Exotel

Exotel is a Bengaluru-based customer engagement company. It provides cloud telephony, communication APIs and contact centre software, and businesses use its platform to run calls, SMS, WhatsApp messaging, IVR and voice bots, as well as full contact centre operations.

Its products for Indian businesses include virtual numbers and cloud call centre tools, communication APIs (CPaaS) for voice, SMS and WhatsApp, and the Exotel Contact Center. It also offers Ameyo XTRM, the contact centre suite it gained through the Ameyo merger, together with a customer support suite and conversational AI features from the acquisition of Cogno AI. These products are used by delivery, fintech, healthcare and consumer businesses that handle large volumes of customer calls.

Exotel sells through self-serve plans for small businesses and through direct enterprise sales, with pricing usually combining licence or seat fees with usage-based telecom charges. It operates in India from offices in Bengaluru, Gurugram and Mumbai, and in the Middle East from Dubai and Riyadh.

Shivakumar Ganesan, Ishwar Sridharan and Siddharth Ramesh founded Exotel in 2011, and Ganesan is CEO. On 29 June 2021, Exotel and Ameyo announced a merger that, by their own description, created the largest customer engagement cloud platform in emerging markets, present in 60 countries with ARR of $40 million. The company says it handles more than 25 billion conversations a year for over 7,000 businesses, and it names Swiggy and Uber among its customers. The company has not published a total employee count on its About page, and it has not disclosed revenue beyond the ARR figure it announced at the time of the Ameyo merger.