Citybiz Interview with Beerud Sheth, Co-Founder & CEO, Gupshup

Beerud is responsible for the overall strategy, execution and growth of Gupshup. He also founded Elance, the world‘s largest online services marketplace and has also played various leadership roles at different stages of the company’s growth.

Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and before that at Citicorp Securities. His graduate research, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning software agents for personalized news filtering.

Beerud earned an M.S. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology & a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and is a holder of 2 technology patents.

Interview questions:

Funding | Gupshup announced a $240 million follow-on funding including Fidelity Management and Research Company, Tiger Global, Think Investments, Malabar Investment… This funding followed the $100 million raise from Tiger Global in April. Please tell us about Gupshup’s funding over the last couple of months.

Gupshup | Can you provide a snapshot of Gupshup – messages per month, partnerships, footprint, key clients, revenue…

Plans | What are the plans for the funding? Are there new products in the pipeline?

Footprint |How will the funding accelerate your go-to-market efforts?

Conversational Messaging | How is conversational messaging evolving? Please explain the evolution from outbound marketing to inbound marketing to conversational marketing.

Clients | Gupshup’s customers include Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn. Tell us about your clients.

Competition | What is the competitive landscape? How does Gupshup compete with Twilio, Sinch, Kaleyra, Route Mobile…

Elance/Upwork |You were the founder of Elance which became Upwork. Tell us about that experience and its impact on your management of Gupshup?

Milestones |  What are some of the key milestones since founding the company in 2004?

Lowlights v. Highlights | What are some of the key lowlights and highlights from the Gupshup journey? Tell us about the near death experiences?  Can you walk us through the pivots?

Connect with Beerud on LinkedIn

About Gupshup

Gupshup enables better customer engagement through conversational messaging. Gupshup is the leading conversational messaging platform, powering over 6 billion messages per month. Across verticals, thousands of large and small businesses in emerging markets use Gupshup to build conversational experiences across marketing, sales and support. Gupshup’s carrier-grade platform provides a single messaging API for 30+ channels, a rich conversational experience-building tool kit for any use case and a network of emerging market partnerships across messaging channels, device manufacturers, ISVs and operators. With Gupshup, businesses have made conversations an integral part of their customer engagement success.

Recent articles

ForbesHow Gupshup turned into a profitable unicorn despite a pivot and two near-deaths

betanewsThe top conversational marketing trends in 2021

Forbes: Venture Capital-Backed Tech Firm Exits To Watch In 2021

FinovateSmart Messaging and the Rise of Fintech in India: A Conversation with Gupshup’s Beerud Sheth

abp: Gupshup launches Conversational Out-of-Home Ads


Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybiz.co, conducts CEO Interviews.

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