Looking into the future: SuperOps.ai CEO Arvind Parthiban on TubbTalk

You can listen to the entire interview here. Edited excerpts of the interview:

Richard: Before we jump into things, for my listeners who perhaps aren't familiar with SuperOps.ai, can you explain a little bit more about what you do to help manage service providers?

Arvind: Firstly, thank you so much for having me on this podcast. So for all the audience here, we are SuperOps.ai; we call our modern PSA and RMM philosophy the main differentiator of our platform. We have bundled five different products, PSA, RMM, IT documentation, and project management in a single platform, built together from the ground up. We want to help MSPs run their business better and get to profitability. That's the essence of SuperOps.ai.”

Richard: Yes! For anybody listening, there are a lot of really good tools out there in the PSA and RMM markets. But some of them are starting to show their age a little bit. That's natural because they'd been built a long time ago. And they've got a lot of bloat on there. They've got a lot of legacy issues, technical debt, and things.

So the reason I'm such a fan of SuperOps is it's built from the ground up, it's for the modern MSPs, it’s very progressive. But, it's about to get a whole lot bigger and better.

You've got some big news to share. Arvind, can you spill the beans for us?

Arvind: We just closed Series B funding! We raised $12.4 million this round. The round has been led by internal investor, Addition. We also have a new investor participating in this round — March Capital, one of the leading investors in the US, along with Matrix Partners India. With the Series B round, total fundraising has gone up to $30 million.

Richard: That's incredible. Congratulations! Just before we came on air, I was applauding the magnificent impression you've made on the entire managed service industry. You've got a presence in India, in America, in the UK, and all across the world. This is really, really great news for you AND great news for the industry.

But what does this mean for the managed service provider space? And specifically for the MSPs who choose SuperOps.ai?

Arvind: One is we're going to expand globally. We are a US headquartered company. And we want to have a local presence. We have hired Juan Fernandez, who's going to help us, be the face of SuperOps in the US, and lead the channel. He's going to be the Channel Chief over there, set up a team, and set up the head office.

So GTM expansion is going to be our number one goal. The second most important thing is that every industry is going through a transformation because of the new AI. Everybody's talking about ChatGPT and Gen AI. But I want all of us in the MSP space to not look at AI as a feature or a threat, we need to rather look at how we are going to look at the industry pain points differently with AI as a weapon. It depends on how you use it. Back in the day, we used to listen to music on a tape recorder or a CD player. Now we are listening to music on Spotify. The music is the same, but the gadgets we use have changed, right?

AI is the gadget. Your pain points are the same. AI is the gadget you can use to make your life better. We have hired an R&D department and a head of AI for SuperOps in New Zealand. The team is only going to focus on how we can completely redo every single thing in a better way with AI. So the second investment is going to be in AI.

And the third investment I'm going to make is to expand and also accommodate our IT market. So we will be thinking of entering the IT market by mid of next year.

Mainly, there are three areas we are going to invest in: (a) Global expansion in the US and the UK (b) R&D in AI and (c) SuperOps IT version.

Richard: Sounds wonderful, the AI piece especially. You're already well ahead of the curve with the AI. The clue is in the name. And it's an exciting time, isn't it? You and I were speaking not so long ago that AI really didn't mean very much to the managed service provider industry. Perhaps we were a little bit ahead of the curve. But as you said, now that Chat GPT and other tools have come along, AI is in the mainstream. And then MSPs are saying, “Okay, this is good for us, let’s check it out.

AI is a toy at the moment, but how can we use it to make our lives easier makes all the difference. And SuperOps.ai is really doing that.

I'm so excited to see what you can achieve now that you're going to fuel the AI revolution. 

I'll ask a question that's probably on the minds of lots of people. Why did you choose to raise this funding now? Is there anything special?

Arvind: To be honest, we didn't even pitch it. We were having great growth. I was just sending an e-mail to my internal investors about how we are growing. Right now the market condition is bad; a lot of companies are trying to keep up with growth or they're stagnant. And that's how the reality of the SaaS market generally is. My investors said, “This is good, you are going at a very fast pace. Why don't you double down and grow faster? We are ready to top up!”

Initially, I wanted to raise further down the road, when the valuation is a bit higher. So I said Thanks, but not now. But after careful consideration, we thought a global expansion would prove to be useful to us. We want to be where our customers are. We are already at 350% growth. By the end of the year, we will be almost at 600% growth. These numbers invited investors, and we raised ahead of time. To be honest, I didn't even have a pitch deck at the time 🙂

Richard: Great, I just want to reiterate why this is such a big deal. We have seen a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the managed service market over recent years.

