venky emailed Paul Graham to ask why they had been rejected, and he said: 1. Venky B and Michael Ricordeau didn’t have a lot of in-person co-founder experience; they had only met offline in Chicago at that conference, and 2. Plivo was a pre-revenue company.
Venky Balasubramanian got to work proving to Paul Graham that he and
Michael had what it took to succeed as a business, scoring Plivo’s first customer and beginning to generate revenue. He also raised a pre-seed
round from Morpheus, Seeders and One97 Mobility Fund, along with Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
Following this, Plivo was accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2012
batch, and counted companies like 9GAG, Boosted Boards, Coinbase,
Soylent, and Zapier as its batchmates. Venky B clearly remembers seeing Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong offering other Y Combinator founders bitcoins in exchange for signing up for Coinbase.
By the time Plivo’s time at Y Combinator was over, they were generating
more revenue than most of their fellow startups, and were able to raise a $1.5M seed round from investors like YC, Battery Ventures, A16Z, and
Qualcomm Ventures. This fundraise grabbed media attention and also
solidified Plivo’s reputation as a business with trustworthy, legitimate backers.
In 2017, Plivo raised $8M in venture debt, rather than pursuing a Series A. While these funds did temporarily alter the startup’s culture, Venky B and Michael Ricordeau were able to course-correct, saving the company from the high-burn trap many other SaaS businesses fall into. By raising debt instead of a Series A, Venky and Michael were also able to retain their equity in Plivo.
Plivo has no plans to go public or sell, and are looking forward to
growing Plivo’s new offerings including Contacto and Sellular. Contacto
is an omnichannel contact center that seamlessly combines your customer conversations and your existing systems, and Sellular is a modern sales platform built for Salesforce users. Both Contacto and Sellular have been internally funded by and set up within Plivo, but with siloed teams and goals which enable them to grow independently.
Today Plivo has a team of 300, the company is fully remote across USA
and India, they’re profitable, and are bringing in somewhere between $50 to $100 million in annual revenue from customers across 190+ countries. They’ve also been profitable for 6.5 years!
Stay updated on what’s new at Plivo:
Twitter — https://twitter.com/plivo
Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/Plivo/
LinkedIn — https://in.linkedin.com/company/plivo-inc
GitHub — https://github.com/plivo
Connect with us:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bwmillionaires/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/backstagewithmillionaires
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Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5rGPalovc6AKsfbOyjh32p
