An Indian billionaire has moved to the UK aiming to build his most successful tech company yet.
Serial tech entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia is the founder and CEO of Flock, a communication platform for teams operating within businesses which he founded in 2014.
With half a million installs to date, it boasts tech giant Accenture, retailer Mothercare and white goods manufacturer Whirlpool among its customers.
“It’s the next paradigm in communication,” he told BusinessCloud. “Upwards of 30,000 teams are now using the platform and, within two months of doing so, our customers claim they see a 40-50 per cent boost in their productivity and efficiency.
“The UK is a massive market for Flock. There are a huge number of employed professionals here.
“Our objective is to have one million users by the end of the next calendar year and we have some interesting marketing plans in different countries to try and achieve that. Our target subsequent to that is to reach 4-5m active users.”
Bhavin Turakhia, 37, set up a permanent base in London this year and has houses in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Mumbai and Dubai.
He is aiming for the sky – but he’s got the credentials to back up his targets.
The founder of 11 companies to date, he started out in tech consulting with brother Divyank aged just 16 from his bedroom in Mumbai. He struck gold with Directi, an IT services company he founded with Divyank in 1998.
They sold the four ‘web presence’ businesses within Directi to Endurance International Group for $160 million in 2014 and two years later sold their advertising technology firm Media.net to a Chinese consortium of investors for $900 million – the second-largest adtech deal in history.
He is now concentrating on Flock, which he claims is a better and cheaper option than competitor Slack.
“We currently have 50,000 to 60,000 active users at any one time,” he said. “There are 2,000 new companies trying out Flock every week.
“It is the tiny things that make the difference: for a team of say 100 people, there is automatic priority of conversations so the most relevant ones bubble up to the top. We also have rich integration, with the ability to integrate workflows from Google Drive, JIRA, Asana and Trello, to name a few. We are looking to break down silos within teams.
“The three other businesses I run are now self-operational and it will take Flock a few years to get to a point where it’s self-sustaining. It’s still in the nascent stages.
“But I think Flock can be our most successful business yet.”
Bhavin Turakhia recently featured in Forbes’ list of India’s 100 Richest People while he has won several awards, including Entrepreneur Magazine India’s 2016 Serial Entrepreneur of the Year Award and Entrepreneur of the Year (Innovation and Technology.