homevideos Newsyoung turks NewsNexus Venture Partners’ Abhishek Sharma believes that the strong will become stronger in these times
Nexus Venture Partners’ Abhishek Sharma believes that the strong will become stronger in these times
In this episode of Young Turks, CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan spoke to Abhishek Sharma, MD at Nexus Venture Partners; Tanmai Gopal, CEO & Co-Founder, Hasura; and Swapnil Jain, CEO & Co-Founder, Observe.ai to discuss growth of India’s SaaS story and the road ahead.
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 10 SaaS unicorns in just the past two years.
With over 1,000 startups, the Indian SaaS engine has begun to generate tremendous power. The combined revenue of these SaaS startups is expected to jump from $8 billion in 2021 to $100 billion in 2026, according to a Chiratae-Zinnov report. This power surge isn’t escaping the attention of global VCs.
VC firm Nexus Venture Partners was among the first to see the potential of the India SaaS story. Besides cutting the first cheques for India’s SaaS unicorns such as Hasura, Postman and Dhruva Software, the Silicon Valley and India-based venture capital firm has backed more than 75 enterprise software startups.
In recent years, the VC firm has been ramping up its consumer tech play with the likes of the quick commerce startup, Zepto. Overall, the VC firm has made investments in more than 150 startups with assets under management to the tune of $2 billion.
The name Hasura is a combination of Asura for demon and H for Haskell, a computer programming language. India’s latest SaaS unicorn was founded by Tanmal Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh in 2017. Hasura is an open source platform for developers to make web application development faster and easier. It decreases time-to-market for mission-critical applications. Its solutions have been downloaded more than 400 million times. Initially started in Bengaluru, but in view of growing opportunities in the US, moved base to San Francisco. A common route for India’s SaaS startups.
Backed by SoftBank, Zoom and Nexus Venture Partners among others, Observe.ai is an Artificial Intelligence-driven SaaS platform for contact centres. With its solutions, the San Francisco-based startup is pulling contact centres out of the dark when it comes to customer conversation insights. It is turning centres of customer support into centres of intelligence for enterprises. In its most recent Series C funding round, the SaaS startup raised $125 million, which is said to be the largest-ever funding of its kind for a contact centre startup.
CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan spoke to Abhishek Sharma, MD at Nexus Venture Partners; Tanmai Gopal, CEO & Co-Founder, Hasura; and Swapnil Jain, CEO & Co-Founder, Observe.ai to discuss the growth of India’s SaaS story and the road ahead.
For full interview, watch accompanying video
First Published: Jun 17, 2022 7:23 PM IST
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