The B2B SaaS Pioneer Who Scaled Knowlarity 60x & Mastered the PE Game
Explore Ambarish Gupta's journey: IIT, McKinsey, failed startup to Knowlarity's 60x growth & Basis Vectors PE. Insights on SaaS, failure & resilience.
What does it truly take to build a category-defining B2B SaaS company from India, scale it globally, achieve profitability, and then transition into the world of Private Equity? Ambarish Gupta the founder of Knowlarity and now CEO of Basis Vectors, embodies this journey, marked by intellectual curiosity, early failures, calculated risks, and relentless execution. His story is not just about success, but about the profound self-awareness required to navigate the founder's tumultuous path.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
From Kanpur Business Roots to IIT Scientist Dreams 👨🔬
Growing up in a business family in Kanpur, Ambarish was surrounded by entrepreneurship – specifically, the trade of jute bags. He even sat on the shop floor, learning the basics of profit and loss firsthand. However, this traditional business didn't excite his intellectual curiosity.
"I was kind of odd men out in my family to want to be a scientist... intellectual excitement was very important."
This drive led him to pursue science, culminating in a computer science degree from the prestigious IIT Kanpur (batch of 2000). He recalls IIT Kanpur as an oasis, a "gem in the middle of all this disaster" compared to the sleepy town outside its gates. The environment fostered intense learning and competition, shaping his analytical mind but also leaving him slightly disillusioned with pure academia by his final year. He craved real-world impact.
Early Career Detours & The First Taste of Failure 📉
Graduating in the dot-com boom era, Ambarish secured a job in the US, but his journey took detours through Germany (as a research intern where he impressed by finishing projects months early) and Australia, before landing in the US in 2001. Working as an engineer, he felt disconnected from the impact of his code.
"I've always been the kind of guy who wanted to see the impact of what I did... it was not enjoyable for me."
In 2003, driven by the desire to build something impactful in India, he returned to Bangalore with ₹40,000 and an idea for an online apartment search portal (similar to Housing.com, but predating even MagicBricks). This first venture, Inventycar Solutions, was a harsh lesson in the realities of the nascent Indian startup ecosystem. His co-founder backed out on the plane to India, finding an office was a struggle, convincing brokers was near impossible ("half the time they wouldn't really get what I'm talking about"), and the ecosystem support we see today simply didn't exist. After a painful one-and-a-half years, the venture failed.
The MBA & McKinsey Interlude: Learning the Language of Business 📊
His first startup failure wasn't the end, but a catalyst. Recognizing the need for formal business knowledge (partly spurred by VCs telling him he needed an MBA to be taken seriously), Ambarish headed back to the US for an MBA at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), funded by a scholarship.
Post-MBA, his goal shifted towards Private Equity, seeing it as a way to make large-scale impact. He joined McKinsey & Company as a strategy consultant, advising Fortune 50 companies, primarily banks and insurance firms, during the turbulent 2007-2009 financial crisis period. He describes the work as "incredibly intense" – even more so than his later startup journey – involving 14-hour days and deep dives into complex business transformations. This period provided an invaluable education in strategy, finance, and operations.
Founding Knowlarity: The Right Idea, Right Time 💡
While at McKinsey, Ambarish noticed the high profitability and customer stickiness of simple communication services like eFax, despite being commodity products. The insight? Phone numbers are incredibly sticky. This sparked the idea for Knowlarity.
Learning from his past failure, he approached this venture with meticulous risk mitigation:
Proven Model: Inspired by US companies like eFax/eVoice and RingCentral, reducing product-market fit risk.
B2B Focus: Seeking faster feedback loops and upfront revenue, unlike consumer businesses.
Strong Co-founder: Partnered with Pallav Nandwani, who had already demonstrated perseverance running his own venture.
Market Tailwinds: Launched into India's booming telecom market, applying "Derivative Market Theory" – the idea that massive consumer mobile adoption would inevitably drive demand for business telephony solutions to manage the influx of calls.
Capital: Raised initial funds from friends and family, avoiding dependency on personal savings.
The initial product, SuperFax, didn't take off, but a pivot driven by an early customer need (making outbound calls for an election campaign in Orissa, landing a ~₹1.5 crore order before the product was built) led them towards cloud telephony (IVR, call routing, analytics).
"As soon as complexity goes up [in call volume], you need a business phone system to manage... My thesis was given consumer telephony has happened, business telephony will happen. And I'm the one who will do it."
Scaling Knowlarity: Growth, Funding & Global Ambition 🚀🌏💰
Knowlarity quickly found traction. They hit product-market fit by 2011 and raised their Series A from Sequoia Capital in January 2012, having already acquired around 500 paying customers and built a team of 50.
The company's growth trajectory was phenomenal:
60x Growth: Between the Sequoia investment (2012) and Ambarish's departure (~2018).
Profitability: Became EBITDA and cash-flow positive, funding its own operations.
Team Expansion: Grew from 50 to around 400 employees.
Further Funding: Raised Series B in 2014 from Mayfield and Sequoia.
Global Expansion: Strategically moved the holding company to Singapore in 2013 to target Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern markets, successfully gaining significant revenue from outside India.
Knowlarity essentially educated the Indian market on cloud telephony, leveraging PR and building a strong sales engine (including 300+ sales team members and 400+ channel partners) to become Asia's largest player in the space.
The Founder Philosophy: Failure, Self-Awareness & The Grind 🙏
Ambarish is deeply philosophical about the founder's journey:
On Failure: "Embrace failure... it surely is the best teacher." His own experience shaped Knowlarity's risk-mitigated approach.
On Self-Awareness: "Before you become a Founder... you have to know who you are." He believes understanding your intrinsic motivations (Money? Power? Fame? Impact?) is critical, as the founder path is incredibly demanding. Doing it for the wrong reasons (like chasing perceived glamour) leads to burnout.
On Hard Work: "For six months we had all engineers sleep in the office... you would have like three o'clock meetings." He dismisses the notion of work-life balance if you truly love what you do, comparing choosing work-life balance to choosing silver over gold. The early days demand total commitment.
On Angel Investing: He's skeptical, calling it "money down the drain" or "spray and pray" from a purely commercial standpoint, lacking the rigorous thesis he prefers.
"If you don't intrinsically like what you're doing, you're not going to be very good at it... If you're a Founder where everything is already stacked against you... not enjoying it or not being very good at it is a death knell."
Transition to Private Equity: Basis Vectors ➡️
Around 2018, with Knowlarity stable, profitable, and less in need of radical change, Ambarish felt the pull towards something new. He transitioned out of his CEO role, paving the way for new leadership.
This led him back to his earlier ambition: Private Equity. He founded Basis Vectors, a PE firm based in New York, focused on buyouts of US and Canadian businesses. Leveraging his decade of operational experience scaling a tech company and his strategic background from McKinsey, he now operates on a larger canvas, aiming for impact across multiple portfolio companies.
"In a PE firm you can make much larger impact... it's less operational... and it's kind of a very natural stepping stone really for me."
Ambarish Gupta's journey from Kanpur to IIT, through startup failure and consulting, to building a SaaS leader and now shaping businesses through private equity, offers a powerful narrative on resilience, strategic thinking, and the importance of knowing yourself. He remains a key figure in the Indian and global tech ecosystem, demonstrating how deep operational experience can translate into successful investment strategies.
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