The Exchanges

Q This area is very competitive, the segment which you operate in. How have you been able to, you know, differentiate yourself and kept the growth rate constant over the last many years?

A It's all about the platform which plays a big role. From India probably there's no company who's scaled or evolved at the level with which we are right now. Like there might be Indian competition who are competing with us within India market, who are connected with just four operators. At the same time, we are connected with 800 to 900 operators globally, and we have partnered with over two 60 operators globally, which means that we directly sit within their operator network and we are having the direct connectivity. We have built our platform in such a way that we can connect the way operator wants us to connect. So I think we spend lots of time and energy, uh, especially to building up this stack. And that's the reason probably I can always say that I'm, I think I'm ready to accept any kind of challenge also, because my platform is far better than anybody else in the current market in India, where it is not about just four operator or five, three operator connectivity. My platform, ODT players, they use my platform not for only one country, they use for over a hundred countries, they use for 40 countries, 50 countries. So they believe that, uh, the kind of platform and connectivity Rootmobile has, uh, is totally different than, uh, some other players, but there are competition we have in market. Like we compete with Synch, we compete with Tulio, Messagebird, InfoBip. So they …

AI assessment note: “It's all about the platform which plays a big role.”

Q And can you tell us more about, uh, your family, your parents, and in your life before Routemobile, where you grew up?

A So I'm a born and born in Mumbai only. So I did my PhD in physics and computer science from National College Benderer. So I'm a Benderer boy kind of thing. You can say that that's a whole gang we used to have there. Uh, post my graduation, my parents were normal working people. We didn't have that liberty of having everything as a, you know, child. Uh, yeah, but, uh, they did their level best to give us a good education. And they're very thankful to them because they always said one thing, like, if you have a good education, guys, you can build everything. What we can give you is today is a good education. That's the only thing we have. And rest is your life to build, you know, and I think, uh, and then my brother, and we are the two brothers, myself and Sandeep, and Sandeep was a charter accountant, and very good in academics, uh, and a brilliant guy, uh, SFP consultant. I'm more on a tech side of a guy, so I did my PhD, physics, and computer science. I started working as, with the various companies as a software developer. I worked almost six or seven years only, and, uh, I said, whatever knowledge I have, I think I can start my company.

AI assessment note: “I'm a born and born in Mumbai only... my parents were normal working people”

Q That's great. And what's your ultimate goal, right? You want to, uh, keep on building, keep on adding new products to loud mobile.

A So I think the ultimate goal is to get into new technologies and being a tech founder. It is very important because I understand technology. It's not that I need somebody's idea or somebody's view or go to a meeting with the entire product team. How do you guys see? Because there are so many things which I, Uh, explore myself, uh, ideas on blockchain, ideas on other technologies. So we want to make sure we keep on enhancing our product also. And we want to make sure that we invest at the right time in the right product. Because there may be some product which is too early for the market, but it's better to be ready. Whenever this change happens, you'll be the earlier advantage. Of that. And keeping that in mind, if you see our RCS strategy, our email strategy, our Viber or WhatsApp, I think we are fairly placed in the market right now. And, uh, we do see good traction happening. People are adopting a new channel of communication and I will keep on building, uh, new products and I will keep on focusing on technology.

AI assessment note: “the ultimate goal is to get into new technologies and being a tech founder”

Q So Radheep, uh, for our listeners, if you can share, you know, uh, what root mobile is, uh, how does it help enterprise customers and the current scale of root mobile?

A Yeah, I think it's a good question probably. So if you talk about root mobile, we are a cloud communication platform provider. We are a platform company. So if you talk about a single, if you just withdraw, say, uh, money from your bank account via ATM, the moment, uh, you withdraw, say, 10,000 rupees from your bank account, you will get one quote, one SMS saying that you have withdrawn 10,000 rupees. If you're logging on on a particular, uh, Uh, website. You need OTP. That OTP also flows through our platform. The moment the OTP is generated or you withdraw money, you also get an email saying that, uh, I just fall back, you know. So that email is also part of our, uh, CPaaS platform. At the same time, there are various other cases, use cases, like if your flight is delayed by one hour, you get a voice call saying that your flight has been delayed by one hour, and the next time for this particular flight is XYZ. That's my voice API we use. Recently we launched the WhatsApp and the RCS API along the, and the Viber API as well. And now you get lots of QR code on your WhatsApp, you know, like, so we partner with WhatsApp to make sure we start building API solutions over WhatsApp API and we can start selling those APIs to enterprise customers. So like, uh, your movie ticket or your QR code or your entire, uh, voting pass come as a, You know, like image on your phone via WhatsApp. So…

AI assessment note: “we are a cloud communication platform provider. We are a platform company.”

