As a sector that has upended practically every other industry by disrupting as well as driving efficiencies through innovation in process and product management, technology has been the bulwark of business activity.
Not surprisingly, it has been an evergreen sector in attracting private capital. While the current top-tier Indian software services giants went public early, BPO firms went through a process of getting VC and PE backers and then hitting the public market. Over a period of time the traditional technology sector was seen as too cash-rich to require capital and matured to generate alpha for alternative investors.
Tech startups made up for the missing opportunity over the last decade and half. Legacy small and mid-sized IT firms, too, kept the momentum going in terms of consolidating their business and seeing intermittent PE interest. Larger legacy software firms have also been trying to expand their foothold overseas with opportunistic buys in the small-to-medium ticket sizes.
However, things seem to be moving to the next level as a clutch of buyouts in the field in the recent past shows how financial and strategic investors see an opportunity of not just scaling up mid-sized software and engineering services companies swiftly but also squeezing more efficiencies in India Tech Inc at large.
Deals involving Mphasis, Mindtree, NIIT Technologies, Hexaware, Majesco, Accelya and GlobalLogic all attest to this undercurrent. At the same time, emergence of firms like Happiest Minds, which went public earlier this year, shows there is still immense scope of creating new businesses with a specialised bent even in a crowded sector.
Overall, technology as a sector has accounted for nearly half of all private investments by volume and attracted capital worth around $51 billion, or over a fifth of the total private capital flow in India over the last decade, according to VCCEdge. In the same period, Indian technology companies comprised a fifth of the 9,400 M&A transactions even though at $39 billion those deals were just about 10% of the value of M&As across sectors.
To gauge how tech companies are firming up their strategies for the next leg of their evolution, finding new pockets of demand away from the US and Europe, rethinking their capital needs and balancing organic growth with inorganic expansion to achieve better scale, VCCircle is organizing its debut edition of the Technology Investment Summit on April 14, 2021 on a virtual platform.
By Jaideep Mehta, CEO, Mosaic Digital & Head - Mint
Marquee investors have reposed faith in India’s legacy IT sector by betting on tier-2 companies over the last few years. Also, Indian SaaS has attracted huge investments over the last 5 years. What is the investment thesis behind such bets and how have those firms fared on the expectations? Can the tier-2 and SaaS firms scale up to hit tier-1 scale soon enough? What kind of business and operational strategies would catapult them?
Speakers:
P. Srikar Reddy, MD & CEO, Sonata Software Limited
Virender Aggarwal, CEO, Ramco Systems
Akshat Babbar, Vice President, Chryscapital
Imran Jafar, Managing Partner, Gaja Capital
Nilesh Patel, CEO, LeadSquared
Moderator:
Payal Ganguly, Principal Correspondent, TechCircle
Data underscores the entire spectrum of technology. Be it storage, analytics or security, the business opportunity around the data being churned out every second is huge. How can small-mid scale tech firms create attractive business model around data? Which buckets of data management have had more success stories and how does the future opportunities look like for investors?
Speakers:
Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-Founder, Group Chief Executive and Executive Vice Chairman, Fractal
Dr. Anil Kaul, Co-founder & CEO, Absolutdata (An Infogain Company)
Abhishek Srivastava, Director, Endiya Partners
Moderator: Ranjani Raghavan, Associate Editor, VCCircle
Business-to-consumer tech companies have hogged the limelight and also a disproportionate amount of VC money through the years. In the same time their B2B cousins have been quietly building a more robust business without much cash burn. How did the B2B firms manage to do that? Can they spot new opportunities? What challenges do they face?
Speakers:
Tanmai Gopal, CEO & Co-founder, Hasura
Avnish Sabharwal, Managing Director, Accenture Ventures & Open Innovation
Sushane Chopra, Sr. Director, Gaja Capital
Kushal Nahata, Co-Founder & CEO, FarEye
Moderator: Abhijit Sen, Partner, Deloitte
Srikanth Velamakanni is the Co-founder, Group Chief Executive and Executive Vice Chairman of Fractal. Fractal is a leading player in the artificial intelligence and transformative enterprise decision making space. Fractal’s mission is to power every human decision in the enterprise and to use the power of AI to help the world’s most admired Fortune 100 companies. Since Srikanth co-founded Fractal in 2000, the company has raised more than USD 300 million from institutional private equity investors. Fractal serves more than 100 Fortune 500 companies with its AI, data and analytics driven business strategies. Under his leadership, Fractal has developed several product lines within the company including Cuddle.ai, Eugenie.ai, Theremin.ai and Qure.ai. Srikanth is the Chair of the board of Qure.ai, that recently raised USD 16MM in funding, less than three years after incubation.
