The Nature of Markets: How Apurv Agrawal Built SquadStack by Learning Not to Fight the Wind
From a side project nobody cared about to ₹200 crore ARR - the story of respecting forces you cannot control
There’s a moment in every founder’s journey when the universe delivers a lesson so visceral it rewrites everything. For Apurv Agrawal, it came while standing at a window with a colleague who was smoking a cigarette.
The wind was blowing into the room. His colleague kept exhaling forcefully outward, trying to push the smoke away. But physics had other ideas. No matter how hard he tried, the breeze kept carrying the smoke back inside.
I’ll never forget this example. Anyone who says, okay, jump in the ocean and change the tides, right? Like come on, man, you cannot fight with nature. And market is exactly nature. And you have to respect nature. As humans, I think you have to figure out how to integrate with nature. Nature doesn’t have to integrate with us.
It’s the kind of insight most founders acquire too late, usually after they’ve burned through capital trying to create demand where none exists. Apurv learned it early enough to build SquadStack into what it is today: a company operating at roughly ₹200 crore annual revenue run rate, managing over 10,000 telecallers across 67 Indian cities with a core team of just 250 employees.
That’s an operational leverage ratio of 1:53. One employee for every 53 managed agents. It’s the kind of efficiency that traditional call centers, with their layers of trainers and quality analysts and team leaders, can only dream about.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The False Start Nobody Remembers
By 2015, after stints at 91springboard where he was a founding member, Apurv was ready to build his own company. The thesis was clear: decentralization of work creates value at scale. He’d seen it with an NGO platform he built at 17, connecting student volunteers with nonprofits.
SquadRun, as it was originally called, launched as a horizontal platform doing data collection and tagging for e-commerce companies. They worked with Zomato, Housing.com, Snapdeal. They raised funding from impressive angels, Deepinder Bansal of Zomato, Amit Ranjan who founded SlideShare (acquired by LinkedIn), even some Infosys founders.
The business grew globally, Japan, the US, Europe. By 2018, revenue hit around ₹10-12 crore. They even had a decent US business doing real estate calling.
But then the e-commerce bust hit. Customers started running out of money. And Apurv realized he’d made a fundamental error.
I used to say, you know, great founders and teams build markets, right? To be honest, I think it’s foolish. I think nothing is bigger than market, right?
He’d built a 10x product for a market that was too small and actively shrinking. Meanwhile, something else was happening on the side. In 2018, Myntra suggested they try telecalling for BPO work. The team treated it like a weekend hack project. They put one product manager on it. It grew quietly, profitably, with about 15 people running it by 2020.
The board barely noticed. It was just “one of the things we were doing.”
Three Forces Collide
What happened next wasn’t genius or vision. It was luck, timing, and the wisdom to listen when the wind changed direction.
In March 2020, COVID shut down the world. Suddenly, every enterprise that had looked at SquadStack’s decentralized model like they were crazy started calling. The mindset problem that had blocked adoption for years vanished overnight.
In November 2020, the Indian government liberalized the Other Service Provider guidelines, eliminating registration requirements and formally permitting Work from Anywhere models in the BPO sector. The highway had been built right as demand was about to flood onto it.
And fintech companies started discovering SquadStack with a different conversation.
I asked them, okay, how much are you paying and how much are you willing to pay? Then very interestingly, they said, yeah, we don’t care how much we are paying here. What we care more about is the value that we can get because it’s more about sales, right? I don’t want to lose one sale also.
Banks started calling. Insurance companies. Lending platforms. Kotak Mahindra. Axis Bank. Bajaj. Companies whose names were on billboards. Apurv was in the Bay Area at the time, trying to crack the US market. He came back immediately.
By the time the dust settled, what had been a side project had become the entire company. Everything before 2020, Apurv says now, was just prologue.
The Architecture of Unprecedented Leverage
Here’s what traditional BPO economics look like: If a call center makes ₹100 in revenue, roughly ₹30 goes to paying the person making the calls. About ₹50, half the total revenue, goes to management layers. For every 20 callers, you need trainers, quality analysts, team leaders, managers.
SquadStack’s model is different. The company has replaced that entire ₹50 management layer with AI. The platform handles agent assessment, training, and real-time coaching. It monitors 100 different parameters during every interaction, identifying which agents excel at which conversations and matching them accordingly.
Traditional BPOs have really terrible margins, unfortunately, not even single digit actually. I mean, everything single digit, but really the early single digit type margin.
SquadStack can therefore pay its agents more, charge enterprises less, and still maintain healthier margins. It’s not a pricing strategy. It’s a structural advantage built into the business model.
The result is that 1:53 leverage ratio. And those telecallers aren’t struggling gig workers. They’re serious professionals for whom this is a primary income source. Seventy percent are stay-at-home mothers from tier-2 and tier-3 cities.
Someone who’s working in an IT job with very good education and then let’s say she gets married and moves to Ludhiana because the partner now has a business in Ludhiana, so what do you do right? And there’s literally nothing to do. Outside the four cities in India, I think it is impossible to find a job that pays more than ₹10,000.
