Knowlarity, a cloud telephony start-up backed by Sequoia and Mayfield Fund, is fighting an order by India's telecommunications department that has directed telecom operators to stop the services of the Gurgaon-based firm.
The company offers a technology to replace expensive communication hardware system with an affordable cloud-based telephony solution for small and large businesses.
“Our lines were disconnected without giving any notice to us,” said Ambarish Gupta, 38-year-old chief executive of Knowlarity.
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The start-up approached the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) for redressal. “We immediately got a reprieve in the form of a stay order against such ad-hoc decisions made by Telecom department cell,” said Mr. Gupta.
Mr. Gupta said that the telecom department officials had told the company that it cannot run some of the features of their service like ‘call-forwarding.’
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It was told that the current licences available from the Department of Telecommunications do not cover such a service. But Mr. Gupta said these licences which were made almost two decades ago were archaic. He said Telecom Regulatory Authority of India was already working on this.
The firm said that it tried hard to convince the telecom operators to give them a three-day notice instead of buckling under pressure and disconnecting immediately. He said the operators shut down the service due to pressure from certain telecom regulatory officials on the legality of the company’s features such as virtual number, click-to-call and SuperReceptionist kind of solutions that use call-forwarding.
Telephones disconnectedMr. Gupta said he met the telecom department officials and explained his position on how illegality of call-forwarding solution means that enterprise telephony industry in India is illegal. However, it did not work.
“We were appalled by the fact that the telecom regulatory authorities forced the operators to disconnect our lines without following any due process or consultation,” said Mr. Gupta.
A former senior associate at consulting firm McKinsey, Mr. Gupta cofounded Knowlarity in 2009 along with his IIT-Kanpur and IIT-Madras batch mates with personal savings of Rs.20 lakh.
Business lossesMr. Gupta said their platform costs less than one-tenth of the traditional equipment sold by large multinational companies.
He said about 12,000 of his customers’ phone numbers have got disconnected. The firm said many of these customers include small businesses, e-commerce firms, cab companies, hospitals and schools. “Even a five-minute outage would lead to massive business losses for them,” said Mr. Gupta, whose service is down from the past 96 hours.
Some operators’ telephone numbers in Delhi data centre continue to remain disconnected, he said.
This week Knowlarity’s global competitor U.S.-based Twilio Inc. raised $150 million from its IPO.