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One of Japan’s premier startup events, Infinity Ventures Summit took place last week on Japan’s southern most island. In addition to pitches by 14 of Japan’s top startups, it featured sessions by some of Japan’s most prominent business leaders.
The final talk of the day took a trip across the continent to India with special guests to discuss how it is the place to go for the next billion users.
1. The money
Left to right: Hirokazu Mashita, Pranay Gupta, Karthik Reddy, Takeshi Ebihara.
Guests Pranay Gupta, Niyaz Laiq, Karthik Reddy, Kawaljit Singh Bedi, Arijit Chatterjee, Hitesh Chawla, and Takeshi Ebihara spoke to a mostly Japanese audience through the aid of simultaneous interpreters and moderator Hirokazu Mashita. But money needs no translation.
“India is growing at almost exactly the same pace as China was 10 years ago,” explained Takeshi of Rebright Partners who is one of the earliest and most active investors in India from Japan. “Venture capital funding has increased tenfold from three years ago. India’s GDP is set to overtake Japan’s in 10 years.”
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Takeshi showed during his presentation that foreign investment leads the pack. The top investors in 2015 by number of deals were Sequoia Capital with 46, Tiger Global Management with 35, and Accel with 33. Approximately US$9 billion was invested in Indian startups last year in over 1,005 deals.
Sequoia’s latest fund is speculated to be the largest to target India with US$920 million. The panelists see no sign of a slowdown for now because that money needs to be deployed within the lifetime of the fund, which is usually said to be 10 years.
It has been breeding season for unicorns as well. Takeshi’s slides show India has 6 percent of the magical beasts, making it the third largest producer after China with 16 percent and the US with 60 percent. Fortune’s 2016 list of unicorns tags seven in India.
2. Mobile
Photo credit: Orbojunglist.
“India is the world’s first mobile-first country,” says Takeshi. It is jumping, skipping, and hopping past technologies. There are roughly 400 million people online in India bringing it past the US into the second spot behind China’s estimated 680 million. However, 90 percent of India’s users are on mobile making it a completely different market.
3. Talent
Takeshi calls it the “world’s largest software programming country,” and cites that India produces 300,000 programmers every year.
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