Indo-US enterprise contract management software provider Icertis has become the latest software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm to be valued at over $1 billion, after it raised $115 million in fresh funding led by US-based venture capital firm Greycroft and PremjiInvest.
The Seattle and Pune-based firm’s induction into the hallowed Unicorn Club comes a year after India minted its first $1 billion-plus SaaS company, Freshworks. Since then, only data management firm Druva has managed the feat when it raised $130 million earlier this year.
Following the latest fundraise, Icertis will have raised a total of $211 million till date. The company said it will utilise the capital to strengthen its product, invest in new technologies such as Blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning and expand its global footprint.
The company also said it is also actively scouting for acquisitions in the blockchain, AI and ML space as it looks to automate the reading of contracts and delivering insights for better decision making.
“We have 150 odd customers today and these are leaders in their industries, because everyone has a need to manage contracts,” said Samir Bodas, co-founder and CEO of Icertis. “We manage 5.7 million contracts, with 2 million-plus subscribers and over $1 trillion in value of contracts under management.”
Icertis counts giants such as Google, Microsoft, Daimler, Airbus, Johnson & Johnson, Lupin, Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant as its customers. The company is targeting to sign up the top 2,000 firms globally as its customers and in some industries such as pharmaceuticals already counts five of the top seven players as clients.
With a revenue of around $100 million, Icertis says it is looking to continue with its three-digit growth rate in the foreseeable future. “The total addressable market size globally is around $20 billion and growing at around 35% year over year. It’s a fast-growing market and we’re growing much faster,” added Bodas.
While Icertis is the third Indian software products company to become a Unicorn, firms like it are still a minority in the ever-growing list of local private companies valued at over $1 billion. India currently has 19 Unicorns including Paytm, Ola, Byju’s, Oyo and Swiggy, most of them are consumer-facing firms.
Experts say that India will certainly produce more Unicorns in the SaaS space, but B2C firms will continue to top the valuation charts, largely owing to the way software product companies function. With the ability to sustain capital-efficient growth, SaaS companies are less likely to raise large amounts of capital which lend them huge valuations.
Further, a large number of SaaS companies in India remain unfunded, following in the footsteps of bootstrap champ Zoho, India’s largest software products company, which has a topline of around $550 million.
Nonetheless, India’s SaaS journey is extremely exciting, says Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT, a think tank for India’s software products industry. “Indian SaaS is doing well at all levels. Companies here are targeting all levels of the market, with firms like Dhruva catering to large enterprises, Freshworks playing in the mid-market and you have Zoho in the lower-end,” Sharma added
