How Saravana Kumar Built Kovai.co into a Global SaaS Powerhouse with BizTalk360, Turbo360 & Document360

In this exclusive interaction with StartupTalky, Saravana Kumar, Founder and CEO of Kovai.co, shares the journey of building global products like BizTalk360, Turbo360, and Document360, a globally recognized SaaS product from India. What started as a two-week internal hackathon in 2017 to solve documentation challenges for BizTalk360 has evolved into Document360, now trusted by companies like VMware and McDonald’s. Saravana discusses the benefits and trade-offs of bootstrapping, the transformative impact of AI-powered tools like Eddy and interactive demos via Floik, and strategies for addressing common knowledge management gaps. He also talks about team incentives, enterprise integrations, and his vision of an AI-first knowledge platform that drives long-term value.

StartupTalky: Document360 began as an internal hackathon project. What challenge were you solving at the time, and how did that experiment evolve into a globally adopted SaaS platform?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: Back in 2017, we were running into serious limitations with the knowledge base that supported our core product, BizTalk360. We had outgrown the bundled helpdesk knowledge base and were battling problems like no version control, no auditing, accidental loss of months of work, poor search, no analytics, weak security permissions, and an overall painful editing and publishing process.

While in Redmond for our annual conference that October, I started researching alternatives, convinced that a dedicated knowledge base product would solve our problems. Instead, I discovered a market gap: enterprise solutions were too complex and heavy, while online tools were superficial, great landing pages but poor depth when it came to real-world workflows.

That frustration turned into an idea: If we couldn’t find a product that met the standards we needed, we’d build it. I spent six weeks creating a detailed technical specification, mapping out features, UI wireframes, and the stack we’d use. Then, in December 2017, I pulled our entire 35-person engineering team into a two‑week hackathon. By the end of those 14 intense days, Document360 was born as a functional MVP.

What began as an internal experiment grew through a “product-first” philosophy. We launched v1 in June 2018, listened closely to early customers, iterated quickly, and improved relentlessly. Two years later, Document360 became a platform trusted by startups, Fortune 100s, and universities around the world, including Microsoft, Harvard, and Monday.com, to power their knowledge bases.

StartupTalky: You’ve scaled multiple SaaS products under Kovai.co without any external funding. What has been the biggest benefit and the biggest trade-off of staying bootstrapped?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: The biggest benefit of staying bootstrapped is control over our vision, our pace, and our priorities. We get to build products the way we believe they should be built: focusing on long-term value instead of short-term metrics. There’s no outside pressure to “grow at any cost,” so we can take the time to listen to customers, iterate, and only ship when it’s right. That’s why every product under Kovai.co—BizTalk360, Document360, and Turbo360 was born from a real pain point we experienced firsthand, not from a boardroom mandate.

But there’s a trade-off. Bootstrapping means we grow with the resources we have. In the early years, that meant slower hiring, saying “no” to a lot of ideas, and wearing multiple hats myself. There’s no big funding cushion to fall back on, you have to be scrappy and disciplined.

Looking back, though, that constraint shaped who we are today. It forced us to be customer-first, to focus on building strong products and relationships. And that foundation is what has taken Kovai.co from one product in my London apartment to 250+ people, three global SaaS products, and customers like BBC, Toyota, and Pfizer, all without a single dollar of external funding.

StartupTalky: With Eddy’s AI chatbot and the acquisition of Floik for interactive demos, how is Document360 transforming the way knowledge is created and consumed?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: Knowledge management is no longer just about storing articles. It’s about making knowledge accessible, interactive, and intelligent.

With Eddy, our AI-powered chatbot, customers and employees can now find answers instantly within the knowledge base. Instead of digging through dozens of articles, Eddy understands the question, searches across all your documentation, and delivers the exact context in real time. Since the arrival of ChatGPT, user expectations have changed dramatically. People no longer want to hunt through pages of documentation. They expect fast, accurate, and personalized answers tailored to their exact question.

The acquisition of Floik AI takes this a step further. Creating product guides and onboarding content has always been a time‑intensive process. Floik’s interactive demo technology changes that. Steps can now be auto-captured, AI drafts the guide, and within minutes, you have clickable product tours, walkthroughs, and interactive videos, all integrated directly into Document360.

Together, Eddy and Floik AI are redefining how knowledge is both created and consumed: faster to produce, easier to keep up to date, and far more engaging to explore. Instead of reading long manuals, teams can chat with Eddy or follow an interactive guide. This is where knowledge management is headed, smarter and more intuitive, and that’s exactly what we’re building at Document360.

