I am looking forward to attending iSpirt’s Intech50 event next week in Bangalore. Fifty Indian enterprise technology companies will be there, meeting with fifty CIOs from the US and India. Congrats to everybody at iSpirt, including Sharad Sharma and Avinash Raghava, for organizing what promises to be a productive spot-market.
We have put the names of the Intech50 companies into a list and categorized by tech category (applications, infrastructure, tools), vertical (e.g. none, financial services, retail) and geographic focus (India, India->Emerging Markets, India->Global, Global). See the Slideshare embed below to view or download the document. Perhaps this is of help to you while navigating the Intech50 event.
These companies are two-thirds infrastructure, one-third applications. Analytics and security dominate the categories, followed by HR and CRM. A good 75% are horizontal solutions while the rest are verticalized. And more than half have a global go-to-market while about 40% are focused on India or adjacent markets.
The last decade, especially the past five years, has seen a lot of change for the better in the enterprise tech startup market in India. Startups have started building world-class product and user experiences. They have understood how to leverage online marketing to acquire customers outside India, versus relying on channel partners in other countries or sticking to just the India market. They have figured out how to initiate direct sales abroad, not relying on hiring expensive VPs of Sales as a first step but sending founders abroad to kickstart sales. They have started efficiently selling into the long-tail of companies rather than just focusing on large enterprises. And they have taken full advantage of platforms such as AWS, Force.com, etc. to run and distribute their products.
I think there is a clear progression forward from the types of enterprise software companies started 7–15 years ago which many times started with services projects; were usually vertically focused on banking, telecom or retail; and, despite branching out to SE Asia, Middle East and Africa, have generally tapped out growth at the sub-$10M annual revenue mark. There were exceptions of course, including companies like I-flex, Subex and Ramco.
Lightspeed globally has put a majority of its capital to work in enterprise technology companies, represented here. Many of our portfolio companies, including Qubole, Numerify and Bloomreach, have teams in India. In India, we are looking for enterprise technology companies that can be category-defining and category-leading and can scale to $50–100M in revenue over time. We are finding higher than average growth coming from applications companies focused on a global or US go-to-market — examples in India would be Freshdesk and Unmetric. We are also seeing such growth from globally-focused infrastructure and developer enabling technologies — examples in India would be Druva, WebEngage and HelpShift.
See you at Intech50! Come talk to us. You can reach me at dkhare@lsvp.com.
India Enterprise Tech Companies at iSpirt’s Intech50 from Dev Khare
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