Kovai.co’s determination to build world-class software products from a Tier-II city like Coimbatore instead of Bengaluru or Chennai sealed the deal for the members of the 7th ET Startup Awards jury.

Startup, which went face-to-face with Chennai-born partner mother-in-law company cardinality.ai, eventually ended up at the top of the jury list. bootstrap champion Category for its financial height and ability to inspire entrepreneurs from smaller cities and towns to build global businesses.

Anu Hariharan, jury member and partner at Y Combinator Continuity Fund, said, “It is very hard to build a bootstrapped company at scale. They have done it in a very interesting format that I have never seen before – of being both London and Coimbatore. but largely in Coimbatore, they have an engineering team that helps them with cost and R&D.”

Hariharan said that it is not just the business model, but also the fact that the company is spotting talent in Coimbatore and motivating a lot of people, which helped it to achieve the top position.

Kovai’s first product, BizTalk360, was a platform for operations and monitoring, and analysis for Microsoft’s BizTalk Server, built by a team of six people. The company now has more than 250 people working on five enterprise-grade software products.

Its core offering, Document360, helps users quickly build a self-service knowledge base for customers and employees, which can be accessed publicly or privately.

“We want to replicate in Coimbatore what Freshworks and Zoho have done in Chennai,” said Founder and CEO Saravan Kumar said. “We are at the forefront of this opportunity and the entire company is passionate about Coimbatore.”

Kumar said, being in a Tier-II city has made the talent hunt more complicated, but it has solved the issue to some extent by bringing people from Coimbatore to come back to their hometowns. It has also built a program to partner with universities to identify and train talent.

According to Kumar, the advantage of living in Coimbatore is the “huge talent pool” Kovai has access to. “We are channeling all that raw talent and then adapting it to what the industry needs. We will do it first in Coimbatore and finally, we will replicate that model in multiple cities,” he said.

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