Indian Start-Ups Become More Attractive to Venture Firms by Claire Cain Miller

India has been the hot new place for United States venture investors for a couple of years now, attracting billions of dollars in venture capital. Are there enough promising companies to use all that cash?
Yes, said Parag Saxena, who runs the biggest venture fund on the Indian subcontinent. In an interview in his New York office, he said that the opportunities in India and Southeast Asia had improved greatly over the last year.
Mr. Saxena is chief executive of New Silk Route, a $1.4 billion, one-year-old fund dedicated to investments in India, Pakistan, Dubai and Southeast Asia. He raised the fund after leaving Invesco Private Capital in 2006. He is also a co-founder of Vedanta Capital, which invests in companies in the United States.
Many top venture firms in the United States are looking to Asia as well. Sequoia Capital announced this month it had raised a $725 million fund for investments in Indian start-ups. Accel, New Enterprise Associates and the Mayfield Fund are also investing there.
The investment opportunities for all that money flowing east have become “very attractive,” Mr. Saxena said, but he said he didn’t feel the same way a year ago. Then, he said, the sums that entrepreneurs wanted for a stake in their companies were too high.
He attributed the change to tightening credit markets worldwide, not just in the last two weeks but over the course of the year, and to Indian government policies to tighten interest rates and fight inflation.
“There is less money around, and less stupid money around, which leads to an improvement in prices” for venture investors, he said.
For the most part, the companies seeking venture financing in India have been middle- to late-stage companies, not true start-ups like those that get financed in the United States. There are simply not enough start-ups to absorb the capital, so investors have focused on older companies. That is slowly changing, Mr. Saxena said, as “a little trickle of start-up money is coming in.”
Many venture-backed companies in Asia are not technology-focused. Those that are mostly produce products that use technology that has already been perfected in the United States, like digital cable and high-definition television.
But that is changing too, Mr. Saxena said. Tech companies will start leapfrogging the United States, he said, producing cutting-edge instead of copycat technologies. He has already seen this happen with technologies like L.E.D.’s.
Clean technology has the potential to be even hotter in India and China than it is in the United States, he said, but not for the same reasons. “It is not because it is cheap or noble — it is driven by necessity,” he said. For example, one of the biggest users of solar panels he has seen is in a group of primary schools he started in Indian villages, where they have no alternative form of electricity.
In terms of clean technology, he predicted, “the cutting-edge stuff will still be done in Silicon Valley, but after that, big manufacturing plants will open in India and there will be greater utilization there.”

The new breed of Indian startups

India might be better known as a software services outsourcing giant to most but if you look internally, there is a new revolution brewing–the product revolution. There are hundreds of startups in the software products space, which are throwing up some very interesting products in the market.

While i-flex, Tally and Subex might still be the most recognizable Indian IT product companies, there is a whole new breed of firms that is all set to conquer the domestic market as well as dent the international markets soon. According to a recently released Nasscom-Zinnov Software Product Study, Indian software product businesses are approaching an inflection point in their evolution.

“MNCs have created product development setups in India, which have spawned a new breed of product development professionals over the last few years,” says Sudhir Sethi, chairman & managing director, IDG Ventures India. These are the entrepreneurs of the new world today who are putting down their ideas to create product-driven businesses. In the last 22 months, the team at IDG has looked at over a 1,000 new startups of which 60-70% are product startups in the areas of security, digital consumer electronics, telecom, semiconductor, Internet, and mobile VAS. In 2004, this figure would have been less than 40%. IDG has invested in eight startups of which five are IT product companies.

While India’s role in global technology

IP creation has grown steadily, several challenges have constrained the growth of homegrown software product businesses. The domestic market was small and there was a lack of experienced product development talent. The venture capital firms were skeptical of funding product startups and of course the entrepreneurs who were launching these new companies lacked adequate exposure to international markets.

These are things of the past, it seems. Today, a lot of the local technology entrepreneurs have a better perspective on IT products and their demand, having worked on key technologies at large Indian IT companies. Others who have worked in global markets have a better understanding still. They comprehend the gaps, are a lot more networked, and hence sales and marketing is not such a tough nut to crack for them today.

