After Zoho’s small-town playbook, Kovai.co bets on Coimbatore for global SaaS scale

SaaS major Zoho Corporation established a technology hub in the rural town of Tenkasi in 2011, creating products for the international market, intends to launch additional tech hubs in the rural areas of Tirunelveli and Madurai in Tamil Nadu, as well as in Uttar Pradesh.

Zoho's founder Sridhar Vembu moved from Silicon Valley to a village in Tamil Nadu's Tenkasi district in November 2019, with the goal of empowering rural communities, and decided to use a hub-and-spoke office model to cater to a distributed workforce.

The hub offices can accommodate 1,000 or more employees, whereas the spoke offices can accommodate up to 100 employees. Each hub office will eventually have a few spoke offices associated with it for infrastructure support and team collaboration.

The company currently has five hub offices in India, including ones in Chennai, Tenkasi, and Renigunta, as well as around 30 spoke offices. Nearly 2,000 employees work out of Zoho's hub and spoke offices in villages and Tier 2/3 towns, with about 1000 hired locally,

Coimbatore stays at the centre

Kovai.co will continue to build from Coimbatore and Chennai. There are no plans to open new centres. “With AI, companies are skeptical about increasing headcount,” he said. “We are optimising our current workforce.”

He laughs about how often visitors now come to meet him in Coimbatore. “Rather than me coming to Bangalore, they come to Coimbatore. It’s a big sector. But next time, I’ll plan a visit to Bangalore.”

Kovai's $10M products, built bootstrapped

Kovai.co has achieved something rare in the SaaS world. It has taken two independent products, BizTalk360 and Document360, to $10M+ ARR without venture capital. Both products were built from their offices in Coimbatore and London.

“As a bootstrap business, taking two products independently to about $10 million is something unique,” Kumar said. “Even globally, there are not that many.”

Overall revenue for Kovai.co now exceeds $20 million. Turbo360, its cloud cost optimisation product, is next. “My goal is for all our products to cross $10 million,” he said. “Turbo360 will take another couple of years.”

AI changed the curve

Document360 launched in 2019 and grew steadily. The big jump happened when customers started adopting AI at scale.

“With AI, there are winners and losers. In our case, AI naturally fits into the product,” Saravana said. “Being a knowledge-based product, that becomes a core for any AI to work on.”

He points to Klarna’s well-known shift to AI support. “The first thing they have done was streamline their knowledge base. Only then the AI support can function properly. All companies are realising that now.”

The company also gained speed by acquiring Floik. “If we hadn’t acquired Floik, it would have taken us 12–15 months to build those capabilities. The acquisition helped us bundle everything and close deals faster.”

What Document360 does

Document360 runs public help sites and private internal sites for content, search and support. Customers include VMware, NHS, Ticketmaster, Payoneer, Virgin Red and Comcast.

“We serve customers with millions of hits,” he explained. “Search must be accurate, and response time must be quick. There’s a lot of technology behind the scenes.”

AI now handles search, writing, screenshots, and localisation.

“What took two or three days for a technical writer becomes a few hours,” he said. “We have over fifty AI features built into the product.”

Aiming for $25 million by 2028

Document360 expects to grow 40–45% annually and reach $25 million ARR by mid-2028. Saravana believes the long-term potential is much larger.

“Blindly, without any big market research, I can say Document360 could be a $100 million business over a long period of time,” he said. “Every digital business could potentially be our customer.”