Srikanth is Co-founder and Trustee of Plaksha University, with a strong academic focus on core engineering, AIML and mathematics. Additionally, Plaksha promotes interdisciplinary learning by bringing together science and the liberal arts. A member of the NASSCOM Executive Council Srikanth serves as a subject matter expert on data and AI.
Srikanth’s passion for AI and analytics has made him a thought leader in the space and an admired public speaker. He considers himself a lifelong student of mathematics, behavioural economics, neuroscience and consumer behavior.
Tanmai is the CEO & co-founder of Hasura Inc - an open-source cloud infrastructure company. Hasura eliminates the data access bottleneck for developers and teams building modern applications by providing an instant API over GraphQL and reducing time to market by an order of magnitude. Before Hasura, Tanmai ran a consulting firm helping some of the largest companies in the world transition to cloud-native architectures. Tanmai comes from a computer science background from IIT Madras and is passionate about making it easy to build complex things.
Disruption led innovation is the new status quo and globally new-age organizations are redefining the rules of the game. This has been the anchor for Virender Aggarwal (aka VA) who has been leading business transformations through technology for 30+ years. As CEO of Ramco Systems, he continues to drive this philosophy taking the organization forward into the frontiers of emerging digital technologies.
His leadership style thrives on building the right culture and leveraging Innovation to thrive in a fast paced world.
On the Innovation front, VA constantly scans the tech horizon and has a natural instinct to read the tea leaves ahead of others. This is why Ramco has been able to bring in new Innovation around Chatbots, Voice and now Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ahead of others in the enterprise applications arena.
Anil has over 22 years of experience in advanced analytics, market research and management consulting. Prior to Absolutdata, Anil worked at McKinsey & Co. and Personify.
Anil is very passionate about Analytics and its potential impact on decision making. He is constantly looking for means to leverage analytics innovatively to improve business decision making.
Anil has a Ph.D and masters in Marketing from Cornell University. He has published various Marketing articles in leading management and academic journals such as McKinsey Quarterly, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research and International Journal of Research.
Anil has been an invited speaker at many industry conferences as well as top business schools such as Dartmouth, Berkeley, Cornell, Yale, Columbia and New York University.
He was recently listed among the ‘10 Most Influential Analytics Leaders in India’ by the Analytics Magazine India and has been quoted as a “Game Changer” in the Research World Magazine from ESOMAR.
Anil is also on the board of Edutopia, an innovative start-up in the language learning space.
In his free time, Anil likes to read when indoors and hike when he is outdoors. He recently climbed a 6000 meter peak in the Himalayas.
Srikar is the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Member of the Board of Directors of Sonata Software Limited. A graduate from the Regional Engineering College (NIT, Trichy), and a Post Graduate in Management from IIM Calcutta.
Srikar has been with Sonata since 1986 and is pivotal in building Sonata as a trusted and reliable IT Solutions company. Srikar’s philosophy of driving business growth through a single-minded focus on customer and investment in people and technology, has made Sonata one of the fastest growing IT solutions company with a unique and differentiated strategy and value proposition.
In the last 6 years, between 2012 to 2018, since Srikar became the CEO of the company Sonata has seen its revenues, profits multiply many times and a market capitalization growing over 20 times, enabling the Financial and Industry analyst groups recognizing his focus to conceptualize and execute a unique growth strategy based on IP. This has helped Sonata to be a member of the group of unique Global growth companies at the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Srikar has set Sonata on a new growth path with a unique proprietary approach to creating digital businesses called “Platformation “
Srikar is actively involved with NASSCOM and CII, and was the Chairman of the Regional NASSCOM Council. He has been the Speaker at WEF and NASSCOM events. Srikar was conferred with the distinguished Alumni award by NITT, for his contribution to Industry/Corporate.
Sonata's growth over past 6 years is now widely recognized and Srikar has been featured recently in the list of India’s 10 most valuable CEO’s in the large enterprise category (2500 crore to 7500 crore) by ‘Business World,’ (Issue dated 18th June 2018). He has also been featured by Business Today (September 2017) as leading one of India’s fastest growing emerging (revenue between 500 to 2500 Cr) companies.
Imran is a Managing Partner at Gaja Capital (www.gajacapital.com).
Gaja is India’s leading mid-market growth capital firm. Gaja’s aim is to help create India’s next generation of market leaders in sectors such as Education, Consumer, Financial Services, Healthcare and SaaS.
Imran has 21 years of experience in Private Equity, Pharmaceuticals and Technology services. Prior to Gaja, Imran worked in a variety of roles of increasing responsibility at Dr. Reddy’s and Wipro Technologies.