“The domestic market is also developing, and with the Indian economy growing so is the size of the domestic business,” says Saurabh Srivastava, chairman, Indian Venture Capital Association. A number of products designed for the local market to cater to call centres, mobile companies, BPOs are coming out of product startups. Srivastava feels that most foreign VCs actually prefer product startups (product or IP based) because they know that model best. It also helped that in the last 7-8 years, lots of Indian startups in the US because successful. “This helped local Indian startups. VCs now understand that Indian product companies today are serious,” he says.

Interestingly, building a services company in India is hard today because of the kind of competition prevalent in the market. Unless you find your niche, which fits well, it is difficult to scale. As competition intensifies, the profitability and growth of services-based small companies is much lower than their larger counterparts. It is that much more difficult for a small services company to scale, though they can still survive.

In the product space though, things are a little different. There might not be great competition in that segment but the economics of product startups are challenging. While one needs scale to survive, it takes a lot more capital too. “The product play requires one to spend a lot more on R&D to keep it going,” says Srivastava. And that is where the VCs come in. Adds a Mumbai-based analyst, “A software service company requires scale and more employees unlike a software product company. If a product is good even a small company has great future.”

“The Indian market will demand more of intellectual property (IP) and start-ups and emerging companies can tap that. The next decade belongs to companies, which can create scalable IP, which has strong market adaptability,” says Gautam Patel, partner, Battery Ventures, a US-based VC fund, which has been investing mainly in IT companies. The fund plans to invest close to $200 million within two years. Patel says they would be investing in companies that have developed an IP, which has or can have an addressable market, a good management team and has the capacity to scale if need be.

Many companies in the IT sector are already preparing to take the opportunities that are being created in India as well as in other markets. Enterprise communication solutions company, Avaya Global Connect, is looking at introducing more products in its portfolio for Internet Protocol based telephony that caters to SMEs.

Last year, IT product companies received a total VC investment of $156 million, according to data released by Zinnov.

“Product startups are always more interesting higher multiple businesses to look at compared to services. We have looked at many Indian products but are waiting for the right venture investible deal to come our way,” says Mukul Singhal at Canaan Advisors.

Lalit Bhise, CEO, Mobisy, a startup that has developed a platform for Internet applications to work on mobiles feels that one thing that helped many Indian product startups is the lowering of entry barriers. His company is focusing on the Indian market as they know it the best. “When we started we had no clue. We thought of going to international markets but realized we had a chance to sell in India,” says Bhise. Today Mobisy already has a few large Indian clients, and the next jump would be to the international markets.

For Devang Raiyani, co-founder of Blink, the scenario is a little different. The retail market that Blink, which developed an intelligent interactive shopping cart, operates in is not mature enough in India. The firm plans to tap more mature retail destinations initially where the trends are fairly settled and retailers are looking at maximising their returns.

As lot of SMEs are trying to upgrade their systems or becoming more IT savvy, the domestic space for product-based companies is expanding. Kunal Upadhyay, CEO of Ahmedabad-based CIIE (Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship) is very positive about the role product startups will play by offering unique solutions for SMEs. “There is going to be huge spurt in mobile and value-added products in near future. Collaborating technologies with value-addition has been growing in many SMBs due to globalisation. This increases the business opportunity for startups,” says Upadhyay.

At CIIE, startups get to work closely with specific industries combined with getting regular inputs from a strong mentoring team to help them in refining their thought-process and ideas. CIIE has nearly 15 start-ups in its kitty at various stages of their development. Across India, there are 38 incubation centres today, which are helping product startups refine their business model and develop their product prototypes.

Sangeeta Gupta, vice president at Nasscom feels that with the domestic market growing rapidly, startups today have an option of testing their products in the Indian market before launching internationally. It is like a large beta site to test your IPs. “As the domestic market is booming and IT penetration is growing among the SMBs in India, a large number of companies are starting to develop products to cater to this market,” says Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov Management Consulting.

There are an estimated 35 million SMBs in India and the PC penetration in these is growing at a fast pace. The Nasscom-Zinnov report also says that by 2015, Indian software product business revenues would be more evenly balanced between domestic and export based sales and share of revenues from the domestic market would increase from 32% in 2008 to an average of 41% by 2015 to reach $4-5 billion.

“Key parameters such as proximity of Indian software product businesses to the local market requirements, excellent understanding on localisation requirements, and ease of adopting customised and targeted sales approach would fuel this growth,” says Natarajan.

(Ravi Teja Sharma with inputs from Anirvan Ghosh, Sachin Dave & Tapash Talukdar)