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Startup Deep Dive : SaaS Labs — the bootstrapped call-software firm that stayed profitable and still raised $42 million from Sequoia

For its first five years, SaaS Labs took no outside money at all. Then, in January 2022, the profitable, self-funded company raised $42 million in a single round led by Sequoia Capital India — an amount most loss-making startups need years and several rounds to reach, and the contradiction sitting at the heart of this story.

SaaS Labs is the company behind JustCall, a cloud phone and business-communications platform used by customer-facing teams. It was founded in 2016 by Gaurav Sharma, a serial founder who had already sold two earlier companies, and it is registered both in the United States and in India. Its Indian arm, SAAS LABS SOFTWARE PRIVATE LIMITED, reported ₹123.4 crore ($12.9 million) in revenue for FY25 with a ₹14.0 crore net profit, according to statutory filings consolidated by Inc42 — a rarity in an industry where profit is usually the last thing you find. This deep dive separates what is verifiable from what is marketing, and is careful throughout to distinguish the global group from the India-registered entity whose numbers are on public record.

Quick facts

Company SaaS Labs (global parent SaaS Labs, Inc.; India arm SAAS LABS SOFTWARE PRIVATE LIMITED, CIN U72900UP2020FTC139075)
Founded 2016 (US group); India entity incorporated 9 December 2020 (Tofler)
Founder Gaurav Sharma (Founder & CEO); India entity co-director Nimisha Arora
Businesses JustCall, JustCall IQ, Helpwise, CallPage, Atolia, CallRoot, EasyCalendar, Dialworks — sales and support communication software
Latest FY revenue (India entity) ₹123.4 crore in FY25, up 34.2% from ₹91.9 crore in FY24 (Inc42, from statutory filings)
Latest FY profit (India entity) ₹14.0 crore net profit in FY25 (Inc42); ₹9.9 crore in FY24
Listed Private (not listed on any exchange as of September 2026)
Last valuation No public post-money valuation disclosed; about $73–74 million raised across three rounds (contentgrip; Tracxn)
Key backers Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV), Base10 Partners, Eight Roads Ventures

What SaaS Labs does

SaaS Labs builds cloud software that runs the phone calls, texts and messages of sales and support teams. Its flagship, JustCall, is a cloud-based business phone system that a company can set up without hardware and connect to more than 100 other business tools, layering call recording, tracking and machine-learning call scoring on top. Around this sits a family of related products, each aimed at a piece of the customer-conversation workflow:

The customers are overwhelmingly outside India. As of January 2022 the company reported serving more than 6,000 customers globally, with about 70% in the United States and 10% in the United Kingdom, and named clients including Grab, HelloFresh, GoStudent and Booksy (TechCrunch; contentgrip). It is, in effect, an Indian-founded company selling Western software subscriptions, with a large engineering and operations base in Noida.

The founding insight

Gaurav Sharma did not start SaaS Labs as a first-time founder learning on the job. He is a graduate of NIT Warangal who had already built and sold two companies before this one: Pinpuff, a Pinterest analytics tool, was acquired by the Los Angeles incubator Science Inc in 2012, and HelloSociety, a social-media advertising business, was acquired by The New York Times in 2016 (Crunchbase; TechCrunch confirms the HelloSociety sale to The New York Times). By the time he founded SaaS Labs in the same year, he had learned two lessons that shape the company to this day: that small, focused software products can be sold profitably without a war chest, and that an exit is easier when the business already makes money.

The founding insight was unglamorous. Instead of chasing one big idea, SaaS Labs set out to build a cluster of practical tools for the everyday work of sales and support teams — a phone system, a shared inbox, a scheduler, a call tracker. Each solved a narrow, recurring problem that businesses were willing to pay a monthly fee to make disappear. The bet was that a portfolio of small, cash-generating products could compound into something large, and that the phone — the oldest sales channel of all — was still badly served by cloud software. JustCall grew out of that bet and became the anchor the rest of the company organised around.

The bootstrapped years

The hardest and least visible part of the SaaS Labs story is the stretch when almost no one was watching. The company was, in its own words, bootstrapped and profitable from its inception in 2016 (JustCall blog), which means that for roughly five years it grew on customer revenue alone, without the cushion of venture money. That is a very different way to build than the funded norm: every hire, every server bill and every marketing experiment had to be paid for out of what customers were already paying.

Building a portfolio of products at once, on internal cash, brought its own strains. Some of the tools — CallRoot, EasyCalendar — remained small satellites while JustCall did the heavy lifting; a bootstrapped company cannot subsidise a losing product indefinitely, so the portfolio had to be pruned and prioritised around what actually paid. The customer base was also concentrated far from home, in the United States and United Kingdom, which meant selling into markets nine to twelve time zones away while running the core team out of Noida. There is no dramatic near-death filing on the public record for this period, and this deep dive will not invent one; the honest description is a long, unfunded grind in which the discipline of having to be profitable was both the constraint and the moat. The pruning showed later: after raising money the company kept consolidating its identity around JustCall and its AI features rather than scattering across many brands.

The turning point

The turning point was not a product launch but a decision to finally take outside capital — and the speed with which it arrived once the company opened the door. Having refused venture money for five years, SaaS Labs raised a $17 million Series A in October 2021 from Base10 Partners and Eight Roads Ventures (Analytics India Magazine; The SaaS News; TechCrunch reported the figure as $18 million). Barely three months later, in January 2022, it raised a $42 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital India, now Peak XV (TechCrunch).