At Gaja, Imran leads investments in the Education and Consumer clusters. He has been closely involved with Gaja’s investments in Leadsquared (Sales tech SaaS), Educational Initiatives (Ed-Tech SaaS), Kangaroo Kids (Pre-K and K-12), KOOH Sports (Performance Sports), SportzVillage (Youth Sports), EuroKids (Pre-K and K12), John Distilleries (AlcoBev), CL Educate (Supplemental Education) and Indus World Schools (K12).
Imran has post graduate degrees in software engineering from BITS-Pilani and an MBA from IIM-Bangalore.
Akshat has been with ChrysCapital since September 2011 and leads investments in IT and Business services sector. He was previously with Goldman Sachs on the equity sales desk. Akshat received an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and a Bachelor's degree in commerce from Delhi University.
Kushal Nahata is passionate about using technology to solve everyday challenges pertaining to deliveries. With global logistics networks and supply chains becoming the lifelines of sustenance, there is a huge price to pay as a result of operational inefficiencies and blindspots in the system. Starting his entrepreneurial journey, right out of college he started by developing a real-time vehicle tracking system (along with his co-founders) and was quick to sense an industry need - the speed at which they need to digitally transform their landscape. This led to the building of FarEye’s intelligent low-code platform which gave unique customization capabilities to enterprises and reduced the time to go-to-market with the transformation.
Since 2013, FarEye has been empowering the movement of multi-million dollar deliveries right from groceries to apparel to medical equipment to truckloads of Ferro alloys with end-to-end and real time visibility. With FarEye, enterprises exactly know where their goods are, when they will arrive and in what condition, this helps them achieve cost and resource optimization.
Kushal’s vision is to make deliveries and the delivery experience better by transforming logistics operations in a way that each stakeholder in the supply chain is empowered to make meaningful decisions with predictive visibility. With FarEye, he aims to plug the inefficiencies that make deliveries cost intensive and turn it into a profit center and brand differentiator.
Abhijit leads the TMT sector for Deloitte India -Financial Advisory practice and has 20 years of professional experience. He specially focusses on the technology sector and has been extensively working with investors and companies in both services and products segments. He has worked on large M&As and also fund raise mandates for fast growing digital and SAAS companies. Abhijit has worked with a variety of clients including multi-nationals and large private equity houses. At a personal level Abhijit is a big foodie and avid traveler. He loves discovering new places and local cuisines. He loves planning for holidays and cooking gastronomic delights with his family.
With his passion for building the next wave of world-class product start-ups, operational advice and strategic guidance come naturally to Abhishek Srivastava, Director, Endiya Partners.
At Endiya, Abhishek focuses on investments in technology, and comes with over a decade of experience in early-stage investing, operations and management consulting. He also sits on the Board of Hansel. Previously, he was on the Board of ShieldSquare (Radware) and Incnut (istyle). Besides that, he has played a vital role in the exit of Little Eye Labs (Facebook).
Prior to Endiya, Abhishek was a part of the investment team at Ventureast. His other experiences span CYIENT, where he was responsible for the firm’s M&As, strategy development & incubations, and PwC, where his skills were utilized at the Transaction Advisory Team. Before PwC, Abhishek worked as a consultant with the strategy and operations group at Deloitte Consulting where he advised several global clients on pre & post-merger strategies, market entry and growth expansion blueprints. He also worked with Tata Consultancy Services, as Engineer/ Account Manager, handling enterprise Product Development projects and Business Development.
Abhishek holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering (Delhi University) and an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. He is also a qualified CFA level 1 and has volunteered with several TiE Hyderabad initiatives. Abhishek is a member of Mensa International. Besides work, he loves unravelling puzzles, playing a racquet game & being glued to his Playstation.
Gaja Capital is a leading private equity firm in India’s mid-market. Gaja Capital is a high-touch and control focused firm with a team of strong operating professionals. Gaja Capital seeks to partner with entrepreneurs and professionals to build the future champions of Indian economy in the high growth sectors of education, financial services, consumer, healthcare and software. Gaja Capital is currently investing out of its fourth fund, which is targeting to raise US$ 400 Mn to invest in India's mid-market opportunity. The firm has an AUM of USD 450 Mn including the previous three funds, with commitments from marquee global investors US endowments, pension funds and foundations.
Gaja Capital was founded in 2004 by indigenous professionals with extensive operating and investing experience in India. With an exceptional network of some of India's most successful entrepreneurs, Gaja Capital has leveraged its deep local connect to partner with emerging businesses in India.
VCC Events opens up the avenues for participation. Join hands to be a part of India’s largest gathering of alternative investments leaders, industry stakeholders and Asia’s influential limited partners, general partners and marquee advisors. Your chance to actively participate and augment yourself as thought leaders.
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