This southern metropolis might be the subsequent tech hub

Posted On Aug 5, 2019 By admin With Comments Off

Chennai is heaven, ” says Girish Mathrubootham, cofounder of Freshworks. Sitting at his San Francisco home, his new residence since he relocated to the US last-place month, Mathrubootham is a tad feeling as he speaks on a Zoom video call one early morning. “What do you miss? ” I ask.It is not so much the things, he says, as he brandishes his bowl of filter coffee that his wife has freshly brewed. He gives out a faint smile: “It is the city, the aura, its people and much more.” Mathrubootham and his love for Chennai can be explained in an interesting backstory.Many Chennai industrialists alter base to Bengaluru formerly their startups income a certain size — for example, Ather Energy that was incubated at IIT-Madras or IITM in 2013 but shifted to Bengaluru in 2015. In 2011, Mathrubootham also seriously contemplated shifting his base from Chennai to Bengaluru. “The suggestion came from an investor, ” he remembers. He went to Bengaluru, zeroed in on an office space for his year-old startup and explored residence options. Besides everything else, being in a city where he could rub shoulders with India’s startup innovators, like the Bansals of Flipkart, was a big draw. Then snags surfaced. Some of his early hires didn’t want to move. Besides, concluding a suitable school for his children proved to be a challenge.

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“It was as if the universe was conspiring to keep me in Chennai, ” he says. One evening, as he waited at the Bengaluru airport for his flight back home, at the stimulation of the moment Mathrubootham decided “forget Bangalore. Let’s just stay in Chennai and construct Freshworks.” “I am glad I stayed, ” he computes after a interval.

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Almost a decade last-minute, Freshworks is a unicorn, appraised recently at $1.5 billion. Mathrubootham, though, has changed cornerstone from Chennai to Silicon Valley even as his companionship gears up for the Nasdaq IPO. And Chennai has become a hotbed of software-as-a-service( SaaS) startups.There are an estimated 600 -plus of them fussing around in the city with Mathrubootham playing its biggest cheerleader. Besides the current unicorns Zoho and Freshworks, Zinnov forecasts that Chennai could see the rise of seven more unicorns in the next five years, including Uniphore, Mad Street Den, ChargeBee and Crayon Data. With 15,000 employees, SaaS revenue from Chennai has touched$ 1 billion with $500 million of financing. “SaaS offers a$ 1 trillion opportunity for India. We will contribute that wave, ” says Suresh Sambandam, cofounder, OrangeScape, who along with Mathrubootham has been working intensely to encourage Chennai’s startup ecosystem.In tandem, IITM extremely has shifted paraphernaliums over the last decade to give Chennai’s startup ecosystem some much-needed ballast. Its four incubators, eight centres of excellence and a new world-class Research Park spread over 1.2 million sqft are encouraging a flurry of deep-tech startups — 190 and counting. “We work with IITs in Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai and also the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, ” says R Raghuttama Rao, CEO, Gopalakrishnan-Deshpande Centre( GDC) for Innovation& Entrepreneurship, which was set up at the IITM in 2017. “We are trying to catalyse a technology’s lab-to-market journey. IITM, with a dynamic ecosystem, seems to be ahead of others.”Bengaluru has the hum and is India’s startup capital, helped by its early lead in tech, cosmopolitan culture and pleasant weather.Mumbai is the financial capital with Bollywood contributing some glamour. Up north, the political nerve centre of NCR has a bit of everything, including some deft packaging and aggression to make it among India’s top startup centres. But Chennai, considered conservative in its approach and introverted in its point of view, has not drawn much attention. Located deep down south, the city is infused in its rich culture and has a society that prides in its centuries-old legends. Amid this, forget the fast paced world of startups, even the old-economy businesses here don’t get much attention.

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Not that Chennai doesn’t have any. It has been the manufacturing hub, once called the Detroit of India. Almost all IT giants — from TCS to HCL and Cognizant to Infosys — maintain enormous campuses in and around the city. In fact, some like TCS began their IT services outsourcing travel from here. Some of the biggest MNCs from Ericsson to Verizon have critical engineering centres here. Hitherto, in terms of signalling its existence and outlook, symbol Chennai Inc barely registers on the India map. “Unlike Bengaluru, Chennai has always been so isolated, ”says Sambandam of OrangeScape. “It isn’t seen as a sexy city. Culturally, we are hype-averse. We want to stand out, form our own space.”Over the last decade, however, a deepen has been afoot. Chennai is slowly finding its trench. Led by IITM and passionate industrialists like Mathrubootham, the city is ranking itself as the capital of SaaS and deep-tech startups.

