Exclusive: Exotel co-founder Ishwar Sridharan resigns amid top-level exits

Ishwar Sridharan, co-founder and COO of cloud telephony and customer engagement firm Exotel, has stepped down, Entrackr has learnt from an internal email shared with employees.

Sridharan, who spent over 14 years at the company, announced his departure in an internal email to employees on Monday. “Today marks my last official working day at Exotel. It’s been the most remarkable and productive professional days of my life,” he wrote, adding that he was proud of building an “institution built to last.”

Sridharan began his career at SAP Labs, later worked at Yahoo! as Principal Engineer and at Position2 as Engineering Manager, before co-founding Exotel in 2011.

His resignation follows a series of senior-level exits at the Bengaluru-based firm. “Since December 2024, Exotel has seen the departure of Angira Agrawal (India Business Head), Late Lalit Khosa (Senior Director, BFSI) and Sumanpreet Bhatia (VP of HR),” said a source on the condition of anonymity.

This series of exits comes after an earlier round of downsizing in early 2023 when Exotel laid off around 142 employees, about 15% of its workforce. The company had revised its Performance Improvement Plan policy, removing the requirement for prior warnings before placing employees under review.

Founded by Shivakumar Ganesan, Ishwar Sridharan, and Siddharth Ramesh, Exotel has raised over $100 million across multiple funding rounds and counts Blume Ventures, A91 Partners, and Sistema Asia among its backers. According to the startup data intelligence platform TheKredible, A91 Partners is the largest external stakeholder with a 25.7% stake followed by Blume Ventures.

Exotel directly competes with Gupshup-owned Knowlarity, MyOperator, Ozonotel, and Tata Communications, and a few others.