Bengaluru: Stack Overflow, the most trusted platform for developers and technologists visited by more than 100 million people each month, today announced a strategic partnership with Times Bridge in order to bring its SaaS knowledge management and collaboration offering, Stack Overflow for Teams, to India. Times Bridge, a leading global investments and partnerships firm, will enable Stack Overflow to launch, scale and expand its reach in India, the world’s largest open internet market.
Times Bridge, a division of The Times Group, India’s oldest and largest media company, also made an investment as part of Stack Overflow’s Series E fundraise of $85 million, announced in July, which was led by GIC with participation from Silver Lake Waterman and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures (USV). The round brings Stack Overflow’s total funding to $153M.
With news of this strategic partnership and investment, Stack Overflow joins Times Bridge’s global portfolio of market-leading partners, mission-driven companies, which includes consumer and enterprise businesses like Airbnb, Coursera, Headspace, Houzz, Smule, Uber and Wattpad, among others.
Stack Overflow is one of the 50 most popular web destinations in the world, with India bringing the largest share of traffic to the site. This partnership enables the Teams product to enter and gain traction in India at a dynamic time for the SaaS sector: at more than 3 million, the Indian software developer population is the second-largest in the world after the US. The SaaS market in India is growing at 30 percent CAGR, having touched $3.5 billion in revenue by FY20, per National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), a trade association of Indian Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing companies.
The partnership will focus on rolling out Stack Overflow for Teams across the Indian market. Stack Overflow for Teams is a secure collaboration platform for developers and technologists to break down silos and work asynchronously to ship products faster, accelerate onboarding, improve customer experience and drive innovation. Stack Overflow for Teams is used by thousands of companies including Bloomberg, Box, Elastic, Expensify, Microsoft, and Zapier. Stack Overflow for Teams is seeing rapid adoption as startups and large enterprises embrace platforms to streamline developer and technologist workflows and integrate tools for transparency, security and confidential communication. Over 200,000 paid users across more than 5,000 teams use the platform across Engineering, Product Management, Data Science and Customer Support. Millions of Indian developers already rely on Stack Overflow’s public platform, and the adoption of Teams will enable mission-critical knowledge management for enterprises.
By providing subcontinent-wide market leadership and drawing on the unmatched reach of Times Group assets, Times Bridge’s initiatives will ensure Stack Overflow’s product, partnerships and positioning are optimized for adoption and impact across India. In addition to being a strategic partner, Times Bridge will also be Stack Overflow’s sales partner in India and will introduce its Teams product to enterprises across a wide range of sectors, including IT/ITES, Consumer Tech, Telecom, BFSI, and Consultancies, among others.Times Bridge’s unique influence-and-insight-oriented approach and dedicated resources, will accelerate the growth of Stack’s SaaS offering and advance its mission in the world’s most developer-rich market.
Prashanth Chandrasekar, Stack Overflow’s CEO, said, “India is among our largest and most vibrant user markets but remains largely untapped in the context of our Teams SaaS product. We are thrilled to partner with Times Bridge and The Times Group, whose enterprise partnership experience, local know-how and reach across the Indian market will help us empower developers and technologists in every corner of the country to collaborate and innovate together.’’
Rishi Jaitly, CEO of Times Bridge, said: “At Times Bridge, our mission is to enable India immersion and impact for the world’s best ideas — and Stack Overflow is, without doubt, one of the world’s premier, proven ideas. We’re delighted to welcome Stack Overflow to our global portfolio of partners — and to partner with a company ready to approach the Indian market with energy and empathy, and unlock outsized global value along the way.”