About 20 people on SquadStack’s full-time staff, including senior product leaders, are former telecallers from the platform. It’s the kind of outcome that sounds like social impact marketing until you realize it’s actually just smart business.
The Billion-Conversation Moat
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, every company with a database suddenly started talking about their “proprietary data advantage.” Most of it was noise. But SquadStack actually has something real.
The platform has processed over 1 billion customer interactions. The Humanoid AI Agent has been trained on 600 million real conversations in more than 10 Indian languages, with all the regional dialects and code-mixing that characterizes how Indians actually communicate.
AI in India can’t be built with a Silicon Valley mindset. The first problem is that we realized no one talks in even one language. Even things like what we’ve done is that even if I’m speaking English, if someone is from the north, let’s say Delhi, so the caller will be Delhi or the voice you’ll hear will be Delhi-based.
This creates a genuine competitive moat. A global AI company can’t easily replicate this linguistic and cultural nuance. But the bigger strategic shift happened when Apurv realized the market was heading toward a tipping point.
The Inflection Point
There’s a report from MIT showing 95% of AI proof-of-concepts are failing. SquadStack is seeing a 95% success rate. The difference comes down to understanding when AI crosses a specific threshold.
That tipping point is when AI can start doing a big chunk of the work as humans are doing, and it’s very critical that it has to deliver the same outcome. No one cares if it’s AI, if it’s a monkey, if it’s Elon Musk calling. What we care is if you’re doing sales, there’s a metric called cost of acquisition. CAC, how much are you optimizing that?
When SquadStack ran a case study with STAGE, a regional OTT platform, they achieved 55% call deflection, 86% customer satisfaction, and 70% cost reduction within six weeks. That’s the inflection point. The AI isn’t just “good enough.” It’s actually better at a growing number of tasks.
Apurv estimates 50% of workflows are now fully AI-native. Another 30% will shift in the next few quarters. The final 20%, complex advisory conversations and sophisticated sales, will remain human.
But because SquadStack has both AI and humans on one platform, they can offer what he calls a “tag-team relay.” AI handles pre-sales qualification, then a human takes the actual sale, already knowing everything about the customer.
The best solution is going to be the combination of this Uber, OYO and AI together. If you can have a platform where all of these three exist together and they use the strengths of each other, I think that’s where the magic really will happen.
The Ironman Philosophy
If you talk to Apurv about AI, you’ll hear him use the “Ironman suit” metaphor repeatedly.
Our goal is not to replace jobs but to empower our workforce. AI should make humans sort of superhuman, enabling them to be more productive, effective, and ultimately more valuable.
The argument is partly ethical (job security in India), partly practical (sophisticated sales still need human judgment), and partly competitive strategy. A hybrid model is harder to copy than pure software or pure labor.
The companies competing on pure AI struggle with enterprise adoption because quality isn’t there yet. Traditional BPOs can’t match SquadStack’s cost structure because they’re still paying for five management roles per 20 agents.
The Funding Reality
SquadStack has raised $24.7 million across four rounds, most recently a $17.6 million Series B in August 2022 led by Bertelsmann India Investments.
For fiscal year 2024, reported revenue was ₹26.5 crore. Apurv now says they’re at roughly ₹200 crore annual revenue run rate, growing 3x year-on-year. The early modest numbers reflect classic marketplace strategy: prioritize building the largest network and accumulating the most data over near-term revenue.
And the timing matters. A recent report shows 63% of Indian companies are now freezing full-time hiring due to geopolitical tensions, and 15% are shifting to contract-based roles. That’s pure tailwind for SquadStack’s variable-cost model.
The average contract value is now around $500,000. Some customers spend $300,000 to $2 million annually. Sales cycles that took 12 months have compressed to one or two months. The September 2023 acceptance into JioGenNext, Reliance’s accelerator, potentially opens doors to the vast Reliance ecosystem.
What Comes Next
SquadStack is processing millions of conversations monthly, working with over 100 enterprise clients including some of India’s largest banks and fintech companies. The company partnered with CoreWeave to implement cutting-edge Serverless Reinforcement Learning. Apurv won CX Leader of the Year at the 2024 CX Strategy Summit.
But when you ask him about the journey, he keeps coming back to that moment with the cigarette smoke and the wind.
Market is nature. And you have to respect nature. As humans, I think you have to figure out how to integrate with nature. Nature doesn’t have to integrate with us.
The data tagging business was good, profitable, with global clients. But the market was shrinking. The calling business started as a weekend project not even important enough to get a valuation. But enterprises kept asking for it.
COVID didn’t create SquadStack’s opportunity. It revealed it. The regulatory changes didn’t make their model work. They validated what was already working. The geopolitical hiring freezes aren’t driving growth. They’re accelerating what was already happening.
The philosophical through-line is this: the best founders aren’t the ones who bend reality to their will. They’re the ones who see reality clearly and position themselves where the forces are already flowing.
You can’t make the wind blow the way you want. But you can adjust your sails.
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