Murthy Chintalapati and the value of a missed call

A missed call can be an accident, an invitation, or a business disappearing before anyone has noticed. Murthy Chintalapati built a company around that last possibility. A prospective customer rings. Nobody answers. Somewhere, a sales opportunity quietly expires. There is no dramatic failure, just an ordinary telephone doing rather less than its owner had hoped. For an engineer who had already built a network-security business in Silicon Valley, this was an interesting place to begin again.

Ozonetel, founded in 2007, grew out of his attention to the awkward space between a business and the people trying to reach it. Its early proposition was practical: give smaller companies communications tools they could use without buying and maintaining a roomful of equipment. The telephone was already everywhere. Making it useful to a growing business required another kind of work.

The resignation that took three years

Chintalapati's working life began well before cloud software became a familiar phrase. He spent more than 13 years at Electronics Corporation of India, the public-sector technology company in Hyderabad. Along the way, he earned a postgraduate degree at IIT Delhi. By 1987, he was considering a move beyond ECIL. The market and the availability of a team made him wait.

In 1990, he resigned and went to the United States as a consultant with NEC. Work with AT&T and HCL followed. That sequence matters: his route into entrepreneurship passed through established engineering organizations, where communications meant actual systems, components, and obligations to customers. The preparation occupied years that a founder's biography can too easily compress into a comma.

His first venture, Intoto, addressed network security for equipment ranging from residential gateways to service-provider systems. In September 2008, Freescale Semiconductor announced an agreement to buy it. The purchase brought software expertise into Freescale's communications-processor business; the financial terms were not disclosed. For Chintalapati, it was an exit from one venture while another was already taking shape.

He later recalled that Intoto had reached an “auto-pilot stage.” It gave him room to explore voice telephony. The next problem would be closer to an unanswered customer enquiry than a semiconductor product sheet.

Cloud software, with hardware underneath

The opportunity he and his colleagues saw in India came with an unglamorous obstacle: smaller businesses could not easily afford enterprise telephone systems or the expertise to keep them running. Buying the equipment was only the beginning. Somebody had to connect the parts, maintain them, and change the configuration when the business changed.

Ozonetel's answer was to host communications services and let businesses access them as needed. The customer could avoid much of the equipment burden. Inside Ozonetel, however, there was plenty of engineering left to do. The team built its own hardware, telecom cards, and software. Chintalapati described an initial development effort of about 18 months.

There is a pleasing physicality to this chapter of a cloud-company story. Someone still has to make the machinery work. A browser may be wonderfully light; the responsibility behind it is heavier. Ozonetel chose to carry more of that responsibility itself, reducing its dependence on outside technology vendors.

The choice also reveals how Chintalapati thought about service. If a customer needed a change or a fault needed fixing, control over the underlying system could make the response easier. His technical background was becoming a business proposition: fewer layers of permission between a customer's problem and the people capable of repairing it.

The customer wanted something easier

KooKoo, Ozonetel's early platform, allowed developers to build telephone applications using APIs. It connected the world of web software to the world of voice calls. Early users included ZipDial and Asklaila. For those customers, programmable communications opened possibilities they could assemble themselves.

A wider market needed a more finished product. A business owner might want the result without wishing to become a telephony developer in the process. Ozonetel expanded into ready-to-use services, including Bizphone, a virtual telephone exchange, and CloudAgent, its cloud contact-center application. The progression made the engineering accessible to customers with different technical abilities.

That movement from components to applications is central to Chintalapati's story. He had invested in owning the machinery. He also accepted that customers should not have to think about it. Building a system and making it easy to buy are separate jobs; Ozonetel had to learn both.

When a missed call became the point

One of Ozonetel's more memorable deployments took the supposed failure of a phone call and made it useful. KooKoo powered Hindustan Unilever's Kan Khajura Tesan mobile-radio platform. The service used the missed-call mechanism to connect people with entertainment delivered over their phones. A familiar Indian telephone habit became part of a distribution system.

