Techosta Where Tech Starts From
Last year, Abhinandan Balasubramanian quit his job at a London-based financial-technology company. The startup scene in his native India was booming, and he wanted in.
The 25-year-old Mr. Balasubramanian moved to Mumbai and in December launched his own business there: Altflo, a global online marketplace for assets such as real estate and shares in investment funds.
Basing Altflo in India was an easy decision, Mr. Balasubramanian said. “The cost of scaling the company is much lower in India,” he said. Office space and talent are “multiples cheaper than in the U.K.”
Lured by a flood of venture-capital funding, relatively inexpensive labor and the size of the potential market in the world’s second-most-populous country, entrepreneurs and technology workers with Indian roots have been coming home in increasing numbers.
Among the highest-profile returnees is Kunal Bahl, who moved back to India after working for Microsoft Corp.and co-founded online marketplace Snapdeal, based in New Delhi. Snapdeal, owned by Jasper Infotech Pvt., is now valued at $6.5 billion.
Others have come back to work at different so-called unicorns, or startups valued at $1 billion or more. Three Indian-born executives from Alphabet Inc.’s Google returned last year to work at the country’s largest startup, e-commerce company Flipkart Internet Pvt. Ltd. of Bangalore.
The trend is a turnaround of sorts for a country that has long seen its ambitious, highly educated workers leave to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
“What looks like brain drain is actually a brain deposit,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in September during a speech in Silicon Valley. Now, he said, highly skilled workers abroad are returning to India “looking for an opportunity.”
There were about 4,200 startups in the country in 2015, according to Indian tech-industry group Nasscom. That is nearly as many as in the U.K. and is more than three times as many as India had in 2010.
Some are looking to compete globally. Others are focused on the promise of India, where the spread of low-cost smartphones is helping hundreds of millions of people get online for the first time. Optimists compare the startup environment with China’s in 2008, when large-scale Internet adoption helped foster the creation of titans such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
“I wanted to create a large tech company, and this is the fastest-growing economy in the world,” said Rahul Garg, explaining why he returned to India after five years with Google in Singapore and Tokyo. “It’s extremely exciting.”
Mr. Garg, 36, launched Moglix, a business-to-business e-commerce startup linking manufacturers and components suppliers, in September. Moglix, which is headquartered in Singapore but operates out of the Delhi suburb of Noida, has a staff of 60. Last month it said it had secured funding from Ratan Tata, one of India’s best-known businessmen and now a prominent angel investor.
Moglix has also received backing from venture firms such as Accel Partners, based in Palo Alto, Calif.
[“Source-wsj”]