This Coimbatore AI start-up gave ₹14 crore bonus to 140 employees, founder explains why | Company Business News

Saravanakumar, the founder of business-to-business software solutions (SaaS) AI start-up named Kovai.co, has given 140 employees a bonus of ₹14 crore, according to a report by News18. When asked why, his response was simple: “Why do people work in startups? They hope to become rich.”

Employees Get ₹14 crore bonus — ‘Hope to become Rich…’

Speaking to News18 about the unusually generous bonus, 48-year-old Saravanakumar said, “Why do people work in startups? They hope to become rich, but in most startups, employees get shares, which are only on paper.”

He added that the big bonus was part of a promise he made employees, “I thought of giving something concrete to my employees. Three years ago, I said that if they stay with us, they will get a bonus equal to six months’ salary in January 2025.” He has now fulfilled that promise.

About Kovai.co…

Founded in 2011 and named after his hometown of Coimbatore, Kovai.co is a B2B SaaS start-up which was bootstrapped by Saravanakumar himself, as per the report. Its clients today include news corporation BBC, airline giant Boeing and oil mega Shell, among others.

Solutions provided by Kovai.co are three-part — Document360 (which creates and updates help pages for organisations), Biztalk 360 (which connects backend applications such as Salesforce and SAP on a single platform), and Turbo 360 (which cuts down cloud costs by up to 30 per cent), as per the report.

From IT employee to founder of $100 million startup

Speaking about the name of his company, Saravanakumar told the publication that he was an ordinary IT worker for 10 years and moved to London 25 years back. However, Coimbatore is his hometown and he recognised the gap in the market which he filled by founding Kovai.co.

With annual revenue of $15 million and its total value is estimated to be $100 million. Now, after fulfilling his promise to employees, Saravanakumar wants to fulfil his dream to making the start-up a $100 million revenue unicorn.