My Startup World speaks to Ambarish Gupta, the Founder and CEO of Knowlarity, about his company, the products and services it offers and its plans for the Middle East region
How is the startup / entrepreneurship scene in the UAE?
According to the World Bank 2016 report, the UAE has ranked 31st in the global index of ease of doing business. In the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI) report, UAE has ranked 19th for entrepreneurial attitude, activity and aspiration, and it ranked 47th in the Global Innovation Index report (INSEAD) for innovation performance.
Many local startups, such as souq.com, cobone.com, dubizzle.com, MarkaVIP, Fetchr and many others, are setting the standards for successful startups to further disrupt the entrepreneurial space. The UAE startup ecosystem is growing fast and with the country’s vision and initiatives on innovation, UAE is amongst the leaders in accepting innovative ideas and support entrepreneurship.
What sort of support does Knowlarity offer to startups in the region?
Knowlarity is a pioneer of cloud communications in emerging markets. We help startups grow through our exclusive offer for startups in the MENA region. Under the initiative, SuperReceptionist Basic Plan would be available for free for start-ups pre series A funding.
It aims to help start-ups discover the advantages of making business communication intelligent and reliable via digital tools. Knowlarity’s flagship product will be available for free for a period of 3 months to help start-ups explore features first-hand and understand the benefits of cloud communications.
Please tell us about specific initiatives you undertake.
At Knowlarity, our solutions helps companies grow faster through innovative cloud communication. We provide mentorship for startups by shedding light on my experience and providing insights on entrepreneurship.
We participate in events, taking part in events to show how startups can benefit from cloud communication. We are also working with accelerators, incubators and co-working spaces to help the aide the budding startups in the UAE. We are very active in the UAE startup ecosystem and excited to introduce innovative solutions to companies to give their businesses a voice.
What products and services does your company offer in the region?
We offer our flagship product SuperReceptionist. This is an all-in-one call center solution, which allows businesses to set up a call handling process for customer care, sales and other departments. Features include CRM suite integration, call forwarding, missed call marketing, unlimited concurrent calls, custom call queues and routing, IVR, multiple language support, call monitoring, support for training-specific features and live reporting.
Apart from the SuperReceptionist call centre suite, Knowlarity also offers other business cloud telecommunications solutions such as:
- K-Broadcast which is an automated voice and SMS broadcast service for outbound campaigns
- Click-to-Call, a widget for enabling one-click calling on websites
- Virtual Number, a virtual number service to help businesses calculate RoI for various marketing campaigns
- Toll free numbers
Where does the development of your products and services happen?
We focus on R&D and technology to constantly improve our products and services. While our team is based out of India, we localize our solutions as per the market requirements with the help of our local team.
What is your team’s strength?
Currently, we have 8 company representatives who are leading the business in the MENA region. We plan to set up our base in the region as well as expand our team to support our growing business. Our office is now located in Dubai Internet City.
What plans do you have for Knowlarity for, say, the next 2 years? What will be your focus area?
We are currently in the process of expanding in the Middle East and see the potential for implementation of our products and solutions in a large number of different verticals. Where we see maximum prospects are in, education, healthcare, banking and hospitality.
At present, we have a strong presence in the real estate industry, in e-commerce, food tech and in the classified/listings sectors. Primarily our customers would typically be service companies, products or services where a consultative sale is required, companies with a large distributed sales force, companies with a large distributed customer community, companies with CRM/helpdesk, and so on
We have aggressive plans for the region and intend to extensively grow our reach in the Middle East with the support of channel partners. In this regard, we are in process of recruiting channel partners and initially plan to appoint 25 partners across the region, which will help us gain more than 100 FoS (feet on street).
In order to maximize business prospects and ensure complete exposure of our solutions to the market, we carefully select our partners. One of the main requirements that we look for in our partnership with any channel partner is their domain expertise like telecom enterprise sales, system integration, B2B sales organisations, Google Partners, CRM companies, digital marketing agencies, and so on.
