Nitesh Nandy

Co-Founder & CTO Hiver

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Nitesh Nandy is co-founder and chief technology officer of Hiver, the customer service platform that began as a deceptively small idea: let a team manage a shared inbox from inside Gmail, without leaving Gmail. He and Niraj Ranjan Rout, both IIT Kharagpur engineers who had already built a development company together, made the product in 2010 during The Morpheus accelerator and founded the company in 2011 as GrexIt. What followed is unusual in Indian SaaS — seven years of near-total bootstrapping on $130,000 of angel money, growing to over a thousand paying customers and a fifty-person team on revenue alone before raising institutional capital in 2018. Hiver now describes itself as an agentic customer service platform serving more than 10,000 teams, with over $30 million raised and around 200 staff, and Nandy has owned its technical direction throughout.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and chief technology officer of Hiver, named as such on the company’s own About Us page as of this review.
• Built the product in 2010 during The Morpheus startup accelerator, founded the company with Niraj Ranjan Rout in 2011, shipped a beta the same year and launched publicly in 2012 (Wikipedia).
• Raised an initial $130,000 from the Citrix Startup Accelerator and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, then ran the company virtually bootstrapped, reaching more than 1,100 paying customers and a fifty-person team funded entirely from revenue (YourStory, October 2018).
• Grew a customer base that by 2018 was more than 60% United States-based, with the remainder mostly in Europe and Australia, and included Harvard University, HubSpot and Vacasa.
• Raised $4 million from Kalaari Capital and Kae Capital in October 2018, $4 million of debt financing from Mars Growth Capital in February 2021, and a $22 million Series B led by K1 Capital in March 2022 with Kalaari, Kae Capital and AngelList participating.
• Earlier co-founded Mobicules, an app and web development company based in Noida, with the same co-founder (YourStory).
• Has taken Hiver’s technology from a Gmail extension to a platform spanning email, chat, Slack, voice and SMS with AI agents that resolve requests end to end.

Professional Journey

Nandy completed a B.Tech in computer science at IIT Kharagpur in 2007. His first venture with Niraj Ranjan Rout was Mobicules, an application and web development company based in Noida — a services business, and the place where the two learned to build together before they had a product of their own.

That product came out of a real irritation rather than a market study. Teams everywhere were managing shared work through email, forwarding threads and losing track of who owned what, and every available fix required them to abandon the tool they already lived in. Nandy and Rout built a Gmail-native answer in 2010 during The Morpheus accelerator, launched a beta in 2011 and went public in 2012 under the name GrexIt. In September 2015 they renamed the product Hiver, to stop it being confused with “Grexit”, the shorthand then in circulation for Greece leaving the Eurozone; the company kept GrexIt, Inc. as its legal name.

The middle years are the interesting ones. After an initial $130,000 from the Citrix Startup Accelerator and the Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Hiver took no further outside money for years. It grew on customer revenue to more than 1,100 paying accounts and fifty people, most of its revenue coming from the United States, with Harvard University, HubSpot and Vacasa among its customers, and a top-ten ranking on G2Crowd for helpdesk software in 2018. Investors, Rout said at the time, were drawn as much by that frugality and the inbound growth engine as by the product itself. Institutional funding followed: $4 million from Kalaari Capital and Kae Capital in October 2018, $4 million of debt from Mars Growth Capital in February 2021, and a $22 million Series B led by K1 Capital in March 2022.

The company Nandy runs engineering for today is considerably wider than a shared inbox. Hiver now spans email, chat, Slack, voice and SMS with a self-updating help centre, and its current pitch is squarely about AI: that most support platforms automate the easy fifth of the work and leave the messy, cross-system long tail to humans, and that the point is to reach that long tail. In the founders’ own words, “We built Hiver for complex support.” It reports more than 10,000 teams as customers, over $30 million raised and more than 200 staff.

Education

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

B.Tech, Computer Science, completed 2007

Sourced to YourStory’s October 2018 profile of the company, which records both founders’ degrees explicitly. Neither Hiver’s own site nor Wikipedia mentions his education.