India Welcomes Home Technology Talent
Surging venture capital for startups helps lure back entrepreneurs with Indian roots
Kunal Bahl, co-founder of the online marketplace Snapdeal, returned to India after working for Microsoft. Snapdeal is now valued at $6.5 billion. PHOTO: ANINDITO MUKHERJEE/REUTERS
By
NEWLEY PURNELL
BANGALORE, India—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.
Kiran Jonnalagadda, founder of Bangalore-based HasGeek, an industry group that provides listings for startup jobs and arranges meetings for tech workers. Many burgeoning startups felt starved for cash in years past, but now more money means building companies is easier.
Overall, investors pumped some $4.9 billion into India's startups in 2015, according to VCCEdge, the financial-research arm of VCCircle.com. That is up from $576 million in 2010. VCCircle, like Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.
India's prime minister, Mr. Modi—and his repeated declaration that he wants to make it easier to do business in India—has also helped boost sentiment.
"He's definitely headed in the right direction," said information-technology management consultant Akhil Sehgal, who lived in the Washington, D.C., area for more than a decade before returning to India in August. Mr. Sehgal, 34, founded a hardware startup to make women's bracelets that double as Internet-connected safety devices.
"As an Indian you always wonder, is it going to be worth it going back?" said Mr. Sehgal. But now, he predicts, the market in India is "going to explode." He added: "Everyone is running after startups."
Joydeep Sen Sarma, who held a senior technology management role at Facebook Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif., returned to India to launch cloud-computing startup Qubole Inc. in 2013. The company is headquartered in the U.S. but most of its engineering employees are in Bangalore.
Mr. Sen Sarma said in an interview at a cafe in Bangalore's Koramangala neighborhood, a leafy startup enclave, that in addition to wanting to get in early on India's burgeoning technology industry, he and his wife enjoy greater proximity to their families.
Not far from the cafe, where tech executives can be seen reviewing PowerPoint presentations on laptops, are the headquarters of Flipkart Internet, the country's biggest e-commerce player, and ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.'s ride-sharing business Ola.
Qubole doesn't disclose its revenue, but has raised $20 million in funding and last year won the job of handling cloud computing for Pinterest, the San Francisco image-bookmarking website valued at $11 billion. "Going back turned out to be a big win for us," Mr. Sen Sarma said.
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