Rajesh Jain is considered a pioneer of India’s dotcom sector. He is now preparing his second startup Netcore Cloud Pvt. for an initial public offer.
Rajesh Jain is preparing his second startup, Netcore Cloud Pvt., for an IPO within the next year, following a $100 million acquisition this month.
The 54-year-old said during a Zoom call on the acquisition and the IPO, “We’ve had preliminary discussions with a half-dozen bankers, and the formal process will begin in the next couple of months. We plan to go public within the next nine to twelve months.”
Mumbai-headquartered Netcore is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup that specialises in providing businesses with client communication and engagement solutions.
It acquired roughly a 90% ownership in Unbxd Inc., a San Mateo, California-based e-commerce search-personalization startup.
Netcore’s offers to its global customers, including Pizza Hut Inc., The Body Shop Inc., and Tommy Hilfiger Corp., will be strengthened as a result of the transaction.
The agreement would also increase the company’s subscription income to $150 million per year within the next 18 months, up from around $100 million today, according to Jain.
Netcore is ready for an IPO since it is “a huge global SaaS firm out of India, very lucrative, and dominates India and emerging regions like Southeast Asia,” according to Jain, who owns around two-thirds of the company. Employees own the rest of the company.
Jain received his bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and his master’s degree from Columbia University.
He worked in the United States for two years before returning to India to start his own business.
In 1995, he sold IndiaWorld Communications in one of Asia’s largest internet deals of the dotcom era IndiaWorld provided news, cricket scores, Bollywood gossip, and search services to the country’s then-minimal internet user base.
It was purchased for $115 million just before the dotcom bust by what is now the Nasdaq-listed communications business Sify Technologies Ltd. Netcore, like IndiaWorld before it, has not raised any venture financing.
According to the company’s acquisition announcement, the SaaS business has over 5,000 clients worldwide and delivers over 15 billion marketing emails and texts weekly through its platform.
According to the company, Unbxd is its fourth purchase, and all of them have been supported by internal accruals. According to Netcore, the new acquisition will continue to operate as a separate organization.
