Indian Billionaire Bhavin Turakhia’s Flock to Take On Slack

An Indian entrepreneur who became a millionaire by the age of 20 and a billionaire when he was 36, Bhavin Turakhia is now building Flock, an office messaging system to rival Slack and other similar platforms.

Turakhia, the 37-year-old CEO and co-founder of the IT services company, Directi Group, has multiple business units, including offices in India, Dubai, New York, Los Angeles, Ras Al Khaimah and Zurich.  He has invested $45 million to build Flock, a cloud-based team collaboration system that has attracted more than 20,000 enterprise users and customers, including, Whirlpool, Princeton University and Tim Hortons.

Billionaire Brothers

Bhavin and his younger brother Divyank became sensations after they sold their advertising technology company Media.net to a Chinese consortium for $900 million in 2016.

“I want to make Flock bigger and better than anything I’ve built before,” Turakhia said at his Bangalore office, reported Bloomberg.

The brothers founded Media.net together, but currently Bhavin is involved with building Flock while Divyank’s focus is on expanding the advertising business.

Multipurpose Messaging System

Flock enables users to share their ideas live without going through multiple communication hurdles. Turakhia says they will be making it available at a cheaper price than rival services. Its free version also includes a to-do list, a polling app that can be shared within the team, and it also allows the users to call an Uber in between all of this.

“As the collaborative messaging space gets hotter, Flock is pricing itself aggressively and fighting for market share,” Neha Dharia, a senior analyst at telecom consultancy firm Ovum Ltd., told Bloomberg. “Turakhia will have to keep innovating and integrating technologies like artificial intelligence to keep up with bigger competitors,” she added.

Teenage Entrepreneurs

The billionaire brothers were born and brought in Mumbai. Bhavin, who is older than Divyank by two years, began programming at the age of 10. His idol is Bill Gates and he read a ton of books to know more about the Microsoft founder.

With a loan from their father, the brothers founded their Directi Group when they were in their late teens. In 1994, it became India’s first accredited domain registrar.

Confident About Flock

Today, as they are on their way to introduce Flock to the world, many have accused Bhavin of copying the idea from other messaging apps. But he is unfazed by such criticism.

“I’ve always arrived late to segments: I was eight years behind the rest of the market in web hosting and 10 years behind in contextual advertising but my startups worked their way into the top five,” he said.