Founder Spotlight: Hiver
Hiver is a team-collaboration tool that allows customer service teams to easily manage shared email accounts. It serves 1.5K+ customers across 50+ countries.
We are fortunate to have partnered with team Hiver in 2018, in the early days. The founders Niraj and Nitesh, shared with us their inspiration to become entrepreneurs, how the firm successfully navigated the turmoil of Covid-19 pandemic, and their vision for enterprise SaaS.
What drove you to pursue entrepreneurship so early in your career?
Niraj: I had a strong tendency towards entrepreneurship from very early on primarily because it allowed me to work and grow in multiple dimensions, from tech, design, marketing, and sales — all at the same time. I found the breadth of these areas as an entrepreneur very exciting. Additionally, I strongly believed in solving problems and creating a good and positive impact. That’s something I try to do consistently.
Nitesh: I have been interested in entrepreneurship since my college days. I used to work on small freelancing projects back then and it was very fulfilling to see them come to life and users using them actively. The wish to create something meaningful which delights users and makes their lives better has been the driving factor for me all along.
Email is ubiquitous in business communication and is force fitted for a lot of use cases. This realization was the starting point for us. We set out to make email better for the teams.
How did you cope with the impact of Covid-19 to continue achieving your targets?
The second and third quarter last year were difficult for a lot of our customers. On our part, we made sure that we continue working with all of them as true partners providing support any way that we can. As a business, we continued to grow steadily throughout. To a large extent, this was possible because our product helps businesses perform an important and critical function. So, while providing good customer service has always been important, doing it efficiently while being remote became a critical factor for driving demand.
What is your vision for the next 5–10 years?
Providing human and empathetic customer service is more important for businesses today than it ever was, and this will only get more important in the future. At Hiver, we strive to enable that for organizations of varying sizes across verticals. We will further build our product by integrating across multiple channels, leveraging deeper automation and functionality. The end goal is to become a leading customer service and support software brand.
Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based out of Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact. The firm’s ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses. At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.
If you are an entrepreneur (or know an entrepreneur) building a company in the SaaS Space, please write to us at saas@kalaari.com
