The Orbit Shift Podcast

S02E21: How Saravana Kumar built a $10 mn SaaS startup from Coimbatore with $0 funding


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As the Founder & CEO of Kovai.co Saravana Kumar has bucked every trend that a start-up playbook advises you to do. He is a solo entrepreneur, his company is based out of Coimbatore, a town in Southern India, and his product is sold exclusively to enterprise customers. 

Yet, he has scaled his organization to $10 million in revenue with a total of 0 dollars in funding. In the latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we caught up with the entrepreneur to learn more about his journey and about how he sells to enterprise customers, builds trust among prospects, moved from a single product to a multi-product company, and how he learns on the job and fixes skill gaps within himself and with the larger team. 


Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.


About the Guest

Saravana Kumar, a renowned software entrepreneur and Chief Executive Officer of Kovai.co, founded Kovai.co in 2010 to help enterprises address the challenges in their BizTalk environments. His decade of experience as a BizTalk consultant motivated him to create Kovai. co’s flagship product - BizTalk36o-to, to reach 1000+ enterprise customers worldwide. Before launching Kovai.co, Saravana worked in the U.K. as a Microsoft BizTalk Consultant. In 2007, for his immense contribution, Microsoft awarded him the Most Valuable Professional (MVP), which he continues to hold to date.


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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

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The Orbit Shift PodcastBy Freshworks Inc.