Exclusive: Tenacity Ventures Joins Exotel’s Cap Table Via Secondary Transaction

Early and growth stage investment firm Tenacity Ventures has joined the cap table of AI-powered customer engagement platform Exotel via a secondary transaction, sources told Inc42.

Confirming the development, a spokesperson of Exotel said that Tenacity became an investor in the company through secondary purchase of shares, primarily from vested ESOP holders. 

PE firm Sistema Asia Capital also sold a part of its stake in Exotel to Tenacity via the secondary transaction, one of the sources said.

Another source said that Tenacity purchased the shares at about 40% lower valuation than in the previous round. “The shares were bought at INR 45,000 apiece compared to the earlier valuation of INR 75,000 apiece,” the source added. 

However, Exotel didn’t give details about the company’s valuation. “Secondary investments such as this by Tenacity are private transactions, strictly between the buyer and seller, and we cannot comment on the details of these,” the spokesperson said. 

Notably, since most of the shares acquired by Tenacity were from ESOP holders, the round is unlikely to have any impact on Exotel’s valuation. The company was last valued at about $400 Mn in 2022, as per a report by Moneycontrol.

Founded in 2011 by Shivakumar Ganesan, Ishwar Sridharan, Siddharth Ramesh and Vijay Sharma, Exotel helps enterprises transform their customer interactions with the help of AI. It deploys its AI-based voice and chat agents, which can handle queries from customers. 

Besides enabling businesses to send out promotional messages and managing marketing campaigns, Exotel offers tools to track call volume, duration, and other metrics to provide insights into its clients’ call centre performance. 

Exotel also launched its new offering last year, called ‘House Of AI’, which can help AI bots understand the context, sentiment and intent of the customer and deliver resolutions with minimal human dependency.

The company has been focussing on delivering AI-powered solutions since 2021, when it acquired omnichannel cloud communication platform Cogno AI. In the same year, Exotel also acquired Ameyo. 

Exotel has raised more than $87 Mn in funding to date and counts the likes of Blume Ventures, A91 Partners and 360 One among its backers.

On the financial front, it narrowed its net loss by 60% to INR 43.3 Cr in FY24 from INR 109.4 Cr in the previous fiscal year. However, revenue grew only 6% to INR 444.5 Cr during the year under review from INR 419.6 Cr in FY23.