StartupTalky: With users across sectors like SaaS, healthcare, and education, what are the most common documentation gaps or inefficiencies companies struggle with? How does Document360 help them move from scattered knowledge to structured, searchable systems?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: Common Documentation Gaps:

• Organization Silos: Teams maintain their own docs, leaving no shared single source of truth. This leads to duplication, outdated content, and inconsistent information flow.
• Missing, outdated, or incorrect information: Documentation often lacks critical detail, coding examples, or up-to-date context, especially as products evolve rapidly
• Weak search and navigation: When instructions and tutorials are scattered, users struggle to find relevant content quickly
• Lack of feedback loops and content KPIs: Without analytics or structured review workflows, organizations can’t easily surface content gaps or prioritize updates.

These issues show up differently depending on the sector:

• In SaaS, rapidly iterating products lead to stale docs and frustrated onboarding experiences.
• In healthcare, documentation inefficiencies can range from missing internal SOPs to inconsistent record‑keeping, causing delays, errors, and clinician burnout
• In education, legacy knowledge often lives in scattered formats (PDFs, slide decks, email threads), making searchability and consistency a real struggle.

StartupTalky: Over the years, Document360 has introduced advanced features like version control, team analytics, multilingual support, and AI-powered search. Which of these innovations do you believe has been a turning point in winning over enterprise clients, and why?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: While all of these features, version control, analytics, multilingual support, and AI-powered search, have been crucial, if I had to pick a turning point for winning over enterprise clients, it would be version control combined with structured workflows.

For large organizations, documentation isn’t just a reference. It’s a living system with multiple contributors, compliance requirements, and constant change. Before Document360, many of them struggled with accidental overwrites, no history of changes, and no clear publishing process. Introducing version control, draft–review–publish workflows, and full audit trails gave these teams confidence that their knowledge base could scale without chaos.

That foundation then made the other innovations more impactful. Analytics showed them where the gaps were. Multilingual support opened up global audiences. And more recently, our AI-powered search and Eddy chatbot have transformed how their users consume knowledge, shifting from “searching through hundreds of pages” to getting fast, contextual answers.

In short, version control earned its trust, and AI-powered access is now delighting its users. That one-two combination is what helped Document360 stand out for enterprise customers.

StartupTalky: Earlier this year, Kovai.co granted INR 14.5 crore (~US $1.6M) in bonuses to 140 employees. What motivated this initiative, and what impact has it had on employee engagement and retention?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: The “Together We Grow” bonus was born from a simple idea: when the company does well, everyone who helped build it should benefit in a tangible way.

Back in late 2021, I wanted to find a way to create real wealth for our people, not ESOPs that might pay off only if we raise funding or go public, and not performance-based incentives that can feel subjective. Instead, we set aside a guaranteed pool and committed that everyone who had been with us before or during 2022 and stayed for three years would share in it.

In January this year, we distributed INR 14.5 crore (~US $1.6M) to 140 of those long-term team members. What’s been most rewarding is hearing how people are using this to achieve personal milestones, paying off home loans, investing in their children’s education, buying their first car, or clearing wedding expenses.

The impact on engagement and retention has been profound. People see this not as a one-time payout, but as a sign that Kovai.co values loyalty and shared growth. It has strengthened trust and commitment across the company. For me, it was never just about money, it was about sending a clear message: when we grow, we grow together.

StartupTalky: How do integrations with tools like Slack, Zendesk, or Freshdesk fit into your growth strategy? Are there new partnerships on the horizon?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: Integrations with tools like Slack, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Teams, and others are a big part of how we make Document360 fit naturally into a customer’s existing workflow. For many of our enterprise clients, the knowledge base is only valuable if it’s accessible in the tools their teams already use every day—whether that’s support agents inside Zendesk, engineers collaborating in Slack, or customer success teams working out of Freshdesk.

Instead of asking people to come to Document360, we bring Document360 to where they are. This drives product adoption, reduces friction, and helps organizations turn their knowledge base into a living part of their support and operations ecosystem.

Looking ahead, partnerships are a key growth driver for us. The recent acquisition of Floik will also open doors for partnerships around interactive product demos and onboarding. Our goal is to create a seamless, connected experience so knowledge flows wherever it’s needed.

StartupTalky: How does Document360 approach AI development in a way that protects user data and complies with regulations like GDPR?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: Document360 takes a privacy‑first and regulation‑aware approach to AI development, especially with features like Eddy AI. EU-based hosting, strict encryption, privacy-first data design, transparent and auditable AI outputs, masking of sensitive data. All underpinned by GDPR and EU AI Act compliance to deliver an AI experience that’s not just smart, but secure and compliant.

StartupTalky: What’s one defining lesson you’ve learned on your startup journey that continues to shape how you lead, build teams, or make product decisions at Document360?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: The most influential lesson I have learned is to stay calm under pressure and act decisively. A calm thought process will help avoid hasty decision-making and enable the team to work towards the objective when things don’t work out as expected. We make product decisions the same way. 