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According to data from Venture Intelligence, Chennai has become India’s fourth most active startup ecosystem, ahead of Hyderabad and Pune. “When I came here in 2007, I wanted to run away, ” says Umesh Sachdev, cofounder of Uniphore, who altered basi to the US last year. “Language was a huge barrier. But a lot has changed. Chennai ripens on you.”Rajan Srikanth, co-president, Keiretsu Forum, who waste times in the US before changing back to Chennai in 2009, says: “The biggest alteration I see is that IITM has become a hotbed for startups. We have got a fabulous start.”Relatively, Chennai is considered a more liveable metropolitan. It is not costly like Mumbai and doesn’t have the vigorous culture generally attributed to the north. It is relatively safer, has shorter travels, better traffic situation, relatively lower cost of living and lower air pollution.Ashwini Asokan, cofounder of Mad Street Den, offers a good vistum of what Chennai feels like today. “Forever, it was about Chennai talent migrating out. With SaaS and deep-tech startups here, we are seeing people biding back and many actually returning, ” says Asokan, who returned to the city in 2014 from the US to set up her startup.

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With 150 -odd staff, Mad Street Den does bleeding rim job around AI and computer seeing and has a rightfully world clientele and squad. “From a ability position, this situate is insane. And I am not just talking about IITM graduates, ” she says. Her strategy is to hire fresh grads from campuses and groom them in AI, talent for which is anyway scarce and expensive globally. Abundant talent, low-pitched attrition and great work ethics have helped Chennai’s image. “For a bootstrapped startup like ours, we needed time, aptitude and resources to experiment. What I managed to do in Chennai I couldn’t have done anywhere else in the world, ” she says.

“There’s something about Chennai’s air that works for SaaS startups, ” says Sachdev of Uniphore. “Unlike the north, Chennai’s culture is introverted, ” says Sridhar Vembu, founder of bootstrapped unicorn Zoho, a pioneer of Chennai’s SaaS curve. “Building a concoction requires a degree of introversion and a lot of patience.” In Bengaluru, B2C benefactors are the biggest poster boys.They often operate in a winner-take-all market who are in need of rushed, aggression and a lot of money to prevail fickle customers and build strong brands. SaaS startups must work differently.Often bootstrapped, building a robust differentiated product is critical. Catering to enterprises, the sales pitch and customer servicing require a degree of maturity and sophistication. SaaS startups also thumped the profitability curve a lot earlier in their trajectory.

“Chennai’s frugal, republican and floored approaching is suitable to build a business well, ” says Chennai-based Arun Natarajan, benefactor, Venture Intelligence. Krish Subramanian, founder of Charge-Bee, agrees: “We in Chennai don’t come from the B2C world. B2B comes very naturally to us.”

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Chennai has also been propitious in having inventors who have helped improved the ecosystem. The biggest credit must go to Zoho. Former employees of the company — begin in 1996 as Advent — have spawned 22 -plus SaaS startups in Chennai. Multiple entrepreneurs say the Zoho factory, with its culture of high operational freedom and empowerment, offered a rich training ground for future industrialists to hone their SaaS skills around structure produces and selling to world-wide customers.Founders like Mathrubootham, with strong Chennai seeds, have worked hard to nurture the local ecosystem. Avinash Raghava , now community pulpit missionary at Accel, saw this happen during his earlier period at iSpirt, where he was working towards offsetting India a concoction nation. “I am an ecosystem builder. We tried with Pune.” But with its high-pitched floating population, it did not get much friction. But in Chennai “bringing the Valley culture of paying forward was easier. Girish, Suresh, Krish, all of them came together to passionately construct the SaaS ecosystem.” In 2014, inspired by SaaStr in the US, Raghava hovered the idea of SaaSX( be called SaaSBoomi) — a founders-only event — in India. Chennai-based entrepreneurs dallied heartfelt multitude and it has been a big success. Mathrubootham specified the mood. Despite being busy, he mentored young entrepreneurs and honestly shared the playbook. “It was less of sharing gyaan and more of sharing real knows. Too focused on their own business, financiers like him rarely give so much time and vigor to build an ecosystem, ” says Raghava. In fact, after the first year, there was a suggestion to shift the conference to Bengaluru. “Girish said if in Bengaluru, I is certainly not coming. And that settled its consideration of this matter, ” says Sambandam.

