The office had a curtain in it. On one side was a living room; on the other, four men trying to build software that would bill businesses every month. That is how Chargebee started in 2011, in a co-founder's drawing room in Chennai, with late-night research and long discussions.
The founders came from two worlds. Krish Subramanian and Rajaraman Santhanam had studied together and had both long wanted to run their own company. One account says Subramanian was working at Cognizant; another says he spent years at Zoho. Santhanam, Saravanan KP and Thiyagarajan T had been building SaaS and cloud products at Zoho. Subramanian and Santhanam quit their jobs and brought the other two in.
We do not have documented accounts of near-failures, fights between the four founders, or personal costs, and it would be dishonest to invent them.
The timing was awkward. Subscription and SaaS models were still a novelty, and subscription services were not popular in India. Selling a billing tool for businesses that barely existed locally meant looking outward, to customers abroad, from a Chennai living room.
Money came slowly. An angel round in 2012. Then in 2014 Accel made its first big investment, a modest sum by later standards. In 2015 Tiger Global led a $5 million round. Nothing explosive, just steady compounding.
Then the market caught up. In April 2021, a $125 million round led by Sapphire Ventures valued Chargebee at $1.4 billion, a valuation that reportedly tripled in six months. The company said revenue was doubling year on year. Less than a year later, in February 2022, Tiger Global and Sequoia co-led a $250 million round at $3.5 billion.
The record is thin on the harder moments. We do not have documented accounts of near-failures, fights between the four founders, or personal costs, and it would be dishonest to invent them. What the sources do show is a company that stayed small and patient for about a decade before the money arrived.
By 2024 one third-party estimate placed annual recurring revenue at about $202.6 million. Santhanam has said the company plans to invest R&D in the Indian market, even though it sells mainly to the world.
The lesson for a first-time founder: you can build a global product from a rented living room, if you pick a boring problem, a category that is about to grow, and the patience to outlast the years when nobody has heard of it.