From a Hobby to a $15M SaaS Powerhouse: The Kovai.co Growth Story

“We want to do to Coimbatore what Freshworks has done to Chennai.”  

The ethos of Kovai.co lies in this succinct statement. 

For a company that began as “a hobby,” Kovai.co has grown to become the market leader in the enterprise integration space with BizTalk360 among the top 5 in the space that Document360 operates. 

Saravana Kumar, the founder, hails from Coimbatore, a tier-2 city in southern India, and believes in repaying the community. In a world where SaaS companies clamor to put roots in Chennai or Bengaluru to leverage the thriving startup ecosystem, Saravana chose to put his hometown on the map. 

He set up the first Kovai office in Coimbatore in 2014 amid much surprise and naysaying. He says, “The biggest advantage we had in Coimbatore was the low rate of attrition.” 

“The company faced initial challenges in attracting talent. Having built a name, things have now become a tad easier.” 

In 2015, Kovai.co moved to TIDEL Park, a special economic zone (SEZ).  “We offer our employees the full package — interesting work as we develop world class products, good pay on par with those offered in Bengaluru or Chennai, a family culture, a great work environment and a work-life balance,” Saravana says. 

In 2021, the company moved to a new 40,000 square feet office, hired the same team that designed the interiors of Freshworks, and invested $1.3 million to ensure that the new workspace provided the necessary environment for the seeding of unique, original ideas.  According to a company statement, “The office is built keeping in mind the modernity and flexibility--and how a future workplace should be.”

In December 2022, the company added to its existing 240-seater office space with a 60-seater space. 

Bootstrapping to $15 million

Founded in 2011, Kovai.co currently has over 290 employees--across its offices in London and Coimbatore--and boasts of 2,500+ customers for its portfolio of 3 products:

• BizTalk360 - for BizTalk Server
• Turbo360 - for Azure Serverless
• Document360 - for SaaS knowledge base

In 2024, Kovai.co made a deliberate choice to sunset its customer‑success product (“Churn360”) in order to focus resources on scaling BizTalk360, Turbo360, and Document360 as each product recorded double‑digit year-over-year growth.

The SaaS company aimed to reach an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $30 million by 2025 from its current $10 million. Around 40%-45% of its revenue is generated from the United States, 30% from the EU, 10%-15% from Australia and New Zealand, and the rest from other countries, including India. 

As of mid-2025, Kovai.co has an ARR of $15 million, and its total value is estimated to be $100 million. Now, Saravanakumar continues steering the company toward $100M ARR ambition and potential unicorn status.

So far, Kovai.co has grown as a bootstrapped company but Saravana is open to raising money at a later stage. “I will look for investors when there is a need for funds. Right now we are re-investing our profits. I would like to attain a scale before seeking funds from outside,” he says. He also said that an IPO will come later as an exit route for investors.

A company with a heart (and foresight!)

With the looming global recession, massive job cuts have become common. But Kovai.co believes in investing in its people. In an internal note, it has informed employees that there will be no layoffs. 

“I have always believed in maintaining a spending and hiring discipline. We have always hired cautiously and organically,” Saravana says.

The birth of BizTalk360

A techie without a business background, Saravana’s entrepreneurial journey has been atypical. In his own words, “Deep inside I’m a technology guy, I love coding, still I own some of the core areas of BizTalk360.” 

Since 2004, he has been blogging about technical topics, mainly the BizTalk Server, which is a middleware product developed by Microsoft that helps connect various systems together. This helped him build a massive following of 15,000 niche readers. 

BizTalk360, the flagship product of Kovai.co, was born out of a need to fill technical gaps in enterprise security and governance. Having worked for 10 years as a BizTalk server specialist in the United Kingdom for companies like Microsoft, Accenture, and Fidelity International, Sarvana discovered that security monitoring gaps, especially in the BizTalk server technology, needed to be plugged. 

He relates an interesting anecdote about how the idea for the product came along. In 2010, during the Microsoft Global MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Summit in Redmond, he was sitting at a coffee shop with fellow MVPs, discussing how to build a web-based admin tool for the BizTalk server. The group initiative did not take off but Saravana, being passionate about UI and web technologies, spent the next 15 months building an initial version of the product while working part-time three days a week! 

Finally, in June 2011, he launched BizTalk360. Saravana had not intended to build it for commercial purposes but sustained interest from the community spurred him on to add more features until it became a mature product with widespread market adoption (every entrepreneur’s dream!). 

Early success

Saravana attributes much of his early success to luck. For starters, his technical blog gave him access to a niche audience interested in enterprise cloud technology. He was also attending conferences and taking up speaking commitments regarding BizTalk server technology. These efforts enabled him to acquire his first 65 customers. 

Until then, he was working as a one-man company and handling everything from building core features, managing accounts, and providing customer support. Eventually, he hired a team of five people who worked out of his living room in London. With their help, Saravana scaled up to 250 customers in a period of two years.

At this point, he decided to return to India and set up a full-blown office in Coimbatore. By 2013, Saravana realized that there was a huge opportunity for him to grow his fledgling venture--and he was already dealing with customers like Mercedes and Ikea. 

As we’ve already seen, there was no looking back since.

Expanding Kovai’s portfolio

Until 2016, BizTalk360 was Kovai’s only product. 

