Exclusive: Customer conversation platform Exotel suffers data breach

Customer conversation platform Exotel has suffered a data breach that may have compromised details of its clients, sources familiar with the matter told Entrackr.

“A massive data breach was reported on Friday which happened last week. Exotel works with many large companies, including financial institutions and their data have been breached,” said one of the sources requesting anonymity.

The company’s chief executive Shivakumar Ganesan also did a town hall or emergency meeting on Friday, the person said.

Confirming the data breach, an Exotel spokesperson said, “We recently identified unauthorized access to one of our cloud Infrastructure stamps in Singapore and acted swiftly to contain the issue. Importantly, no sensitive personal or financial information was compromised.”

“The breach was limited and majority customers were not affected. We have already notified those impacted, providing them with detailed information and recommended steps to mitigate any potential risks,” the spokesperson added.

The 13-year-old firm offers voice and SMS contact center capabilities for businesses to manage their customer engagement over the cloud. Besides India, it operates in the UAE, Indonesia, Africa, and the US.

Another source said that Exotel stores call recordings and SMS of its clients on the cloud. “AWS private keys got breached from some developer. The hackers got access to the database and source code. Zomato, Khatabook and others became victims of the breach,” added the source.

In a response to this, Exotel’s spokesperson clarified, “While we store call recordings and SMS of clients on the cloud none of these have been accessed or impacted in this incident.”

Confirming the data breach to Entrackr, a Zomato spokesperson said, “We have been made aware of the data breach at Exotel. So far, from what we know, our merchant and customer data is fully secure and no payment related sensitive information has been compromised. Our teams are actively working with Exotel to ascertain more details on the ongoing investigation.”

Entrackr has reached out to Khatabook to verify this.

The Steadview Capital and A91 Partners-backed company reported a 32.1% spike in its collection to Rs 420 crore whereas its losses jumped 2.5 fold to Rs 109 crore. It is yet to file its annual report for FY24 but the firm projected a 50% revenue growth for the last fiscal year (FY25).

Exotel directly competes with Knowlarity, MyOperator, Ozonotel, and Tata Communications, and a few others. Peak XV-backed Knowlarity was acquired by conversational messaging unicorn Gupshup in a $100 million deal in February 2022.