India Tycoon Partners US Firm On $2 AI Email Rival To Outlook
Titan, which provides a suite of professional email services to small and medium businesses, currently has 2.3 million registered mailboxes.
Indian tech entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is partnering GoDaddy Inc. to offer his artificial intelligence-led email service — Titan — to tens of millions of new users in an enterprise market dominated by Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
The tie-up with Tempe, Arizona-based GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest web hosts, is expected to swell Titan’s user base beyond 10 million mailboxes worldwide in about four years, founder and chief executive officer Turakhia said. Titan, which provides a suite of professional email services to small and medium businesses, currently has 2.3 million registered mailboxes.
“Our product is far more relevant for these micro-businesses,” Turakhia said in a Zoom interview. “Generally these micro-businesses don’t have as much of a need for collaboration suites, which is what the others offer.”
Another factor is pricing. Basic plans start from $2 a month for a mailbox. Typical customers include small firms with as little as five employees. Titan’s premium plans — that cost as much as $15 a month for every mailbox and offer AI tools capable of creating marketing campaigns, generating invoices and providing read receipts — account for about a fifth of the service’s userbase, Turakhia said.
Titan last raised $30 million from blogging platform WordPress’ parent Automattic Inc. in a round that valued the firm at $300 million. The company is profitable and hasn’t needed outside investment since that 2021 funding. It’s targeting sales of around $100 million by 2030, Turakhia said, declining to share specifics.
Turakhia and his younger brother Divyank were born and raised in a middle-class family in India’s financial hub of Mumbai. Turakhia idolized Bill Gates and began programming when he was 10. The siblings joined the ranks of India’s super-rich in 2016 when they sold their advertising tech firm Media.net, with customers including Yahoo, CNN and the New York Times, to a Chinese consortium for $900 million.
Turakhia, who typically dresses up in Michael Kors T-shirts and joggers, also founded Flock, an enterprise messenger that rivals Slack.