By November 2014, Ozonetel's account of the project described more than 50,000 hours of content being consumed each day. Its platform also supported HUL's record for the maximum missed calls received in 120 hours. For a business built partly to help companies stop losing calls, this was an entertaining reversal: the unanswered ring now had a job.

Chintalapati summed up 2014 with one word: “EUREKA!” He was also frank about the constraint. Lean marketing budgets had limited the company's ability to grow faster. The contrast is revealing without needing a victory speech. The engineering could handle large campaigns; getting the company in front of its next customers remained hard work.

“EUREKA!”

Murthy Chintalapati's one-word description of 2014

Before the AI agents, there were Indian languages

Ozonetel's interest in speech predates the current enthusiasm for generative AI. In August 2014, it acquired YantraSoft's speech-recognition business. The transaction added technology and people, with plans to offer speech services through the cloud. Chintalapati wanted to make capabilities that carried substantial upfront costs available through a pay-as-you-go model.

The Indian setting gave that ambition a particular shape. A phone service needed to cope with regional languages and variations in how people spoke them. Ozonetel's proposed tools included text-to-speech in languages such as Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil, alongside recognition of spoken choices. The aim was to let a caller speak an instruction rather than repeatedly hunt for a keypad button.

In 2015, the company introduced speech-recognition technology intended to broaden access to business services. That history gives its later AI work some continuity. Long before an autonomous agent could be pitched as the answer, there was the more immediate question of whether a telephone system could understand the person talking to it.

A founder learns to sell what the engineers built

Chintalapati's fellow founders brought their own expertise. Atul Sharma was the product architect behind KooKoo, with an enterprise-telecom background. Chaitanya Chokkareddy brought software architecture and open-source experience. Chintalapati's advice about choosing colleagues was grounded in that division of work: spend time working together before formalizing the partnership, and pay attention to how people actually operate.

By 2022, he described his own focus as the business side. His co-founders handled product and engineering. Sales, marketing, and taking the company to its next stage occupied him. He also acknowledged a strategic regret: Ozonetel could have pursued a global market earlier.

The company had entered the US market in 2019. In October 2021, it announced a $5 million Series A from Stakeboat Capital, with plans to expand US operations and increase its workforce. Chintalapati set an ambition of reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue within four years. It was a target, an indication of how far he wanted the business to travel.

Reaching international buyers also meant working through partners. An April 2021 agreement with IstTek aimed to bring CloudAgent to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The technology was only part of that journey. Distribution, local relationships, and someone prepared to make the introduction mattered too.

The next conversation

Atul Sharma is now Ozonetel’s CEO and co-founder. The business Murthy helped establish continues to develop the communications systems that brought its founders together.

The scope of Ozonetel's business continued to widen. In October 2024, it announced the acquisition of CloudConnect Communications, a provider of mobile-first unified communications and a licensed virtual network operator in India. The deal brought workplace communications into a broader offering that already served customer-facing teams.

In January 2025, Ozonetel announced CXi Agents, allowing organizations to build and deploy AI agents for customer-experience workflows. The described applications included product enquiries, collections, and abandoned shopping carts. Its oneCXi platform connected that work to a larger effort to bring customer context and conversations together.

These are company developments, but they trace a recognizable interest in Chintalapati's career: the space between technical capability and whether a business can use it. The early obstacle was expensive equipment. Then came the difficulty of building an application, supporting Indian languages, and joining communications to the rest of a company's systems. Each addition changed what Ozonetel was selling.

His advice to founders remains smaller than the ambition of the product catalogue: “focus on the customer and the product.” It is easy advice to print and demanding advice to follow. It asks an engineer to listen when an elegant platform is too difficult, and a chief executive to learn distribution after years spent making the technology work.

The missed call remains a useful way into his story. A telephone can ring perfectly and still leave a business with nothing. Chintalapati has spent much of his second venture working on everything that needs to happen around that ring: understanding it, routing it, recording it, and helping somebody respond. There is a considerable company inside that apparently small problem.