Three SaaS startups in India have had successful exits. What does it tell us?

CloudCherry. Mettl. Minjar. Three startups which outline a playbook for entrepreneurs and those who are enterprising.

Last month, global tech major Cisco acquired a hitherto unknown Indian startup called CloudCherry. The deal, although reports are yet to be confirmed, is north of US $50 million. CloudCherry was a Customer Experience (CX) startup that helped understand their customers and brand loyalty better. Did Vistara send you an SMS to fill a survey about your last flight? Well, CloudCherry was the brains behind that.

This is the third instance of a successful exit for an Indian SaaS startup, a space which is hard to operate in and even harder to find an exit. A startup which measured and assessed employee skills and operated in the HR management space, Mettl was acquired by Mercer, a global giant in the HR operations space, for an all cash deal worth $40 million. Another startup, which built bots to better utilize public cloud, Minjar was acquired by US-based cloud infrastructure company Nutanix for $50 million. A 25X return, considering the minimal equity funding raised.

If you look deeper, you’ll see that three things that stand out.

• CloudCherry was a company that was in the brand assessment space. It assessed how brand should map out their strategy and engage proactively with customers.
• Mettl did something similar, but with corporates. It provided a one-stop talent and HR management solution, easing hiring and other operational aspects in companies.
• CloudCherry wasn’t the first instance of a SaaS startup to be acquired by a publicly-listed company in the US. That was Minjar.

The common point among all these three, was that it was a win-win-win proposition. For founders, for investors and for employees.

And in here, in the stories of these three startup exits, lies a playbook for entrepreneurs and those with an entrepreneurial bent of mind. We at The Ken have written about all the three startups.

About Minjar, which “consciously eschewed taking in more funding despite having the option to do so [and] what the company sacrificed in terms of capital, it made up in terms of optionality — having the flexibility to choose getting acquired at the time it did.“

About Mettl, where “the exit is significant because it validates their convictions and demonstrates that there is money to be made.Returns of this kind not only inject confidence into the system they also create virtuous cycles where more angels venture into the market and pools of capital are re-invested into next-generation startups.”

And about CloudCherry, where it is “easy to overlook the fact that tech majors like Microsoft, Cisco and Apple are sitting on so much cash on their balance sheets that they can easily accommodate billion-dollar acquisitions without batting an eyelid — a scale that even public market exits might find difficult to achieve. While the size of of CloudCherry’s success might not have been at this level, its journey provides an exit path and playbook for other Indian startups to consider, beyond the limited choices of hard-to-achieve IPOs and unplanned ad-hoc acquisitions.”

The Ken is a subscription-based digital publication headquartered out of Bengaluru, India. It publishes one in-depth analytical story everyday about start-ups, technology, healthcare and science with an India-specific lens.

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