Building a World-Class Company

Published on November 18, 2021
Reading time 3 min read
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Achieving Growth Goals and Hiring a Global CEO

Suresh, Anand, and I started CleverTap with a mission to empower digital brands to increase their customer retention and lifetime value. This mission provides a significant global opportunity of becoming a world-class growth partner for our customers.
As we take stock today, despite many improvement areas, I feel proud of what we have achieved in a short period of time:

$45 million ARR in less than 6 years of monetization with 235% CAGR
120% NRR
72% gross margin
350+ CTzens across 10 countries
Profitable and cash flow positive today, the first in our category and size

Every day, our customers touch more than a billion people through our platform.
We are market leaders in mobile-first, growth markets of Asia including India and cannot wait to bring our Retention Cloud to the rest of the world. CleverTap has created a new retention category that delivers unprecedented value and a significant competitive advantage to our customers.
We have built our business with a long-term mindset and have always acted from first principles. Over our brief history, we have done things in fairly unconventional ways, such as:

Investing the first 30 months in building our core technology platform without deploying it to customers to monetize. Today, our technology is a key differentiator for us in the market and has made our current scale, security and reliability possible.
Bringing on the right set of investors at the right time rather than optimizing for valuation or timing. Today, our investors have played a critical role in our success.
Executing on our growth in a capital-efficient way. For every dollar we have spent through our history, we have added $1 of ARR. In 2021, we added $2.5 of ARR for every dollar we have spent.

These achievements only validate our mission and strengthen our ambition.
As a significant step in marching towards these ambitions, we are strengthening our leadership team today, with Sidharth Malik joining us as global CEO of CleverTap.
Sidharth brings significant global experience and specialised skills to continue our blitzscale. Most recently, Sidharth was the Chief Revenue Officer at Freshworks, playing a key role in their 10x growth over the past four years leading them to become the first SaaS company from India to list on Nasdaq. He has led 1500+ member teams across sales, marketing, customer success, HR, finance and operations at multiple prior roles in his career.
Sidharth has incredible life experiences, connects amazingly well with people, is passionate and a keen learner.
Building a world-class company needs world-class people. With Sidharth’s passion, insights, leadership skills and experience leading growth at scale, I’m extremely excited and proud to bring on a world-class leader to CleverTap.
While Sidharth helms the build-up of the next stage for us, I will be taking on the role of an Executive Chairman to focus on long-term strategic direction and initiatives that we have not actively pursued till now. In my new role, I will be supporting the management team in overall positioning and evangelism, inorganic growth, external stakeholder management and more.
Sidharth’s addition to the leadership team, Vikrant’s recent joining, Patch acquisition and some more organizational adjustments we have done in the recent past are all pieces of the same ambitious plan to shift CleverTap’s orbit and deliver phenomenal growth and value to our employees, customers and investors.
Onwards and upwards!