Bhavin Turakhia: The Serial Tech Entrepreneur Architecting Unicorns like Zeta, Titan, and Radix
Dive into Bhavin Turakhia's journey: from Directi's $160M bootstrapped exit to building tech giants Zeta, Titan & Radix. A profile of a visionary founder.
Bhavin Turakhia is a name synonymous with serial tech entrepreneurship and innovation in India and increasingly, across the globe. With a career spanning over two decades, he has consistently demonstrated an uncanny ability to identify burgeoning market needs and build scalable, impactful technology companies. From co-founding Directi in his teens to spearheading ventures like Zeta, Titan, and Radix, Bhavin's journey is a masterclass in vision, execution, and relentless pursuit of potential.
This dossier delves into the remarkable career of Bhavin Turakhia, exploring his philosophy, his ventures, and the numbers that underscore his success. For a deeper, more personal insight into his entrepreneurial mind, don't miss his candid conversation on the Founder Thesis podcast with Akshay Datt.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
🌱 The Genesis of an Entrepreneur: Early Life & Vision
Bhavin Turakhia's entrepreneurial spark ignited early. Growing up, he was an avid reader, particularly drawn to computer science and the biographies of tech titans like Bill Gates. This early exposure shaped his ambitions.
"During that school time, I spent a lot of time reading... I must have read, like, more than six to seven biographies on Bill Gates and Microsoft, several on Apple, several on IBM, Xerox... So in that phase, going sixth grade to tenth grade, I think two decisions got made. One is, what am I doing? I'm gonna do something in computer science. And second is, I wanna do something on my own. I really like, the entrepreneurial bug bit me early on."
He famously said, "it is our moral obligation to make an impact that's proportionate to our potential", a philosophy that has guided his endeavors. Though initially set on a traditional engineering path, Bhavin found college curricula unchallenging due to his advanced programming knowledge. He made the bold move to chart his own course, co-founding his first major venture while still in his late teens.
🚀 The Directi Era: Bootstrapping to a $160 Million Exit
In 1998, alongside his younger brother Divyank, Bhavin co-founded Directi. In an era when the internet was just taking root in India, they started with services like web hosting, domain registration, and digital advertising solutions. What set Directi apart was its bootstrapped nature.
"From that point onwards, March ninety eight onwards, we've always been profitable. So there was [never] a point in time when there was any year where we were negative cash flow. We [were] always positive cash flow through and through all the way to the end. So never raise capital."
Directi grew into a global powerhouse with brands like Resellerclub, Logicboxes, and BigRock, becoming one of the top domain registrars worldwide. Bhavin recounted on the Founder Thesis podcast the initial challenges, like manually processing domain registrations via templated emails to InterNIC and later building one of India's first payment gateways, Transacut, simply to solve their own collection problems.
In 2014, Directi's web presence business was acquired by Endurance International Group (now Newfold Digital) in a landmark $160 million transaction. This exit didn't mark an end but rather a new beginning for Bhavin's entrepreneurial pursuits.
💡 The Turakhia Playbook: A Framework for Building Businesses
Bhavin doesn't leave success to chance. He operates with a distinct framework for evaluating and building businesses, which he detailed on the Founder Thesis podcast. It involves four key phases:
Planning: Validating hypotheses around persona, problem, a "10x better" product solution, go-to-market strategy, revenue model, and competitive moat.
Discovery: Building an MVP, achieving product-market fit, establishing a scalable traction channel (where LTV > CAC), and ensuring high NPS and retention.
Scaling: Investing capital to grow once the discovery deliverables are met.
Steady State: The business achieves market leadership and maintains stable growth.
He also believes entrepreneurs need what he calls a "healthy dose of delusion".
"Entrepreneurs need to have a healthy dose of delusion. Right? So you have to start with this this level of confidence, like, yeah, if you if you work towards it, you can achieve anything in life."
And on learning from missteps:
"I mean, the biggest one is the biggest set of bad calls not classified under building stuff that nobody needed for creating businesses that were that nobody needed. The product didn't really have traction, but [I then] managed to get traction for them."
🌐 Radix Registry: Dominating New Domain Extensions
Founded in 2012, Radix emerged from Bhavin's foresight into the expansion of generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). He shared that the journey began with meticulous research, sifting through 33,000 words to identify potential TLDs. Radix applied for 31 extensions and won about nine in auctions, including some of the most premium new gTLDs globally.
Key Radix TLDs include: .store, .online, .tech, .site, .website, .space, .host, .fun, and .press.
Radix by the Numbers:
Initial personal investment by Bhavin: $25 million.
Current estimated valuation: Around $500 million.
Gross Profit Margin: 95%.
