Sequoia India and Southeast Asia has announced the launch of Pathfinders, a platform that connects early-stage SaaS founders from the region with global operators, who will help shape go-to-market strategies to succeed in new markets, particularly the US.
The pathfinders, who are founders or CXOs from some of Silicon Valley’s innovative technology companies, will help young SaaS startups from India and Southeast not only shape their go-to-market strategy, but also get their initial set of global customers, make key hires, think through product design choices and more.
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“Over the past year we have onboarded 25 Pathfinders to the platform to include exceptional executives from unicorns to large tech companies across domains such as sales, marketing, product management and engineering," said Harshjit Sethi, Managing Director, Sequoia India.
The pathfinders include Amit Singh (President, Palo Alto Networks), Oliver Jay (ex CRO, Asana), Param Kalhon (CPO, UIPath), Prasanna Sankar (Cofounder, Rippling), Pratyus Pattnaik (Snr Director of Engineering, Okta), Sandeep Johri (former CEO, Tricentis) and more.
"Six of our companies have already received investments and mentorship from our Pathfinders and feedback has been unanimously glowing. We intend to scale the platform significantly over the next year by onboarding more Pathfinders and portfolio companies,” said Sethi.
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In a blog post co-authored with his team at Sequoia, Sethi explained that the genesis of Pathfinders came in an internal Zoom brainstorming session in late 2020.
"We were noticing an increasing trend in the number of companies we were partnering with that had global ambitions from Day One, and the challenges faced by early-stage startups quickly became the focus of that call," he wrote.
The Pathfinder program comes at a time when the India SaaS engine has begun to generate tremendous power with over 1,000 startups. Going global, particularly in the US, will be the key to their success, as it's been for successful enterprise tech unicorns to come out of India, including the recently-listed poster boy of the SaaS revolution — Freshworks.
Between 2012 and 2019, India had only seen the emergence of eight SaaS unicorns. However, given the wave of enterprise adoption of SaaS at global scale, India has seen the creation of at least 10 SaaS unicorns in just the last two years.
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"To succeed, Indian disruptors need to understand the western buyers, their needs and their user’s expectations clearly, and design products that fit them effectively," said Amit Singh, President, Palo Alto Networks, who is one of the Pathfinders.
According to a Bain report, Indian SaaS companies have the potential to achieve $30 billion in revenue and capture an eight to nine percent share of the global SaaS market by 2025.
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