But right now, I’ve had many vendors tell me they are getting incredible amounts of pressure put on them by their investors to turn a profit and grow faster. It's blood in the water out there at the moment.

The SaaS market is really, really tough. So the fact that Arvind and the team at SuperOps are having people throw money at them, just speaks to how highly they are regarded in the market.

And Arvind has got a phenomenal reputation within the SaaS community, as an investor, and as somebody who has built great businesses before.

Let's dig in a little bit further, then. So what new features can we expect from the SuperOps product going forward? Could you give us any specifics without giving away too many trade secrets on what we might expect in the future?

Arvind: Sure, first off, I have an announcement to make. We are opening up beta access for network monitoring. This was not in our roadmap, initially. We listened to our customers, and we changed our roadmap to accommodate network monitoring.

So we have three segments of MSPs. Emerging, maturing, and advanced MSPs. The emerging and maturing MSPs especially, use a PSA-RMM platform, and a separate network monitoring tool. That's been the norm. We thought a platform should accommodate everything an MSP manages, whether it’s a laptop or a router. So we built network monitoring as part of our unified platform. As we speak, we are launching beta access today. We want to show you what we have built, give you access, and get feedback to know what more we need to get you started with network monitoring.

We are also launching Smart Tracker by the end of the year, which will help MSPs improve technician efficiency. It’s a foolproof efficiency tracker, which eliminates the worry of missed worklogs and incorrect payments. It will tell you how much time you have spent on a particular job, automatically track it, and help you get paid accurately. We are also looking at several wow enhancements in the billing process. So that's our quick roadmap plan.

Richard: “Quick roadmap”, you say, but there's so much going on.

I want to share a peek behind the curtains here. I've been an advisor and a friend to SuperOps.ai for quite some time. I was very kindly invited to speak with the development team and give them ideas.

But I've never come across a company or I've rarely come across a company that listens so much to feedback from end users and changes the product accordingly.

Every piece of feedback that I've given them, they've taken on board. And I know there are other experts in the industry they listen to. These features are things that people are, on the one hand, asking for a lot. On the other hand, I think they don't realize how much they need them. Smart tracking, for instance, is going to bring a significant change to a lot of MSPs who struggle to track their time and bill time effectively to clients. 

I'm really excited to see what's coming next because these are great features that people want, not just fluff.

Arvind: Yes, and we are also significantly investing in AI features, from the smallest features like sending an email without drafting it or changing the mood of a reply instantly to big features. Everything that will make you work much smarter.

Richard: Great! Now let's change track a little bit. You mentioned that you took on Juan Fernandez as SuperOps.ai’s new channel chief.

I have known Juan from his days running an MSP and writing the book, the MSP Handbook. Tell us how that came about.

Arvind: For the audience here, we have put together a Customer Advisory Board where we bring in great industry experts and MSPs of all sizes, and we'll show them what we're building, and we'll get their inputs, and then we deliver those features. That's how SuperOps.ai operates. We have put together a board in London and we wanted to do it in New York this time. 

Juan was one of the people on the board. He was asking us all kinds of important questions, which at one point led to me saying, “You know, Juan, you should be on this side of the table, not on the other side.” It was a joke. But I kind of felt that we needed someone who could actually have the same enthusiasm that SuperOps.ai has about the industry. 

A few conversations later, we got him on board.

Richard: No doubt, getting somebody with that breadth of managed service experience, somebody who's been there and done, somebody who knows what MSPs want is a really, really smart choice for you.

Also, I know you've things coming up on the community side of things. You’ve had SuperSummit in London, you have the Virtual Summit going on. You've been a really strong part of the managed service provider community globally. But what are your plans for the community going forward?

Arvind: Absolutely. There are so many communities already, one might think, ‘Why another community?’ We definitely want a forum where we want to help the MSPs, we are all doing this to make MSPs’ lives better.

We are launching a SuperOps community to start with customers who will be able to ask any questions about the product. And we are also trying to take a new approach, where this community can help each other. It can be an influencer, a vendor, or an MSP. 

We need all the love and support from the industry to help us make this community into a place where we can actually go back to, be vulnerable, and reach out for support.

Richard: Even from day one, when people didn't even know who SuperOps.ai was, you were actively engaging with the community in such a respectful way.

So I'd encourage everybody listening to take a look at this community, no matter whatever tool you’re using, because there are going to be some of the best minds in the industry getting involved there. It's a great way to learn and to share your own experience as well. 

Overall, it's a really good news story in the middle of quite a challenging time for the managed service industry and the vendors that are in it. 

Exciting times!

Arvind: Exciting times. Indeed.