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Bhavin
Turakhia needs no introduction
in the domain and hosting worlds.
He and his brother, Divyank,
found Directi
and went on to sell the
company for $100 million in
2013. Their successes,
collectively and individually have
gotten only bigger since
then, including Divyank's $900
million sale of Media.net
in 2016. In the meantime, Bhavin
founded new gTLD registry operator
Radix,
messenger and online collaboration
innovator Flock,
Titan,
a next-gen email suite for the
small business customers of web
hosts and domain registrars, and
co-founded fast rising banking
tech company Zeta
with Ramki Gaddipati
(Bhavin serves as CEO, Rami as CTO).
The
Zeta venture is on the verge of
upending how business is done in
the banking world. After watching Bhavin's
presentation (under 10
minutes) outlining what Zeta can
do for banks and their customers,
I want my bank to adopt it now!
It is so impressive that Soft
Bank announced
a $250 million investment
in Zeta Monday, valuing the
company at $1.45 billion
and producing the tech world's
latest unicorn. The proceeds from
this funding round will be used to
accelerate Zeta’s growth in the United
States and Europe,
including efforts to scale its
operations, team, and platform to
better meet the demands of its
expanding customer base.
Turakhia
noted, “Most banks are using decades-old
software built at a time when Mainframes
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Bhavin
Turakhia
Zeta CEO & Co-Founder
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and Cobol were in vogue. As a result, they have been slow to innovate and
provide poor user experiences. With Zeta, financial institutions can now
leverage a modern, cloud-native platform and improve speed to market,
agility, cost to income ratio, and user experience.” Among its customers,
Zeta counts over 10 banks and 25 fintechs across eight companies, including Sodexo,
a leading issuer of employee benefits and rewards that touts over 30
million global users; Standard Chartered Bank; and HDFC Bank,
the 14th largest bank in the world by market cap.
I
had a call with Bhavin this afternoon to learn more about Zeta, as well as
to catch up on the latest developments with Radix, Titan, and Flock. The
interesting thing about Zeta is Bhavin told me when that journey began, the only
thing he knew about the banking business was that it was broken!
So he and partner Ramki, starting in 2014, spent a full year studying the
banking industry to learn everything they could about systems,
how they made their money, where improvements could be made, etc. They
officially launched in 2015 and the company has been growing by leaps and
bounds ever since and now has approximately 700 people on staff.
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Bhavin
Turakhia speaking at the 2019
NamesCon Global conference in Las Vegas. |
We
talked a good bit about how Bhavin identifies new opportunities
and his process for finding solutions to problems others
have failed to solve - something he has proven to be successful at
over and over again. Turakhia said that he always tries to start off
with no pre-conceived notions. Instead, he and his team members
set about doing exhaustive research on the subject, gathering
mountains of data that they then mine to zero on bottlenecks
and how something can be done better.
Radix
was built in the same way. Bhavin's team began by considering over
600 TLDs, a number that their research whittled down to 31
and, once competitive bidding began for the TLDs, allowing them to
determine which ones were the best values, they finally
pulled the trigger on 10 (including .tech, .host, .store and
.online, among others). With just those 10 TLDs, Radix commanded over
25% market share of new gTLD domain registrations in 2020 and
their revenue
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has grown by double
digits annually. Bhavin credited Radix CEO Sandeep
Ramchandani and his entire team for that performance but
was also proud to say he was absolutely certain that no one did
more research and market study than Radix did before making their new
TLD investments. |
Another
observation from our conversation today that I found especially compelling
was Bhavin's comment that virtually every business idea starts
with a domain name. An online presence is an absolute must
(anyone who didn't know that before, in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic,
knows it now). Bhavin said that is creating a fabulous opportunity
for domain registries, registrars and domain investors (the latter group is
already benefiting from an aftermarket sales boom). We are fortunate to be
in the right place at the right time.
While
the Turakhia brothers have expanded their entrepreneurial reach well
beyond the domain world, people in our industry will always have an
interest in what they are doing. Their process works and we can all
learn from studying it, but there is also a pride factor. I've always said
that the domain business attracts some of the smartest, most creative people
I've ever met - people who would succeed in anything they did. By
doing what they have done in such disparate fields - and doing it the right
way - Bhavin and Divyank have proven that and, by extension
made our industry look good as well.
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