Michael Marks, whose investments include Twitter and SpaceX, said that India is ahead of countries like China and Israel in having a robust and deep startup ecosystem.
The year 2017 has seen around $31299 m being raised by around 19,000 mainstream Indian tech startups with most notable investments coming in the second quarter onwards.
However, he was quick to point out that startups in India still need to weed out regulatory hiccups and innovate on solving local issues, not just follow and implement the global technology leader’s examples. “There is a cultural shift towards entrepreneurism which augurs well for India but there are still lesser number of VCs and angel investors compared to number of startups.”
He said while these startups are maturing, the market still needs to bring in more capital versus the current scenario. “Regulatory issues have been an obstacle to bring in more capital to India but with demonetisation and GST, organically it will get better,” adding, “The investment opportunity is quite nascent right now with 75% of the capital in Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai.”
Mark’s venture capital firm, Innoventure Partners is now also collaborating with Bengaluru-based Startups Club to launch an accelerator along with a seed fund targeting around $100,000 into startups with valuation of at least $1 million. Innoventure aims to reach out to smaller towns and cities.
Marks venture will have a key focus on verticals like education, agriculture, robotics, healthcare, machine learning, analytics and blockchain. “Apart from the regular fields, Blockchain is really exciting because which will accelerate safe transactions, solve issues like cyber security and help scale Fintech.”
He points to efficacy of the distributed ledger technology which they would want to combine with hardware solution from a startup. Also, we are collaborating with a startup in Signapore which has a Indian founder.”
Further on, he says that they are scouting for enterprise focused startups as the mortality rate for B2C startups is quite high in India. He notes the future growth will be driven by B2B2C startups.
“We are also involved with few social technology startups who are creating videos on social media platforms.
Noone goes to Youtube to watch videos today, Facebook has cracked it better so that’s the way forward.”
Commenting on rise of ICO among startups to raise funds, Marks says it has already become an alternative.
The year 2017 has seen around $31299 m being raised by around 19,000 mainstream Indian tech startups with most notable investments coming in the second quarter onwards.
However, he was quick to point out that startups in India still need to weed out regulatory hiccups and innovate on solving local issues, not just follow and implement the global technology leader’s examples. “There is a cultural shift towards entrepreneurism which augurs well for India but there are still lesser number of VCs and angel investors compared to number of startups.”
He said while these startups are maturing, the market still needs to bring in more capital versus the current scenario. “Regulatory issues have been an obstacle to bring in more capital to India but with demonetisation and GST, organically it will get better,” adding, “The investment opportunity is quite nascent right now with 75% of the capital in Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai.”
Mark’s venture capital firm, Innoventure Partners is now also collaborating with Bengaluru-based Startups Club to launch an accelerator along with a seed fund targeting around $100,000 into startups with valuation of at least $1 million. Innoventure aims to reach out to smaller towns and cities.
Marks venture will have a key focus on verticals like education, agriculture, robotics, healthcare, machine learning, analytics and blockchain. “Apart from the regular fields, Blockchain is really exciting because which will accelerate safe transactions, solve issues like cyber security and help scale Fintech.”
He points to efficacy of the distributed ledger technology which they would want to combine with hardware solution from a startup. Also, we are collaborating with a startup in Signapore which has a Indian founder.”
Further on, he says that they are scouting for enterprise focused startups as the mortality rate for B2C startups is quite high in India. He notes the future growth will be driven by B2B2C startups.
“We are also involved with few social technology startups who are creating videos on social media platforms.
Noone goes to Youtube to watch videos today, Facebook has cracked it better so that’s the way forward.”
Commenting on rise of ICO among startups to raise funds, Marks says it has already become an alternative.
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