Technology for MSMEs: Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma-backed email collaboration startup Hiver on Thursday launched its new product Hiver Lite to help small businesses with better team emails management. The ‘shared inbox solution’ helps Gmail users share group emails such as support@, invoices@ and info@ with their teams to ensure important emails are not missed and the team members don’t have to use forwards and CCs to collaborate. The new tool will provide all functionalities of a typical mailbox that includes “ability to assign emails, add contextual notes for coworkers, automatic detection of duplicate responses, email templates, and basic automation,” the company said.
By using “inefficient methods” such as Google Groups, or forwards and CCs for sending group emails with team members, “unfortunately, what they (small businesses) save in terms of cost, they end up losing in time spent on managing these emails,” said Niraj Ranjan, CEO and Co-founder, Hiver. The company, which claimed to save 264 hours a year per business, had raised funding from Paytm’s founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma back in 2011, as per deals tracker Crunchbase.
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The global collaboration software market is expected to grow from $11.4 billion in 2019 to $13.5 billion by 2023 growing at a CAGR of 4.3 per cent, as per Statista while India software-as-a-service (SaaS) market will grow 36 per cent annually to $3.4 billion by 2022, as per a Nasscom report. Bengaluru-based Hiver was founded by Niraj Ranjan and Nitesh Nandy and has more than 1,500 customers including Lonely Planet, Harvard University, Canva, PluralSight, Flexport etc. The startup’s pricing starts from $7 per month to $57 per month which includes chat and email support, customer satisfaction surveys, scheduled data exports, call-back support, onboarding training etc.