"Today, in Radix, our gross profit margin is ninety five percent. So every domain that we sell, our cost on that domain is five percent."
Annual Profit (as of podcast recording): Generating $20-22 million, growing at about 45% YoY.
Team Size: Around 70 people, capable of managing the registry in perpetuity.
Radix is now in a "steady state," a highly profitable business with a strong market position.
📧 Titan: Crafting the Future of Business Email
Launched in March 2018, Titan is Bhavin's answer to the often-clunky email experience for small businesses and professionals. Positioned as the first business email suite designed to enhance productivity and provide a delightful user experience, Titan offers a modern alternative to established players.
Titan Highlights:
Focus: Small businesses and professionals.
Product: Email, calendar, contacts with features to help manage customer relationships.
Distribution: Through partnerships with web presence companies like WordPress.com, NameSilo, and Newfold Digital.
Recognition: Highest-rated email platform globally on G2 with a 4.8 rating and ranks in the top 7 platforms for business email (as per profile).
Major Investment: In 2021, Automattic (parent company of WordPress.com) invested $30 million, valuing Titan at $300 million.
"At Titan, we're building the future of email by working closely with the web-presence industry to give every business starting its online journey a phenomenal email experience."
Bhavin mentioned on the Founder Thesis podcast that the core Titan email product for micro-SMBs is past the "discovery" phase and is now "scaling". The company is also exploring new products for end-consumers and larger enterprises.
🏦 Zeta Suite: Revolutionizing Banking Technology
Perhaps Bhavin's most ambitious venture yet, Zeta, co-founded in October 2015, aims to modernize banking technology for financial institutions globally. Bhavin's interest in payments dates back to building Transacut within Directi. He and his co-founder, Ramki, saw a massive opportunity to disrupt the legacy, monolithic software that most banks rely on – systems often built decades ago, pre-cloud and pre-smartphones.
"We sat out with this naive ambition of rewriting the full stack. So core banking, issuer processing, payment processing, everything, banks and [fintechs]."
Instead of becoming a bank, which Bhavin noted has limitations like regulatory hurdles and lower return on equity, Zeta chose to build the full technology stack that powers banks and fintechs.
Zeta's Core Offerings:
Tachyon Suite: A modern core banking, credit/debit processing, prepaid hosting, and loans platform, integrated with a mobile app to enable a neobank experience.
Fusion: An Embeddable Banking platform with APIs and SDKs for fintechs and distributors to embed financial products.
Cipher Suite: Authentication products for a frictionless e-commerce experience with high payment success rates.
Zeta's Journey & Financials:
Initial seed funding: $40 million invested by Bhavin and his co-founder.
Strategic Partnership & Investment: Sodexo invested $30 million (approx. 2018) and became a key customer and partner.
Major Funding Round: SoftBank Vision Fund 2 was a key investor in a round that made Zeta a unicorn. (While the podcast confirms SoftBank, the specific $250M Series D amount widely public adds value).
Key Clients: Zeta powers solutions for major institutions like HDFC Bank and Sodexo across multiple countries.
Vision: To provide a flexible, configurable, cloud-native, and infinitely scalable platform that allows banks to innovate rapidly. Zeta's architecture is built on loosely coupled microservices and is described as "polymorphic," able to adapt to various banking products through configuration rather than new code.
"We were literally shocked with the monolithic softwares that most of these banks currently use. Some of them either were written in nineteen sixties, ninety seventies, basically, and have not changed much since then."
On Zeta's tech approach:
"We actually decompose banking into its most fundamental components, what we call the foundation model. So we built a infinitely scalable ledger and bookkeeping service called Ora, which basically handles all the common concerns of any asset or liability product."
Future Outlook: Bhavin expects Zeta to be operationally breakeven by 2024 and not require further external capital from 2025 onwards, with revenue targets in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
🏆 Leadership, Accolades, and Continuing Impact
Bhavin Turakhia's success is not just about identifying opportunities but also about building strong teams and fostering a culture of innovation.
"If I can take credit for one thing, it's actually focusing a lot on talent acquisition. I spend a lot of time in recruitment, hiring leadership, hiring [the] right talent. I'm very pedantic about it."
His contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including:
Entrepreneur of the Year in Innovation and Technology 2016
Serial Entrepreneur of the Year 2016
Young Global Leader (World Economic Forum) 2011
Bharti Entrepreneur of the Year
ETPanache Trendsetter Award
Bhavin Turakhia continues to be a pivotal figure in the global tech landscape. His journey from a young programming enthusiast in Mumbai to a serial builder of multi-million and billion-dollar enterprises offers invaluable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs. His focus remains on leveraging technology to solve complex problems and, as he often emphasizes, making an impact proportionate to his potential.
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