1947 Tech 🇮🇳 : 68
Once a week newsletter: Insights on Tech, markets, startups, venture capital, and foreign investments in India
1. Global startups rope in Indian engineers
India is seen as the last greatest untapped opportunity in the world for three reasons.
- Tech Talent
- Market
- Global companies see India as an innovation and learning hub. The products and features that do well in India are exported to other emerging markets like Asia, MENA, and Latin America.
After an entrepreneurial stint and various assignments as a product management consultant in India, Rashmi Ranjan Padhy is the senior product manager at Dubai-based transportation company Careem for seven months now. “I get to be part of a global, diverse team and the role offered was quite competitive,” he said.
Like Padhy, several mid- to senior-level executives are now finding jobs in global teams at growth-stage startups and young companies in Germany, the US and Southeast Asia. What used to be the dominion of global tech giants like Google and Facebook is now trickling down to smaller firms too.
Companies such as GrabTaxi, Go-Jek, Delivery Hero, etc are hiring executives in full-stack development, data science and product management. “These are startups that are looking to ramp up their team after sealing a series-B or -C round so that they have enough bandwidth to look outside their market for talent.
2. DineOut pilots new offerings, plans to expand internationally and in India
Going forward, Go-Global from day one would be a must mindset of next-generation entrepreneurs in India.
A trend that I have been noticing — Series B, C and beyond companies have started to expand to International markets and to tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India.
DineOut, a restaurant table reservation service, which competes with Zomato and LimeTray in certain business offerings, said it plans to expand to Indonesia and Philippines. It has already started operating across the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and East Africa. In India, it is looking to expand to smaller towns and cities including Lucknow, Indore and Surat.
The gaming company, MPL recently raised series $35 Million Series A round will be looking to expand to other emerging markets. For more
3. Chinese entrepreneurs ride India internet consumer wave
Around 50 Chinese entrepreneurs have launched internet companies in India in the past one year, inspired by success stories of NewsDog, Shein and TikTok, according to multiple people aware of the matter.
The reason: they are keen to ride the Indian consumer internet wave as China’s consumer internet market plateaus.
Many entrepreneurs from China as well as folks who have worked in large Chinese startups have seen and built scale across multiple areas in China over the past 10 years,” said Karan Mohla, a partner at Chiratae Ventures. “Now they want to build products for the Indian audience — and they believe they already have the China playbook for reference, along with India’s fast-growing market.”
They are even founding companies with an India co-founder to understand the market better and adopting India names because they don’t want to be referred to as a firm owned by Chinese.
4. Former Google India Head: What Rajan Anandan Looks For While Backing Startups
Rajan Anandan bets on a founding team that’s solving “real problems”. The former Google India head recently joined venture fund Sequoia Capital to focus on investing in early-stage technology startups across Southeast Asia
As the startup ecosystem expands he expects India to produce 10 unicorns this year and 100 by 2025. In 2018, India got eight unicorns, including the likes of Oyo, Freshworks, Udaan, Zomato, among others — the most in a calendar year — whereas the corresponding figures for U.K. and Germany were four and two, respectively. The unicorn tally for U.S. and China were 25 and 20, respectively.
The emerging unicorns, Anandan said, will not be only in the consumer internet space. “We already have two logistics firms inching closer to becoming unicorns — Rivigo and Blackbuck. Then we saw the first gaming unicorn with Dream 11
A week in review
