Knowlarity raises $16 million funding rounding from Sequoia Capital and Mayfield

Cloud telephony company Knowlarity Communications today announced that it has secured $16 million in series B funding from Sequoia Capital and Mayfield. The funding will be used to invest in R&D and to expand internationally.

Knowlarity has managed to successfully win the fragmented enterprise segment in emerging markets using a 360-degree customer acquisition model that includes online marketing, field visits and channel partners. The company plans to use the same model to increase its presence in overseas markets.

Ambarish Gupta, CEO & Founder, Knowlarity Communications is very confident of the company’s appeal, saying

Knowlarity is to communications what AWS is to applications. Knowlarity provides the tools needed by businesses to build today and scale tomorrow.

Read more: Ambarish Gupta, CEO, Knowlarity talks about the history of cloud telephony

Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors,

Sequoia was the first institutional investor at Knowlarity and over the years we have built a priceless trusting relationship with Ambarish and the management team.  A big thank you to the thousands of Knowlarity customers who have helped shape this company and super happy that we will now be welcoming customers across Asia. Knowlarity can help every business manage their precious leads and distributed sales teams with a few simple clicks on their mobile.

Vikram Godse, Managing Director, Mayfield India added,

Knowlarity is solving a big pain point for businesses, allowing them to communicate faster, cheaper & better. We are very excited to partner with the team to build out what could be the largest cloud telephony company in emerging markets.

Mayfield is a leading venture capital fund, with portfolio companies such as Amagi Media Labs, The Beer Café and Sohanlal Commodities under its belt in India.

Cloud telephony enables enterprises to virtualize their business phone systems in the same way hosted web services (like Amazon) enable virtualization of hardware and software. Knowlarity provides a highly scalable phone platform for startups, SMES and enterprise markets; capable of handling over a million calls an hour. Cloud telephony acts as a catalyst in a world fast moving towards social, cloud, data and mobile (SOCLODAMO), providing context to data, accelerating cloud application development and strengthening social connections.

Valerie Wagoner, CEO, ZipDial, is happy customer of Knowlarity services,

Knowlarity has been a fantastic partner in providing the robust infrastructure and flexible technology needed for ZipDial to scale our mobile marketing and analytics platform.

Knowlarity claims over 6500 paying customers worldwide, ranging from mom-and-pop startups to very large blue-chip companies. With series B funding it will certainly be a leader among product companies with their eyes on a global market.

In the past, Pallav Pandey,COO, Knowlarity had quit the company and will be moving on to other things while he still remains on board of the company.

Earlier, Knowlarity had acquired Unicom Techlabs, another Delhi based startup in the same space to fuel its plan for global expansion. In international market, Knowlarity is competing with Sequoia portfolio company - RingCentral.

Cloud Telephony is an interesting market in India considering the recent success of Knowlarity.