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India’s growth story is unquestionable. An unprecedented amount of economic activity prevails across all sectors and a consistent GDP growth of 7% is being predicted for this decade. Especially, on the IT front, the software services exports have reached close to $170billion for the fiscal year. India being a global leader in software services exports, India is also poised to become a product nation and this trend is witnessed through a robust startup eco-system being developed. India now has emerged as the third largest startup eco-system in the world with 107 unicorns with a valuation of about $340 billion. The tech products designed and developed in India is not just for the Indian markets but for the world markets. There are countless examples, but Freshworks is one of them, a digital service desk company incubated in Chennai but being sold world over and currently has a market cap of about $4Billion

I recently had an opportunity to attend NPC (NASSCOM Product Connect) in the city of Bengaluru. The 2-day event was the confluence of startup founders, investors and startup companies. I was able to witness some amazing product innovation and was able to hear many success stories from the founders themselves. Below I share notes from some of my favorite sessions.

DeepTech ecosystem: For a startup to be considered as DeepTech, they need to be leveraging one or more of the technologies that includes AI, IoT, Bigdata, Robotics, 3D printing and drones. Only 12% of the startups in India are DeepTech that would need to create, IP thought leadership and most importantly patents. Creation of deep tech eco-system is imperative to exchange knowledge and co-create solutions.

India opportunity: Global innovation capital sits in Bengaluru. 3rd largest pool of AI talent is in India that produces 0.5 million engineers per year. India ranked 40 in the global innovation index and is the data capital of the planet. Public platforms like UPI payments are wildly successful and other countries are planning to model this for their own citizen payment method. Indian government is replicating the success of this UPI payment platform to other sectors like logistics, education and agriculture.

Freshdesk success story: For product companies to be successful, there has to be a market, a great product and distribution mechanism. Blue ocean strategy -chase new categories of the market. Red ocean strategy – build a better mouse trap. Freshdesk example. Freshdesk offered 2x the value at half the cost and first 3 users free.

Investor’s view: Sequioa capital. Product market fit for series A, strong unit economics. Valuation, funding, runway, capital cost-structure.

Web3 report: Distributed trusted ownership. Not controlled by one entity like web2.0. Layers and layers of use cases. Metaverse and NFT use case to improve customer experience, identity and privacy. Certified ownership-proving authenticity, e.g., buying a car, medium for ownership. Gaming – in-game asset ownership, convert time and skill into money

Tata steel digital view: Multiple layers and frameworks. 7-layer IT architecture.

Infra and agility layers

1. Multi-cloud architecture layer
2. OT tech- sensor layer
3. Enterprise architecture (CRM, HRM, ERP,)
4. Middle layer – Data layer intelligence

Consumption layers

1. User apps, ent.apps, system of innovation and experience
2. AI layer
3. Visualization layer

Resources

NASSCOM | NPC (productconclave.in)