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San Jose and Bengaluru-based Hiver, a Gmail-based customer service solution provider, on Friday announced it has raised $4 million in debt financing from Singapore-based debt fund Mars Growth Capital. 

Niraj Ranjan, CEO and Co-founder of Hiver, said: “Last year, we shifted our focus from the shared inbox market to the highly-competitive customer service helpdesk market, and we have seen an overwhelmingly positive response. We see a huge business opportunity with Hiver, in simplifying customer service for businesses by bringing it back to Gmail. 

 “With this funding, we will aggressively expand on our sales and marketing efforts to grow our customer base and double revenues in 2021 and 2022.”

Built for Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) users, Hiver, founded in 2012, helps teams collaborate on customer service emails right from Gmail. It offers functionalities such as email assignment, tracking, automations, analytics, service-level agreements, and business hours right out of the box. 

More than 1,500 companies from over 30 countries use Hiver to manage customer communication, including Vacasa, Upwork, AppsFlyer, Flexport, Harvard University, and Kiwi.com.

Mars Growth Capital is a joint venture between Mitsubishi UFJ Financial’s core banking unit, MUFG Bank, and Liquidity Capital. It looks to provide debt facilities to fast-growing startups in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, especially for ecommerce and software-as-a-service (SaaS) verticals. 

 “Mars Growth Capital has a unique AI (artificial intelligence) platform that supports growth debt for APAC ecommerce and SaaS startups,” said investment director Ryutaro Edward Hiroshima. “Hiver is a growing company that perfectly fits our AI model.”

After an initial round of angel funding to the tune of $130,000 in 2012 from Citrix Startup Accelerator and Paytm Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Hiver raised a $4-million Series A round in 2018 from venture capital firms Kalaari Capital and Kae Capital.