I believe in getting the tough conversations out in front early. Honest and timely feedback is a key factor that helps people develop. That is how happy teams are built while establishing high performance and trust in the long term.

StartupTalky: You’ve built a globally recognized SaaS product from India without following the typical Silicon Valley playbook. How has your personal philosophy shaped your leadership style, risk appetite, and approach to long-term value creation?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: A lot of it, I think, really comes down to a principle that I always believed in: growth must be collective. Since day one, my priority has been to establish a culture where the company and the team develop together.

Building Kovai.co in India, instead of the Silicon Valley blueprint, was a very deliberate choice. The technology landscape of India has grown by leaps and bounds, and there are no reasons anymore why we should be moving to the Western world to develop world-class products. Our presence in Coimbatore also means that we are able to directly impact the economic and skill growth of the local population, which would be my personal contribution. 

Everything we do is centered on long-term value creation. Simply put, our philosophy is this: grow together, take calculated risks, and make a difference, not only in business but also in the people and communities we serve.

StartupTalky: Turbo360 and BizTalk360 serve different needs for developers and enterprises. What key challenges do these products solve for your users, and how have these solutions evolved since their launch?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: We built BizTalk360 and Turbo360 with the goal of addressing very specific operational challenges that we faced firsthand. BizTalk360 was designed to give enterprises greater visibility, control, and governance over their Microsoft BizTalk Server environments. What started as a basic monitoring tool has evolved into a comprehensive operations and analytics platform, offering end-to-end monitoring, alerting, automated remediation, auditing, and compliance capabilities. It enables organizations to eliminate manual checks, reduce downtime, and strengthen governance and security across critical integration systems. 

Turbo360, on the other hand, has a unique evolution story. We began as ServiceBus360, focused on managing Azure Service Bus messaging infrastructures. As the Azure ecosystem grew, it evolved into Serverless360, expanding its capabilities to monitor and manage broader serverless components such as Logic Apps, Event Hubs, Functions and more. Today, it has been rebranded as Turbo360 to reflect its transformation into a comprehensive Azure Cloud Management Platform. It empowers cloud teams to optimize cloud costs, monitor distributed applications, and trace complex business workflows through unified dashboards and automation. Turbo360 is the only cloud management platform specifically built for Azure, helping customers control sprawling cloud environments by providing contextual visibility into resources and spending patterns. 

Over the years, both products have evolved through continuous listening to customer feedback and addressing real-world pain points. BizTalk360 has strengthened its automation, compliance, and hybrid monitoring features, while Turbo360 has expanded to cover FinOps and cost-intelligent insights. Together, they form a powerful ecosystem that bridges the operational gap between traditional enterprise integration and modern cloud-native environments.

StartupTalky: With AI, automation, and emerging technologies transforming SaaS, how do you see Turbo360 and BizTalk360 adapting, and what new features or improvements can users expect in the near future?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: AI and automation are reshaping the way enterprises manage and optimize their operations, and both Turbo360 and BizTalk360 are evolving to lead this transformation.  

Turbo360 has already introduced LLM-based cost forecasting, leveraging large language models to predict cloud spending trends and provide proactive cost optimization recommendations. Moving forward, we have a roadmap to develop AI capabilities such as predictive anomaly detection, natural-language cost analysis and automated right-sizing suggestions. These features will enable users to interact with their Azure environments in intuitive ways, uncover insights instantly, and automate corrective actions while maintaining full transparency and data security. 

BizTalk360 has evolved into a highly mature and robust solution over the years. Our primary focus is on ensuring customer satisfaction by continuously enhancing the product experience for our existing users. We are committed to delivering ongoing improvements, particularly in strengthening our monitoring capabilities and automated actions. We plan to incorporate AI-driven capabilities for proactive system resource monitoring, forecasting message transaction failures, and providing intelligent recommendations for automated task flows. These enhancements enable intuitive management, instant insights, and automated corrective actions with full visibility.

StartupTalky: As knowledge management evolves, what’s your future vision for Document360 in the next 3-5 years? Will you expand into new product lines, seek funding, or double down on enterprise solutions?

Mr. Saravana Kumar: Our vision for Document360 in the next 3-5 years is to become an AI-first knowledge management platform, enabling teams to access, manage, and act on knowledge faster and better. We will work on enriching enterprise solutions with AI-enhanced features, increasing automation, and rendering better actionable insights. 

For now, we’re prioritizing sustainable growth over fundraising and investing in products that really work for users. Finally, we aim for Document360 to become the must-have knowledge base of companies across the globe, bringing efficiency and teamwork while staying aligned with our culture and customer-centric approach.