How 1 Ex-Cognizantand 3 former ZOHO Employees Went On To Create A Unicorn
Entrepreneur magazine|June 2021
In April 2021, Chargebee raised $125 million in Series G round, almost tripling its valuation to $1.4 billion
Debarghya Sil
How 1 Ex-Cognizantand 3 former ZOHO Employees Went On To Create A Unicorn
‘‘India is a big focus for us and we’re investing our R&D to solve for the Indian market,” said Rajaraman Santhanam, chief operating officer and co-founder of one of India’s latest entrants to the Unicorn club, Chargebee. India has certainly drawn the interest of foreign investors and made top executives of enterprises turn their heads. However, several Internet companies are skeptical about launching operations in India, despite the fact India is on the verge of witnessing the next 500 million Internet users. Why? It is because subscription-based services are not quite popular here in India.

In order to address the issue, and help businesses expand by automating operations around subscriptions, billing, among others, Chargebee was founded back in 2011.

FROM DRAWING ROOM TO CALIFORNIA

Chargebee was founded by Krish Subramanian, Rajaraman Santhanam, Saravanan KP, and Thiyagarajan T. Back then, Subramanian was working with Cognizant, and the other future co-founders were working to build SaaS portfolio products and cloud applications at Zoho. Interestingly, one common link between them was that Subhramanian and Santhanam had studied together. Both of them had earlier dreamt of running their own company.

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