Global SaaS — promising road ahead

We’re entering the golden era of global SaaS — build in India, for the world

Some time ago I had written a couple of articles encouraging SaaS founders to think beyond India, and build for the US market from day one. At Pravega, were fortunate to witness the potential of this approach in Innovaccer’s journey from early on. The founders hustled hard in their initial years trying things way beyond their comfort zone (riding in Greyhound buses! ) but the result is a company that is well on its way to be a big part of the massive US healthcare IT market. Off course, luck played its role, but as they say, you have to be in the right place and right time to give luck a chance.

When I look back at my interactions with founders last few months, it is very heartening to see an increasing number of founders take this route — some literally from day one, and others right after. I believe, couple of things have helped in this:

• Lot more founders are realising that US markets are both broad and deep. You could pick almost any industry and the IT market would easily be several billions of dollars if not more. And within each such vertical there still are still sizeable number of companies with potential ACV of $500K or more. The math is not hard to understand: for the magical $100MN revenue mark you need only 200 customers paying $500K each. Compare that with 20K customers for ACV of $5K. Founders are beginning to discover these niche vertical areas compared to the horizontal ones.
• Enterprise focused accelerators like Alchemist, Techstars, Target are giving founders early exposure and connects to US enterprise market. This gives a good leg-up to the founders and an early support system to tackle US market.
• And finally, Indian enterprises are certainly waking up to the fact that need to invest in technology to stay relevant. Most of them have hired for product/tech roles internally and these folks are eager to collaborate with young startups. This at least helps the startups in problem discovery.

Nothing succeeds like success. Companies like Innovaccer and Druva are showing the way, an ecosystem of founders and leaders is emerging that can mentor younger companies, and more funds are investing in Enterprise software. Personally, I am quite excited and hope to partner in some of these journeys going ahead.

Rohit is an early stage investor at Pravega Ventures. You can find his other articles here and follow him on twitter @rohitjain.