Networking startups in India
(It took a year of rejections…)
It took a year of rejections before technology entrepreneur Sumeet Anand managed to bag the first big customer for his software product venture Kreeo.
A chance meeting with Piyush Singh, chief information officer of one of the world's largest insurance firms, Great American Insurance, helped turn around the fortune of his fledgling venture. Singh not only mentored the firm on how to bag big customers, but also invested in Kreeo.
Anand, 39, whose venture provides a social networking platform for large enterprises is hoping to get lucky again. Next week, he will attend a matchmaking event where 50 chief information officers from some of the world's biggest companies will land in Bangalore to meet Indian startups and many deals are likely to be struck. The event called InTech50, organised by industry think-tank iSpirt and Terrene Global Leadership Network, will see the founders of 50 Indian tech startups rub shoulders with technology buyers from multinational giants like Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive as well as large Indian customers like the Aditya Birla Group.
"Chief information officers are treated like kings around the world. The cool thing is that they are coming to India, " said Manjunath M Gowda, co-founder of enterprise mobile security startup i7 Networks, one the startups attending the event. "To reach to a CIO in US, I had to pay around `60 lakh per event." Over more than two decades, India earned a reputation as the global leader in software outsourcing, but product companies had been few and far between. There are now more than 3, 700 software product companies in India addressing technology requirements across both the enterprise and consumer segments, according to research firm Zinnov.
From providing information security to large banks to crunching numbers so retailers can understand customer behaviour, these startups are providing cutting edge technology to provide tailor-made solutions for global as well as domestic needs.
"The energy levels of these entrepreneurs are absolutely tremendous. Indian product story has got a promising future, " said Piyush Singh, CIO of Great American Insurance. "The entrepreneurs here have very good domain expertise of the problems they are addressing and their solutions are much more targeted." Experts say it is a great time to be a technology product startup from India, given the maturing ecosystem, and the global opportunities.
"We have a strong belief that great product companies are going to come out of India. The reality is that there are great entrepreneurs building product companies out of India, " said Alok Goyal, partner at Helion Advisors which recently invested in enterprise product companies such as payment device maker Ezetap and local language business software maker LinguaNext.
"The fact that 50 CIOs, many of them from large global companies are coming to look at the product companies in India is a great validation." India's software product industry is expected to reach $100 billion (`6 lakh crore) by 2025, according to iSpirt. However, unlike matured ecosystems, such as the US where large companies lap up products developed by startups, finding early adopters in India is still a challenge.
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