Editor’s Note: Serial entrepreneur Murthy Chintalapati left Silicon Valley, returned to Bangalore and launched Ozonetel in 2007 with a cloud telephony platform for voice apps development. As founder and CEO, he shares insights on growing a company and presents advice for entrepreneurs.
SandHill.com: What inspired you create Ozonetel?
Murthy Chintalapati: Being a serial entrepreneur, I always look for opportunities to build ventures rather than work for a paycheck. My first venture, Intoto, was built in Silicon Valley and later was acquired by Freescale Semiconductor.
When I moved back to Bangalore in 2005, I started assembling a core team with strong telecom and web technologies backgrounds. We had experience in implementing and deploying solutions around Avaya. We looked at the market opportunity of addressing 50 million small and midsized businesses (SMBs/SMEs) and 800 million mobile/landline voice users and connecting them over a platform.
Looking at India’s SME market, we realized they couldn’t afford the branded solutions, and they couldn’t own a team internally to maintain and manage the solutions. SMEs needed someone to host and manage various enterprise-class voice services. We created our own hardware and the telecom stack to host the service, and launched Ozonetel, a cloud telephony services provider. Fortunately we were able to self-fund the venture, so there was no need to convince an investor.