Q And, uh, what were those qualities if you can, uh, reflect in you as an entrepreneur that you kept pushing ahead and ahead, right? You never looked back or got satisfied with the growth at any point in time.

A So I think the first thing for an entrepreneur is the question is, I think there is a debatable point. Some say never get satisfied. Some say always get satisfied what you achieve. And so, I always believed that whatever I achieved, I have been good. And that satisfaction I always took along with me to my home and say, I'm going to sleep well today because I have achieved something. So, I never kept that kind of a goal that I want to do this in this quarter, I want to do that, you know, like, this is what I want. I said, this is what my way of walking. If I'm, if I'm doing the right thing, If I know that this, whatever I'm building may have not requirement by that customer today, but maybe tomorrow they may need. So for me, it is very important that, um, be satisfied what you achieve and, uh, always look forward, uh, for the new things, you know, like, so whenever, uh, you get up in the morning, you should have something to build, something to do, something to focus on. So I'm always, as of today, also I'm sitting in this room and talking with you. I think that whatever I have received before six o'clock or seven o'clock today, it was phenomenal. And I'm very happy with that.

AI assessment note: “be satisfied what you achieve and, uh, always look forward, uh, for the new things”

Q And if you can, uh, take us through the last, uh, four or five years, uh, of the journey, how has route mobile first grown in number of enterprise customers in India and outside India and second part, how has the revenue grown?

A Yeah. So, so that if you see our revenues, I think that we're showing the growth over a 30% year-on-year basis from the last five years, in fact. And from the last five years, I think we have started focusing more on the enterprise side of the business. And we always wanted to create a sustainable business model where the customer are going to be with the company for a longer period of time, and that's the reason we started focusing more on a, what do you call, enterprise base, operator base, and OTT players. So once we are very well integrated within the enterprise ecosystem, it's very tough for someone to replace because it's a short code, it's email, there are lots of API integration. So I think last five years back, we realized if we really want to scale ourselves to the next level, we were working, we already have offices all across the globe, and we thought working on one side of the business, which is only on messaging, we need to create more product offering to our existing or a new customer. And keeping that in mind, we built this whole stack, and today we have, I think, starting from a banking customer to airlines, we name it, like, I think there is not a single vertical who's not using our APIs today, because every vertical requires to communicate with their end user, and those, they need APIs, which is provided by OpenBuy. And that is the beauty about our platform, …

AI assessment note: “we're showing the growth over a 30% year-on-year basis from the last five years”

Q And if you can share your, uh, process of managing yourself and managing business, are there some key aspects of your processes that entrepreneurs can learn from?

A So I think, uh, we all know the entrepreneur's life, uh, you know, like it's full of sacrifices. We, we, Cannot just say that I'm successful, that I've not had a sacrifice in my life. I have missed so many, my parent-teacher meeting of my kids, you know, like, I've missed so many vacations, I've missed so many things in life, because there is two priorities, I know, it's a company and the family also, but I always try to balance it. There are various times, I think, where I've missed that, you know, and, and, That's a very common thing, you know, like, it's not that people are trying to do purposely, or they have some kind of dream, or they just want to focus their vision. It happens. If you're in a meeting for a very important meeting, which is a large customer, and at the same time there is another mere PTM is happening, you may need to sacrifice, you know, like, that happens. I can say yes, Uh, it is a, I have just calculated the amount of travel I have done in 17 years, you know, like it's almost four years, uh, of that time I stayed away from my family. You know, so that is a time, you know, like, and my kids were very young, and they were just, uh, you know, growing up, and then those moment also I missed, but thankfully, because of this pandemic situation, I think the best thing it happens to parents, like, uh, working parents like me, probably, I spend lots of

AI assessment note: “entrepreneur's life, uh, you know, like it's full of sacrifices.”