Indian cloud telephony startup Knowlarity secures $16M funding from Sequoia, Mayfield

Cloud telephony company Knowlarity Communications has secured US$16 million in series B funding from Sequoia Capital and Mayfield. The Indian startup will use the fresh funds to expand operations into Southeast Asia, and fuel research and development.

Knowlarity’s cloud telephony services enable businesses to virtualize their phone systems. It provides a scalable phone platform that can handle over a million calls an hour. Knowlarity arms startups and small businesses with toll-free numbers, helps them manage business leads, coordinate sales teams across centers, and offers facilities like call-routing, call recording, and voicemail. Currently, it has two flagship products: SuperReceptionist, a hosted business phone system that allows you to record, route, forward, and track every call that your company makes or receives, and SmartIVR, a customized solution for all enterprise telephony needs.

For startups and small and medium enterprises, these cloud telephony products are affordable solutions for mobility and business collaboration. They don’t need to set up expensive communication hardware, or worry about its maintenance and upgrades as they scale operations.

“Knowlarity is to communications what Amazon Web Services is to applications. Knowlarity provides the tools needed by businesses to build today and scale tomorrow,” Knowlarity founder and CEO Ambarish Gupta said in a statement.

Knowlarity moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2013 after Sequoia Capital came on board as its first institutional investor in 2012. Last year, the company acquired its competitor Unicom Techlabs.

Founded in 2009 by two graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, Ambarish Gupta and Pallav Pandey, using personal savings and borrowed cash worth US$2 million, Knowlarity currently claims to have over 6,500 paying customers in over 65 countries. Its clients range from mom-and-pop startups to companies like Pepsi, Zomato, and Medanta.