Rajesh Jain and Netcore Cloud: The $115M Internet Exit, and the Bootstrapped SaaS He Built Next
How India's first internet entrepreneur sold a portal at the peak of the dot-com boom and then spent 27 years building a profitable MarTech company without a single dollar of venture capital.
In October 1999, Rajesh Jain had a company doing about three crore rupees in revenue and two acquisition offers on his table at once. Over roughly two weeks, the price for IndiaWorld, the portal he and his wife Bhavna had built from home, climbed from a broken $13 million term sheet through $40 million, $70 million and $80 million. Satyam Infoway (Sify) closed it in November 1999 for $115 million, almost all cash. On three crore of revenue, that was a deal of 499 crore, about 166 times sales. The night it was announced, Sify’s NASDAQ-listed stock added close to $700 million in value.
He almost did not sell. His banker, Hemendra Kothari of DSP Merrill Lynch, talked him into it.
More important than knowing when to enter a business is knowing when to exit. You will never get this kind of valuation again. This money will give you the freedom to do what you want in life.
The timing was close to perfect. The NASDAQ peaked in early 2000; Rajesh’s second payment tranche cleared in June 2000, as the market was already falling.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
From a room-sized computer to 30 failures
Born on Independence Day, 1967, into a middle-class Mumbai family, Rajesh expected to follow his civil-engineer father until a computer his father bought for the office, a machine nobody there could operate, changed his path. He taught himself BASIC on it.
I just fell in love with the idea that you could write software and control the actions of a machine.
After IIT Bombay, a master’s at Columbia and two years at NYNEX in New York, he returned to India in 1992. The next two and a half years were a string of failures: reselling US software, a multimedia database, an image-processing product killed by two-year government tender cycles. The pattern became the thesis of his career.
Every time I’ve been enamoured and excited by the tech side of it, tried to create tech in search of a solution, I failed.
He has a related line founders tend to remember.
There are hundreds of moments when you are one little tiny second away from failure. People think it’s overnight success. No, you avoided failure probably more than others to have succeeded.
IndiaWorld: a portal before India had the internet
The idea that worked came after he read Competing for the Future in late 1994. Rajesh launched IndiaWorld in March 1995, aimed at non-resident Indians; commercial internet did not reach Indian consumers until that August. He and Bhavna took turns watching Doordarshan at night to send out news updates, and he answered every feedback email himself, letting the replies tell him what to build next.
Paid money can get a person to the site once, but it’s only the content which will keep that person coming back. I wanted IndiaWorld to be a habit in people’s lives.
The best decision came out of the worst setback. After losing the indiaworld.com domain, he and Bhavna, on a drive back from a temple in Rajasthan, hit on a contrarian idea: split the portal into separate, memorable, Indian-named sites rather than nesting them under one roof like Yahoo. Of 13 launched, four worked. Samachar became a single-page news start page drawing about four million page views a month, effectively a precursor to Google News.
Out of probably the worst adversity of my life came the best decision.
After Sify, Rajesh did not become an investor. He tried angel investing in about 15 startups and concluded it was not for him: “I am the entrepreneur type.”
Seven flat years, then the $500 billion argument
Netcore grew out of a small side business setting up Linux mail servers, a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Exchange. For about seven years it barely grew, undone by the same disease: technology in search of a problem. A consumer SMS service scaled to four million subscribers around 2007, then regulators raised SMS pricing sharply and killed it overnight, teaching a lasting lesson about depending on a platform someone else controls. Netcore re-architected to deliver email and SMS as cloud services for enterprises, becoming one of India’s earliest SaaS companies. Email gross margins ran at 80 to 90 percent; today Netcore sends 30 to 35 billion emails a month, close to a billion a day.
In 2014 the company built a MarTech layer on top of its pipes: a customer data platform, personalization, and journey orchestration. Because Netcore owns its own delivery channels rather than renting third-party aggregators, it can optimize send times and inbox placement in ways pure-software rivals like CleverTap or Braze cannot.
The greater the control you have across the stack, the better the recommendations and messaging. That’s really where we stand out.
But the sharpest argument is Rajesh’s diagnosis of how marketing money is spent. Roughly 90 percent of budgets go to acquisition, 10 percent to retention, and most acquisition spend re-buys customers the brand already had.
70 percent of the 90 percent is spent reacquiring the same customer again and again. For me, this 70 percent is actually ad waste.
In a $700 billion global ad market, he sizes that waste at $500 billion.
Agentic AI, and the Proficorn
Netcore’s newest move is an Agentic Marketing Stack built with Google Cloud, using AI agents to remove the manual “drudgery” that pushes marketers back toward ads. The deeper bet is on pricing. Rajesh argues MarTech has capped its own market by charging for inputs rather than results, and wants to price like a hedge fund: a baseline fee plus a share of incremental revenue, a model he calls “Progency.”
You go from a red ocean, every MarTech and CPaaS player fighting, to a blue ocean where you tell the brand: I’m on your side of the table. I’ve got skin in the game.
The anchoring number: Netcore crossed $100 million in revenue, reported at around $136.5 million ARR for FY25, with 6,500-plus brands including Walmart and Unilever, and no venture capital. In 2022 it funded a roughly $100 million all-cash acquisition of US-based Unbxd from its own savings; Unbxd now contributes 12 to 13 percent of revenue. Rajesh calls companies like this, the subject of his book, “Proficorns”: private, bootstrapped, profitable, scaled.
Many businesses are funded by venture capitalists. Netcore is funded by its customers.
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