They want to fly the Chennai SaaS flag high

You may have heard of the Zoho mafia and Freshworks mafia in Chennai SaaS circles -- founders who started with either of the two software majors. Arvind Parthiban and Jayakumar Karumbasalam are members of both. The duo, who spent over a decade in Zoho learning the ropes, built critical products at Freshworks, and then collaborated to start up SuperOps.ai.

“It was Girish (Mathrubootham) who interviewed me when I entered AdventNet (what Zoho was called back then). My 10 years there was like a college education, and I decided not to pursue an MBA or Masters,” says Parthiban. He left Zoho to start up marketing software firm Zarget with two friends in 2015. This was about five years after Mathrubootham himself left Zoho to launch Freshworks. Zarget was able to attract marquee investors such as Sequoia, Accel, Matrix Partners and others. Parthiban sold it to Freshworks and joined the firm.

Three years later, Parthiban was itching to move on. With Karumbasalam, he started SuperOps.ai -- a software to help IT-managed service providers (MSPs). MSPs need a host of tech tools to manage the IT operations of their clients. SuperOps provides a unified platform with built-in IT documentation, project management, and a recently launched networking monitoring feature.

Today, the MSPs market is almost $200 bn in size globally and is in many ways recession-proof, says Parthiban. “Companies outsource tasks when they cannot hire or are cutting staff, and this helps MSPs grow. They are also looking for modern tech support to optimise costs,” he says. With a 300% growth in customer count in the past 12 months and more than $12 million in funding from marquee US investors raised just last week, SuperOps.ai is now looking to strengthen its customer-facing team in the US and has hired industry veteran Juan Fernandez to head it. While primarily selling to small businesses now, the product startup wants to reach out to the larger MSPs.

Starting with a core eight-member team predominantly from Zoho and Freshworks, SuperOps has more than 120 people today and is building its global product out of Chennai. It has managed to add around 500 customers (mostly global small businesses) without investing much in sales operations in the US as yet.

“Silicon Valley is what it is because years ago, a chip company decided to start there and slowly create an ecosystem. Chennai SaaS is what it is because of Zoho and Freshworks. As the baton gets passed, we are striving to do our bit to build the next global software giant from Chennai and India,” he says.

‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’, is something every business book says, and Parthiban is a strong follower of this adage. “First thing we did when we started SuperOps was define our culture code — the values we carry as a company — and communicated it to our team. There is no such thing as a wrong employee, it’s up to us as managers to understand what they bring to the table,” he says.


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