POWERED BY TEXT

Route Mobile, a cloud communications platform for enterprises, has had a dream run on the bourses since its listing last year. At the core of this success is the humble text message.

- Abhik Sen

SEPTEMBER 21, 2020, turned out to be a red-letter day for brothers Rajdipkumar and Sandipkumar Gupta. That day, Route Mobile, which they co-founded in 2004, made a stellar debut on the bourses. More importantly, it was the culmination of a plan they put in motion some 15 years ago: raising money through an IPO (initial public offer). But more on that later.

Route Mobile's600-crore IPO was oversubscribed nearly 75 times, according to stock exchange data. The stock listed on the bourses at an 86% premium over its offer price of ₹350. Since then, the stock has run up sharply, closing at1,594 on the BSE on February 12, with a market capitalization of ₹9,140 crores. This has proved to be a windfall for employees who received ESOPs. That’s quite something when you consider that at the heart of the company’s business is the humble text message or SMS.

Here’s how. From banking transactions to deliveries, to authenticating e-mail and social media accounts, one needs a one-time password (OTP). The OTP is generated by the enterprise, while the SMS is delivered by the operator. Route Mobile—which ranks at No.269 on the 2021 Fortune India Next 500 list—provides the interface between the enterprise and operator, via its application programming interface (API). All this happens seamlessly.