Nasscom helps start-ups woo Silicon Valley, win investors

Over the first half of this year, multiple Nasscom initiatives sought to help India’s best small businesses in key ways.

After the first batch of Nasscom Warehouse in Bengaluru met with success, it’s now going to be a network across five cities in India.

During the summer, Nasscom enabled Cashkaro.com’s Swati Bhargava to attend Blackbox Connect’s first residential programme for women founders.

In the last quarter, 39 start-ups from India visited the Valley to be connected with mentors, investors and potential customers – this Nasscom-powered Innotrek became the perfect opportunity for start-ups to assess themselves against those in the Valley.

Two of those start-ups have closed pre-Series A round of funding in recent weeks.

From site visits to Y-Combinator and 500 Startups, along with one-on-one meetings with mentors, these 39 start-ups selected for Nasscom Innotrek this year experienced a week-long bootcamp. They also got connected with large enterprise names from various sectors.

Rajat Tandon, Senior Director, Nasscom 10,000 Startups, reveals, “In 2014, we had 27 start-ups on Innotrek. Out of more than 200 applications this year, we focused on quality applications and settled in on the 39 that made it.”

Dhruvil Sanghvi, co-founder of Loginext Solutions, one of the 39 start-ups selected this year, says, “Initiatives like Nasscom’s Innotrek are very useful, because Indian start-ups don’t know if they’re comparable with the best in the world or how we are viewed outside India. Loginext, particularly, wanted to access the US market, considering the market for logi-tech there is about $20 billion as compared to the $2 billion in India.”

Naeem Zafar, CEO and co-founder of Adolene Inc, as well as a start-up mentor, says, “Measures like Innotrek and Nasscom’s Product Conclave are essential for creating an ecosystem. It’s important to create the kind of enthusiasm that Nasscom is trying to achieve.

“Entrepreneurs need to share knowledge and mentor each other, even empathise, so that confidence is built.”

Notably, collaborations are emerging between small players and large companies, thanks to such initiatives. The best Indian businesses are getting a showcase in markets like the US.

“It’s a new trend playing out over the last five years or so – big companies often have holes in their R&D, and now increasing collaboration seems to be happening between large enterprises and start-ups. This is specifically in R&D, because start-ups are good at that – solving a specific problem,” says Zafar.

What is exciting beyond the attention that Indian start-ups now receive is that they are also winning over global investors. Lazylad, a hyper-local mobile commerce company, raised $500,000 in a pre-Series A round of funding from a group of angels, including Japan-based Kiyohiro Sugashita, Jaichoi (a Silicon Valley-based VC) and Hirokazu, recently.

Faircent.com also raised pre-Series A funding of $250,000 from Singapore-based M&S Partners. Both companies were part of Innotrek 2015.

Meanwhile, such initiatives help Nasscom in its larger goal of creating 10,000 start-ups by 2020. “We’ve impacted more than 800 start-ups since taking on that big goal. About 500 of those 800 have been connected with other stakeholders for a business relationship, or for the purpose of problem resolution,” explains Tandon, adding that Nasscom has already received more than 9,000 applications under its larger objective for start-ups in India.

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