Practical Founders Podcast

#124: From Services to SaaS Products to a Successful Acquisition in India – Sunando Bhattacharya

Dec 26, 2024


Sunando Bhattacharya spent 13 years as a business leader in managed IT services companies in India before starting his own cloud tech services business. This company grew slowly and an opportunity arose to create a software product for one of their clients. Two years later, in 2019, they had a few more Apiculus product customers and focused more on the product.

Apiculus is a complete “cloud-as-a-service” software platform for data centers to offer, sell, deploy, and manage cloud data services for their own customers. They focused on smaller data centers in emerging markets, including Nepal, Oman, Rwanda, and others in the Middle East and Africa.

The Apiculus business grew as it turned into a product-first company. They overcame many challenges during COVID and with customers and partners that didn’t work out.  In 2024, the company was acquired by Yotta, an Indian cloud technology company, in a strategic acquisition.

Quote from Sunando Bhattacharya, founder of Apiculus

“Somebody asked me what one thing you want for your company. I said I wanted my company featured on Great Places to Work. It’s very important that the team that works with me finds this a great place to work.

“The only secret ingredient for tech companies is people. It’s people who make the technology. And if you take care of your team, you take care of your people, you will always do well.

“This isn’t just for services companies. Talent and ability are important. But for somebody to bring their best every day to work and deliver something world-class, which is world-beating, it needs a very different level of passion. And that passion will only come from your team if you take care for them.”

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Podcast Sponsor – Cypress Growth Capital

This week’s podcast is sponsored by my friends at Cypress Growth Capital. For 15 years, Cypress has provided non-dilutive growth funding to bootstrapped SaaS founders, including many successful founders I’ve interviewed here on this podcast.  Message Cliff Sentell at Cypress to have an open discussion about your options.

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Practical Founders Podcast with Greg Head

Every week, host Greg Head interviews a successful software founder who started, grew, and sometimes sold a valuable software company—without big funding.

Over $8 billion of founder equity value has been created by just 130 SaaS founders interviewed on this podcast so far. That’s an average of $60 million founder of equity value created by each company.

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