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Chennai founders, a relatively smaller, homogeneous mint, are also a tight-knit group. From Open Coffee Club to Filter Koffee Mafia, they connect over WhatsApp groups and Sunday breakfasts, exchanging indicates and endeavouring promotion on functional and strategic issues as varied as customer acquisition to setting sales target, hiring to setting metrics. “You can be openly vulnerable and nobody will judge you. People find time to help, ” says Subramanian. Too, the Zoho “mafia” reinforces each other, that was fundamental in early days of a startup. For PipeCandy, both Freshworks and ChargeBee were the very early customers. Freshworks employs ChargeBee for subscription control. “When you are starting, your product is not mature. You need friendly customers who can give feedback and realise you better, ” says Murali Vivekanandan, cofounder, PipeCandy. Equally, if not more, IITM is giving Chennai’s startup world a big leg-up by house a colourful ecosystem of manufacture mentors, faculty and young students. Take for example Satyanarayanan Chakravarthy, a professor who lay out a $23 million combustion research centre in 2011 with concedes. He now has 40 -plus activities and his 15 team members, all IITM faculty, have earned Rs 69 crore cumulatively between 2012 and 2018. “Each project we do involves large firms. And “weve had” huge startups like Agnikul and Aerostrovilos coming out of now, ” he supplements.

Professor Krishnan Balasubramanian remembrances IITM’s startup bet kicking off around 2009 -1 0 with an incubation programme that enabled students and faculty to work on startups. Multiple initiatives followed — from setting up a entertaining laboratory where students could fidget around with the most recent developments engineerings to Nirmaan( a one-year pre-incubator programme for students) to boot camps on cutting-edge engineerings like hums and Android app development. A recent initiative has been I-Incubate by the GDC. For each meaning, they put together a crew with a induce researcher( faculty member ), twothree entrepreneurs and manufacture instructors. “The biggest alter is that students are turning down jobs to do startups. We interpret a huge difference in the way faculty and students should be considered study, ” says Krishnan. Startups like Ather Energy and Uniphore are some of the promising IITM alumni. But the biggest credit at IITM must go to professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala who has intensely and patiently succeeded “to build a very unique innovation ecosystem.” The biggest proof is the Rs 500 crore Research Park that houses R& D equipment of 90 business. As part of the lease contract, fellowships at the park must pay recognitions for academia partnerships as well as students and faculty dates. Not governed by IITM and not dependent on government money, the activities of the centre previously utters Rs 30 crore as cash benefit and has 65% occupancy. It should be offsetting Rs 50 crore or more when perfectly occupied, says Jhunjhunwala. He says some 10 IITM faculty make Rs 1 crore-plus through the centre. “There are huge helps if you fetching three laids of beings together — academia, the enterprises and students, ” he contributes.

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Challenges onward Despite the progress, Chennai must overcome many obstacles. While the founders find time to exchange records and support each other, would they be able to sustain this as their startups magnitude up? Mathrubootham, who played a big mentor role, has just relocated to the US. Lack of availability of risk capital is another challenge, says Srikanth. Arun Jain, founder of Polaris, says: “Bengaluru is first generation professional capital and Chennai is second contemporary promoter money. Stewards, the latter, often take fewer risks.” Mathrubootham contributes, “People in Chennai are very intentional about spending. They must learn to balance it with big-hearted judging. This applies to India at large , not just Chennai.” As they originate, SaaS industrialists will also have to take on the biggies from Silicon Valley. Targeting small and midsized patrons through desk-selling has its restrictions. “You have to work harder to understand product-market fit. Just having a cheaper version of a bigger product brand has its limitations. When you relocate to the US, you realise you approximately lives in a well in Chennai, ” says Sachdev of Uniphore. The municipality moves slowly in the fast-paced startup world. For the young crowd, there are ethnic challenges like the lack of vibrant nightlife. Language remains a barrier in the region where Tamil pride is sometimes worn on the sleeves. “At Open Coffee Club, sometimes the conversations are in Tamil, seeing non-Tamilians feel like an stranger, ” says an entrepreneur. Chennai has made a good start. It must now work harder to build on its niche positioning.Deep-tech startups from IIT-MadrasDetect Tech: Its IoT-based intelligent hardware caters to the inspection needs of the power area, like checking oil pipelinesCygni Energy: Solar DC answers and DC Micro-grid render light-green energy and DC power at a very low costAgnikul Cosmos: Provides a dedicated launching vehicle for smaller planets at a lower costMGH Labs: Patented product attracts, catches and kills mosquitoes in a non-toxic wayFibSol Life: Gives nano-biotechnology and computational biology to solve problems in agricultural products, state and environmentInnoDI Water: New generation of care arrangements treat field and surface water to produce clean drinking waterFabheads Automation: Its carbon material 3D printer gratifies to spheres such as space tech( micro and nano spacecrafts ), aviation and biomedicalAerostrovilos Energy: It is building India’s first indigenous gas turbines for power generationePlane: Firm is designing hybrid electrical airplanes for short-range intracity travelPlanys: Provides underwater robotic inspection and overlook mixtures