Ritu Verma, co-founder and managing partner at Ankur Capital. Image: Harichandan Arakali
There are waves of innovation arising out of India’s digitalisation revolution, and markets hitherto difficult or impossible to serve are now within reach, says Ritu Verma, co-founder and managing partner at Ankur Capital, in a recent interview with Forbes India. Entrepreneurs are building many such ventures–from solving fragmented supply chains to digital distribution of innovative insurance products to mitigate the impact of climate change.
Also in recent years, there has been a surge of venture activity in deep science and engineering, with world-class innovations originating in India, which perhaps is the most exciting bucket for her (Verma herself has a PhD in physics) and at Ankur Capital, she says. Edited excerpts.
Q. What stands out to you as a big change in India beyond the metros today that is an opportunity for entrepreneurs?
The fundamental change is the digital infrastructure revolution that we have witnessed. Ten years ago, if you went out into rural India, you were still questioning whether there would be connectivity. That is not the question anymore. I am also referring to the digital public stack that has been built on top.
As a result, many markets that were hard to serve are much more accessible today. And because we are a country of much smaller, fragmented players, the cost to serve or get consumers as part of your network was very high in the physical world. The digital infrastructure and the stack is taking away those costs, reducing those frictions and allowing new businesses to emerge, with entrepreneurs finding new opportunities.
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That is an important part of what we are bullish about. While obviously the top 100 million represent a consumer opportunity, today even in Tier-III, Tier-IV towns and beyond, there are a lot of opportunities and not just consumption opportunities, but the opportunities to integrate those markets into the larger fabric of the Indian economy. That is a large play.
Q. Give us a couple of examples of such in which you have invested.
One of the companies we have invested in is Captain Fresh. While people would be familiar with various B2C (business-to-consumer) brands, they may not have heard of this company as Captain Fresh does not deliver to households. Instead, they are tackling the fragmented nature of the backend, in the supply chain of seafood, business-to-business.
They will serve any business anywhere in the world. There are big opportunities in solving the backend supply chain and backend enablers for large consumer businesses.
What’s happening is this wave after wave of digitally-enabled innovation. In the first wave, things started becoming possible on our phones. In the next wave, the data availability is not only an efficiency driver, but it is also a source of new products. This is still waiting to unfold.
An example of a startup we have invested in is Ibisa, which is a parametric insurance tech specialist focused on mitigating the impact of climate change for its customers. They combine access to satellite data and digital reach to provide what I call sachet insurance products.
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A farmer can insure crops against unseasonal heavy rain, or a dairy owner can insurance against the impact of unusually high temperature on milk yield. Such things are possible by Ibisa’s technology solutions and know how. A small solar farm operator can insure against the gear unexpectedly not working.
In food delivery, for example, if delivery agents are ferrying packets in the rain, during the monsoons, say, an insurance-tech solution like this could potentially insure the food delivery company against loss due to food getting wet, at the scale of their operations.
There are many new opportunities coming up in India now because of the digital distribution and eliminating the need for and the cost of deploying people to various tasks that previously made many markets hard to serve.
Q. How does all this influence the way you invest in startups as a VC investor?
The traditional processes of due diligence do not change. They are essential. The value lies in us going forward (with the opportunity) and there are two sides to this. The positive is, one learns about the new market opportunity, and one gets to analyse strategies and so on.
The negative is that this is about the future five years and not the past five years. Life will definitely be different in the next five years. Here some past experiences may be seen either as baggage, or learnings that strengthens your resolve, so it’s a balance that one has to strike and assess how the world might turn out in the future. You will be wrong. That is 100 percent true, but you also will be right. It is a mix.
Q. So at a high level over the next ten years, what are the threads of the India story fabric?
There are three things we are unpacking. First, the opportunities enabled by the ongoing digitalisation is something we like to think of as the ‘Amazonification’ of many businesses that already exist. They are becoming more efficient, with greater reach and so on.
The second is the waves of increasingly sophisticated digital-led products that companies will be able to offer – such as Ibisa and others.
The big change we will see in the next five-six years is ability of the Indian entrepreneur to build not just for India but also for the globe. Whether as software (products) companies or deep science startups, India is the underdog here, and that is a good thing.
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Third is the science bucket. Over the last six-seven years, we have seen some really world class, fundamental innovations from Indian entrepreneurs, but with global relevance. They are highly competitive in the global arena and there are some advantages to being based in India.
Did you know that last year there were close to one lakh patents (applications) filed in India? While in comparison 7x more were filed in the US, we used to be much worse. So, we’ve seen a spurt in this activity in India in recent years. There always were interesting things happening in the lab, but I think you’re seeing more people convert that to a commercial opportunity and build a business on top of it. That is very exciting for us as investors in deep science and tech.
Q. Tell us about a couple of ventures you have invested in, in deep science.
We have invested in companies ranging from battery chemistry to synthetic biology. The people who come in after us into these companies are huge global companies who are scouting for the best of technologies. They’re scouting the world. Then they come back and say ‘Hey, I think this is the one in India that will work’.
That to me is a huge opportunity. They are saying this one’s the best, and the most capital efficient. In the next five to 10 years, you will want to see these deep science and tech companies compete for the global pie.
String Bio, for example, (which takes methane and makes useful proteins and other products. Founded 2013, Bengaluru) is absolutely a global company in terms of its know-how and the quality of its products. String Bio has set up a plant in Tumkur and it is capable of making their products at some scale and they are already selling out of that plant.
Yes, it will take them a couple of years to build out the facility but it’s already being operated at very good economics. They are also in talks to raise more money to set up a larger facility. They have a platform technology that can serve multiple industries.
They have ambitions to list in the next four-five years, but what you will see in the next couple of years is the actual sales products out there in the market.
Offgrid is another example (Offgrid Energy Labs, founded 2018, Noida). They are not at full commercial production. They are just setting up what I would call an initial plant to make zinc-based batteries for energy storage. In fact, there is a petrol pump in North Bengaluru that is fully running on their batteries.
They’ve also been able to run six or seven autorickshaws more economically than what the vehicles had previously, on these batteries. These zinc-based batteries have certain advantages over the lithium-ion ones.
They are setting up a factory to serve some customers and they will follow up with a larger facility. But these are the journeys we’ve not seen before in India and will see for the first time in the country over the next 5-10 years. These are the exciting wave-2 or wave-3 of innovation out of India.