The Indian Landscape

New technology and technology led service businesses will emerge from India in the near future

• There’s already a buzz around startups in India
• Lots of US VCs are interested in investing in Indian startups
• High cell-phone (~90M) & TV (~200M) penetration & Telecomm spend; potential of reasonable growth in consumer Internet (cheap DSL) & other consumer areas are being expected, due to higher disposable incomes
• Huge “content” industry around Cricket and Bollywood
• The China factor… e.g., Chinacars.com, Baidu, etc.; everyone seems to believe that next 20 years these are the primary growth markets
  

Early/Idea stage US companies would like to leverage India strategically

• Several new business ideas (e.g., in the KPO and BPO spaces) need to leverage India in a strategic manner right from their formative stages
• Several other startups would like to leverage Indian rates to pre-validate ideas (technically & from market perspective) before launching them in US/more expensive geographies
• There are US entrepreneurs/startups that are keen to address Indian markets; e.g., wireless infrastructure, telecomm, video content & delivery, broadband services such as IPTV, etc.

Lots of Venture money (~$2B in 12 months) is/will be available for India, question is: where are the deals?

• The bigger/well-known companies have already been picked up with huge investments; e.g., Indiatimes, MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Tejas Networks, etc.
• There are few more that people are running after; but nowhere close to the deal-flows that can absorb $2B in capital
• Also, most VCs would like to invest in the order of $2-10M/deal (even as initial commitment) at a time. Most new India focused funds also have larger corpus ($100+M in size), and therefore usually unable to invest less than $1M at a time either