Open-source technology company WSO2 has concluded its $93-million Series E funding round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
While the first tranche of the round was completed in November 2021, Redstart Labs, a subsidiary of Info Edge, participated in the latest round.
The fresh capital will be used to expand sales teams, marketing channels and for strategy and product development.
Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, Founder and CEO, WSO2 told BusinessLine, “We are happy to have Info Edge on board. India is a fast growing market for us. We expect to double our business in India this year despite having no physical presence in the country. We were planning to hire and expand the India team with a country general manager and a few more additions for the sales and pre-sales teams. But given the situation in Sri Lanka, and the likely unstable situation we might have for some time, we plan to focus on expansion plans in India. We’ll have 50-100 people in full function capabilities in India in two years.”
Of its 1,000 employees worldwide, around 875 are based out of Sri Lanka. Though the company is headquartered in California, Weerawana is Sri Lanka born. With the ongoing economic crisis in Sri Lanka, the company had to shift some of its employees to other countries to ensure business continuity.
“With the first tranche, we expanded our global sales footprint. We have general managers in eight countries now. We have been expanding our physical team globally. The US has about 50 people, Brazil and UK 25 each and Australia 15. We are expanding in India and Europe now. The larger investment for us will go into building sales and marketing networks and investing in a go-to market team. Product development is always a focus area, we have about 450 people in R&D now. But it’s not the key focus for investment at the moment, we are investing more on the business side,” he added.
Founded in 2005, WSO2 develops modern applications and services with industry-leading, cloud native and open-source technologies for API management, integration, and customer identity and access management (CIAM). The company is now expandingthese offerings with a new generation of platform-as-a-service.
“We believe WSO2 operates at the intersection of two powerful trends -- an increasingly API driven world, coupled with a wider adoption of open-source software by large enterprises to offer agile, personalised services and innovative use-cases for their customers,” Amit Behl, Partner at Info Edge, said.
Many of the company’s software products are open source. In India, WSO2 has been working with several companies, including many central and state government bodies, to aide with Digital India apps and even the Income Tax platform. Currently, the company has about 25 clients in India. Globally, BFSI is the largest segment for WSO2, followed by healthcare and government.
IPO plans
The company sees almost 40 per cent of it revenue coming from the US, which is its single largest market by size, followed by another 40 per cent from Western Europe and the rest from other parts of the world.
The company is now eyeing an IPO in the US by 2025.
“We plan to be prepared by 2024. We are growing at 50 per cent YoY. Last year, we saw an ARR of $63 million. This year we expect to get close to $90 million, and want to maintain that in the foreseeable future. We plan to go for an IPO with a business size of $200-300 million, while being profitable. We have been profitable for the last four years, though that might be impacted this year because we are investing more on the business,” Weerawarana said.