The Venture Intelligence Blog

From elephants and snake charmers to software coders/coolies to app-toting delivery boys/dabba-walahs, the image of what's "happening" in India keeps morphing. And IIT-ians get added to the mix somewhere. " India is becoming the land of the errand app. " declared a recent Bloomberg News article that got featured in various international publications. Extracts: “People today want to do as much as possible with their phones,” said TinyOwl co-founder (Harsh Vardhan) Mandad, who graduated from Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Technology in 2012. “It is a friction just to go out – there’s the heavy traffic, pollution and waiting involved for a cab.” The startups are carving out niches by serving certain neighborhoods or parts of cities, realizing the “hyper-local” strategy long envisioned in more developed countries including the U.S. Larger e-commerce companies such as Flipkart and Snapdeal dominate online sales of more traditional goods, including books, apparel...

From a Businessworld article Far from being hotbeds of student-driven entrepreneurial activity, like in a Stanford University or an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), India’s B-school incubators now find themselves on the sidelines of the powerful entrepreneurial wave that is sweeping the country. During 2000-10, close to 150,000 startups have sprung up outside such incubators; 37,500 of these are in the five metros, according to Amit Grover, member of angel investment firm Mumbai Angels. Among the eight incubators the IITs and IIMs set up nearly two decades ago, SINE is tagged the most successful. Since 2004, it has incubated 35 startups, of which 20 are ‘graduated’ and are in various stages of progress. Three have shut operations due to reasons including their inability to raise fresh capital, difficulties in finding customers and gaining scale at the right time. Others have been in the incubator well beyond the incubation period of three years for similar reasons. For exam...