In the early 2000s, mobile communication started picking up pace in emerging markets like India and SMS (short messaging service) became the primary channel for interaction. Beerud Sheth, along with his friends from IIT Mumbai – Rakesh Mathur and Milind R Agarwal — wanted to tap into this opportunity. They launched Gupshup as a social network in 2007, built around SMS. The goal was to create a platform where people could join interest-based groups and share updates via text.
“The early days were exhilarating. By 2010, we had 70 million users, and it became the largest social network in India. I thought we had something big on our hands,” Sheth says. However, to their surprise, the business model, which was based on subsidising SMS costs for users, quickly became unsustainable as costs skyrocketed, and it was no longer easy to monetise because of regulatory restrictions on advertising.
But 54-year-old Sheth, co-founder and CEO, Gupshup, didn’t give up and decided to pivot to a B2B platform that offered messaging solutions for businesses, in 2011. This model enabled businesses to send transaction-based communications like OTPs, payment confirmations, and customer support messages. In no time, Gupshup began to see traction with businesses that needed a reliable way to engage with customers. “We didn’t start with a 100-slide deck. We started with a hunch, a prototype, a live product — and let the market steer us.” Over time, Gupshup expanded from just SMS to a full-stack conversational messaging platform across WhatsApp, Instagram, voice, chatbots, and more.
But even after the pivot, growth wasn’t easy. The firm faced another major hurdle in 2013, when its revenues couldn’t keep up with the expenses. “It was a make-or-break moment, but we continued to focus on improving the platform, investing in infrastructure, and ensuring customer satisfaction,” says Sheth. Over time, Gupshup grew into a leader in conversational messaging and eventually achieved profitability. As of FY24, Gupshup’s estimated revenue stands at $300 million, with a 40% year-on-year increase.
Sheth feels that Gupshup’s potential didn’t come from any one big idea but from a series of decisions that allowed them to adapt and innovate. “If there’s one lesson I have learned, it’s that the best research often comes after you launch. The market has a way of teaching you what works and what doesn’t, sometimes the hard way. You just have to stay curious, flexible, and willing to adapt.”
Sheth says that the journey so far has taught him something important: Be stubborn about your vision, but flexible with the path. “You can’t control timing, tech shifts, or regulation — but you can stay focused, adapt fast, and keep listening to the market. It took years, but the persistence paid off.”
Today, Gupshup delivers billions of messages every month, is a leading player in conversational AI, has over 100,000 developers and businesses as clients and is Meta’s biggest partner in terms of messaging volumes.
The problem-solver in him perhaps helped Sheth tide over the challenges life threw at him. “I was a curious kid. I liked figuring out how things worked. My dad had a real love for math, which rubbed off on me. My mom had this incredible ability to find creative workarounds in everyday life. I think that’s where I got my problem-solving instinct,” Sheth recalls.
“IIT Bombay is where everything shifted. The academics were intense. But what left the biggest mark were the friendships, the 3 am coding marathons, the drama rehearsals, and the sense that you were surrounded by people who were wired a little differently. It was a world of ideas, experimentation, and camaraderie,” he says.
After graduating in 1991, Sheth moved to Boston to pursue Master’s at MIT. He started out in distributed computing and published a paper on it, but over time, got more drawn to machine learning and AI. “The idea that a system could learn and adapt to individual users fascinated me,” he says.
Out of curiosity, he also signed up for a few business courses at MIT Sloan. “I wasn’t thinking about startups yet, but I was curious — how does tech become a product? How do systems connect with people?” he says. Around the same time, Sheth realised that academia wasn’t the space he could be in and dropped out of the PhD programme at MIT. He started working on Wall Street, first at Citibank and then at Merrill Lynch. His work there sharpened his analytical thinking and he wanted something that could give him ownership from end to end. “It was intense and intellectually stimulating, but after a while, it got monotonous. Just endless variations of buy low, sell high. I wanted something more creative,” he says.
By the mid-90s, that drive to start something on his own had started to solidify. He could see inefficiencies everywhere — how businesses hired, how projects got executed, how fragmented the access to skilled talent was across the globe. Then came the internet wave, with Netscape, Amazon and Yahoo. Sheth wanted to be part of this.
He began his entrepreneurial journey with Elance with his friends from IIT in 1998, which was rebranded to Upwork after a merger with O-Desk. “With Elance, our research was more hands-on than formal. We ran a small real-world experiment with IIT students to see if remote freelance work could deliver quality results. And it did. That experience taught me something valuable: when you are building in a new category, sometimes the best kind of research is just rolling up your sleeves and testing the core assumptions.”
In hindsight, Sheth knows they were ahead of their time. Not many could believe that businesses would trust freelancers they had never met, or that remote work was scalable. “But I knew the problem we were solving was real. I had seen the pattern from multiple angles.” He applied the same principle to Gupshup, which was founded in 2007 as a B2C social platform. “We weren’t reacting to trends. We were leaning into where we believed the world was headed,” he says. That, in a nutshell, is behind the Gupshup success story.