The contrast on either side of that line is the whole story. Before: zero external funding, five years, one profitable business quietly compounding. After: roughly $73–74 million raised across three rounds, two international acquisitions closed in the same month as the Series B, and the backing of one of Asia’s best-known venture firms. Sequoia’s stated reason for investing was operational rather than hype — it cited customer-reported time savings of about 12 hours a week per agent and a roughly 30% improvement in customer satisfaction (TechCrunch). The company also told the press its revenue had grown about 2.5 times in the preceding year (TechCrunch). A business that had spent half a decade proving it did not need money suddenly had a great deal of it, and used the moment to buy growth it would otherwise have had to build.

The money behind it

SaaS Labs’ funding history is short, recent and concentrated in two disclosed priced rounds plus an earlier tranche:

What each backer changed is worth naming. Base10 and Eight Roads provided the first institutional validation that broke the bootstrapped streak. Sequoia Capital India brought scale capital and a brand that opens enterprise doors, and its investment coincided with the two acquisitions — CallPage in Poland and Atolia in France (TechCrunch; Crunchbase acquisition profile) — that turned SaaS Labs from a single-country product shop into a group with European teams. No post-money valuation has been publicly disclosed for any round, so any specific valuation figure circulating online should be treated as an estimate rather than a confirmed number; this piece does not state one.

How it makes money

SaaS Labs earns the way most business software does: recurring subscriptions, billed per user per month, that renew until a customer leaves. The mechanics, based on published pricing and company statements:

The numbers

The only audited-style figures on public record are for the India entity, SAAS LABS SOFTWARE PRIVATE LIMITED, as compiled by Inc42 from statutory filings (published 28 May 2026). They show a small but genuinely profitable and fast-growing operation. Figures in ₹ crore:

Metric (India entity) FY24 FY25
Revenue 91.9 123.4
Net profit (PAT) 9.9 14.0
Total expenses Not separately disclosed in accessed sources 104.6
Estimated EBITDA Not disclosed 20.1
Net profit margin Not disclosed 11.4%

A few things stand out. Revenue rose 34.2% year on year, from ₹91.9 crore in FY24 to ₹123.4 crore in FY25 (Inc42), a figure independently corroborated by Tofler, which records a 34.22% revenue increase and places the entity in the ₹100–150 crore revenue band. Net profit rose faster than revenue — up about 41.6% year on year per Tofler, consistent with Inc42’s move from ₹9.9 crore to ₹14.0 crore — and net worth rose 57.56% (Tofler), the mark of a business retaining earnings rather than burning them. Verified figures for FY23 and earlier for this entity were not available in the sources accessed for this piece, so they are deliberately left out rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

The revenue mix is defined more by geography and product than by neat published segments, and the split is where the surprise lives:

The surprise is the mismatch between where the company is built and where it is paid. This is not a business selling to Indian SMEs; it is an Indian engineering base monetising American and British sales and support teams. The India entity’s rupee revenue is real, but it is the visible tip of a dollar-denominated business whose consolidated scale sits with the US parent and off the Indian public record.

The risks

Even a profitable, cash-generating SaaS company carries concrete risks, and these are grounded in the structure described above rather than in speculation:

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from SaaS Labs is not that bootstrapping beats venture capital, or the reverse. It is that being profitable changes the terms on which you raise. Because the company spent five years proving it could make money without outside funding, when it finally chose to raise it did so from a position of strength — a $17 million Series A and a $42 million Sequoia-led Series B within three months, on its own timeline rather than a runway deadline’s. Discipline early bought optionality later. For founders, that is the quiet argument hidden inside a story that looks, on the surface, like an overnight funding win: the leverage in a fundraise is built long before the term sheet, in the unglamorous years when the business simply has to pay for itself.

Frequently asked questions

What does SaaS Labs do?

SaaS Labs builds cloud software for the communications of sales and support teams. Its main product, JustCall, is a cloud phone system for calls, texts, WhatsApp and email, and it also runs Helpwise, CallPage, Atolia and other tools. As of January 2022 it served more than 6,000 customers globally, mostly in the US and UK (TechCrunch).

Who founded SaaS Labs and when?

Gaurav Sharma founded SaaS Labs in 2016. He had previously built and sold two companies — Pinpuff, acquired by Science Inc in 2012, and HelloSociety, acquired by The New York Times in 2016 (Crunchbase; TechCrunch).

Is SaaS Labs profitable?

The India entity, SAAS LABS SOFTWARE PRIVATE LIMITED, reported a net profit of ₹14.0 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹123.4 crore, an 11.4% net margin, according to Inc42’s compilation of statutory filings. The company has also described itself as bootstrapped and profitable from its inception in 2016.

How much funding has SaaS Labs raised?

About $73–74 million across three rounds. The disclosed rounds are a $17 million Series A in October 2021 (TechCrunch reported $18 million) and a $42 million Series B in January 2022 led by Sequoia Capital India, now Peak XV, with Base10 Partners and Eight Roads Ventures (TechCrunch; Tracxn).

Is SaaS Labs listed on the stock market?

No. As of September 2026 SaaS Labs is a privately held company and is not listed on any stock exchange. No official post-money valuation has been publicly disclosed for its funding rounds.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

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