With increasing opportunities in the Microsoft Azure and Cloud space, Kovai launched two more products - Serverless360 (now Turbo360) and Document360 -- in 2017 and 2018, respectively. 

• Turbo360 provides activity monitoring, Azure documentor, and support for Microsoft Azure services like Event Grid, Azure SQL, Logic Apps, and Service Bus.
• Document360 is a self-service knowledge base platform for both customers and employees that can be accessed either privately or publicly. 

Saravana says, “Document360 is well-suited for remote-working setups. Moreover, the millennial crowd doesn’t want to contact support. Hence, it is becoming critical for companies to have a self-service knowledge base. That way they can reduce their customer support cost significantly, and people can find relevant answers to their questions quickly.”

In November 2020, Kovai acquired Udaipur-based firm, Cerebrata, that was building supporting products for Microsoft Azure. In Saravana’s words, “Until this point, we were taking a long route of building the products from scratch which approximately takes 2-3 years to mature. When the opportunity came to acquire Cerebrata in 2020, we looked at it carefully and it felt like the right fit for our portfolio of products.” 

In November 2024, Document360 acquired Floik, integrating AI-powered demo and guided walkthrough capabilities. As of early 2025, it supports 100,000+ monthly active users, with AI-enabled search and content features boosting engagement by ~50% and cutting operational costs by ~40%.

Andrew Cloke was appointed as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Kovai.co in September 2022. According to Sarvana, “Cloke’s focus and expert knowledge in the industry has been exemplary. As we were looking to strengthen our leadership team at Kovai.co, he was the logical choice since he would help us maintain momentum and growth and build appropriate policies to keep them in place.” 

Kovai - the rebranding

Since Kovai began with BizTalk360, the company was only known for its flagship product. The challenge was to position the other products and bring them under an umbrella brand. 

Being community-oriented, Saravana felt it only made sense to choose “Kovai” as the brand name. Coimbatore is also known as Kovanputhur--which is often shortened to Kovai. People in Coimbatore still refer to the city as Kovai, and the name holds an immense emotional appeal. 

Thus, in 2018, the company was rebranded as Kovai.co.

Acquiring the domain name, though, was an uphill battle. The previous owner of the domain name had been holding it for over 20 years, and Saravana had to go through multiple rounds of negotiation for two years before he tasted success in 2020.

Community initiatives

Kovai.co Connect program

An industry-academic initiative, the Kovai.co Connect program seeks to find engineering students in tier-2 cities who want to join the SaaS industry and empower them by training them on product development and on-ground SaaS innovation.

The focus is on nurturing local talent in the tech/SaaS industry to reduce the migration of skilled people to established markets like Bangalore, Mumbai, and Chennai, and to encourage the establishment of local technology hubs for even socio-economic development of the country.

Together We Grow

What’s more, Kovai.co recently initiated its "Together We Grow" bonus program, distributing a substantial $1.62 million (equivalent to Rs 14.5 crore) among more than 140 of its employees. This program, announced by Saravana Kumar in 2022, was made available to employees who commenced employment by 2022 and maintained their tenure with the company for a period of three years. The initial cohort of 80 recipients, primarily those who joined prior to 2022, received their bonuses and salaries on January 31, 2025.

Kovision 2025

The company’s internal culture festival in Coimbatore, Kovision 2025, celebrated the 14-year journey with theatre, awards, and the launch of a printed “Kovai.co Storybook”. It also honoured a 10‑year employee milestone and featured keynotes and creative themes.

Content marketing initiatives

“A cost-effective way to generate more leads would be to start a blog and activate social media channels. Having a blogging schedule and building a following will improve visibility for your brand. Use the blog to illustrate what problem you are trying to solve for customers, provide as much detail as possible, and avoid overselling. Doing search engine optimization (SEO) for your blogs can generate more leads,” says Saravana Kumar. 

As mentioned previously, Saravana gained initial traction for his product by publishing 600+ technical articles on the subject of BizTalk server on his blog. 

In addition, to build brand awareness and credibility, he got Kovai.co covered by various national and international publications like Money Control, Mint, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, and Forbes.

Saravana Kumar also secured membership to Forbes Council, a prestigious publication for founders to share their thoughts. As part of it, 20+ listicles featuring Saravana’s opinions have been published and shared on LinkedIn. Saravana has also published eight thought leadership pieces on Forbes. 

A focus on LinkedIn has also helped Kovai.co increase its following from 17,000 to 96,000 on the platform. The company continues to engage with its followers and has also revamped its “Life @ Kovai” page. It prefers to recruit through this professional social media platform, too. 

In 2022, Kovai.co also launched a podcast on Azure and invited Microsoft professional Kent Weare as a guest speaker.

Recently, INTEGRATE 2025, Kovai.co’s flagship integration conference, was held in London in June, with both in-person and virtual sessions; it featured Microsoft speakers and integration experts.

Overall, their content marketing strategy involves a holistic, organic approach via blog articles, digital PR, social media, and now podcasts.

What’s next?

Kovai.co has an eye on scaling its products in the United States and is looking at niche markets. We are doing a lot of smaller experiments in niche markets like Israel, and we will keep identifying markets where the CAC is still reasonable,” reveals Saravana. 

Summing up the situation, he opines, “SaaS businesses have been witnessing a correction in valuations of late, and that would only augur well for the industry in the long run as it would force a return to fundamentals and time-tested growth methodologies.”