‘TECH-LED STARTUPS HAVE OVER $100 BLN IN MARKET CAP'

India Has Demonstrated Early Scale-up Successes, Depth Of Founder Abilities, And Has Returned Vc Money In Multiples

In the last 10 years, India has produced technology-led startups that have changed how Indian consumers and businesses discover, buy and consume products and services digitally. These startups have scaled rapidly and over these 10 years have created a market capitalisation of over $100 billion. For perspective, that’s a cohort that has created economic value comparable to 4 percent of India’s GDP.

The valuation of these startups combined would have been a couple of billion dollars a decade ago. Such wealth creation is extraordinary, if not unparalleled in Indian history. This achievement is outstanding not just in terms of convenience to consumers/enterprises but also in terms of metrics such as jobs created, employee wealth, increased infrastructure creation, government tax revenues and FDI inflow, and profitability improvement in the Indian industry.

This is the 15th year of operations in India by Accel (including its predecessor Erasmic Venture Fund). When we started with our first fund in 2005, mobile phones and the internet were just starting off in India—only one in 50 Indians had access to the internet. Three years later in 2008, when we raised our second fund, the number of Indians with access to the internet had doubled to 52.5 million, many of them still going online only from their offices.

In contrast to peer economies that relied on export-led growth, domestic consumption would prove to be the key driver for the Indian economy. That coupled with India’s young population (the median age was 24 years in 2011), the largest in the world, translated into an immense opportunity to partner with local entrepreneurs who were both familiar with the needs of the Indian market as also localised global solutions to suit India better.