AWS bullish on India Start-up Ecosystem: Kumara Raghavan

On the sidelines of the recent AWS Re:Invent 2022 at Las Vegas, Kumara Raghavan, Head-Startups at AWS India (Amazon Web Services India Pvt Ltd) spoke with Prabhu Ram, Head – Industry Intelligence Group, CyberMedia on the start-up momentum in India, AWS commitment to start-ups, and, most importantly, the future outlook for the start-up ecosystem, amongst others. 

Here are some major highlights from our interaction:

On the India Start-up Ecosystem

In the last two years, there has been a phenomenal growth in the Indian start-up ecosystem. There are some favorable tailwinds driving the start-up ecosystem. 

To begin with, with the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and ONDC, a whole new array of opportunities has opened up for start-ups. 

Secondly, there is in an overall growth and maturity in the start-up ecosystem. This is evinced from the fact that many second time, and third time founders, who have had successful exits, and have strong teams, are building new start-ups, compared to in the past.

Lastly, powering these market opportunities is Cloud. By using the power of the cloud, today’s start-ups are able to innovate and experiment, while lowering their cost of curiosity. Start-ups can easily and quickly scale up or bring down their cloud usage as needed. It enables them to optimize costs, without impacting their growth. All three have enabled big momentum for the start-up ecosystem in India, and we will continue to see this. 

AWS for Start-ups

At AWS, we have the tools and applications that enable start-ups across various sectors to build and scale. With 200 products and services, we have the broadest and deepest set of capabilities of any cloud provider, ranging from basic compute and storage to advanced database and architecture options, to pre-built solutions. Our team is dedicated to working with our start-up customers to help them determine which services are best suited for them. Amazon has provided more than $2 billion in AWS credits since 2020 to help early-stage start-ups launch their businesses and accelerate their growth. Through, AWS Activate program, we have helped our start-up customers to build fast and build right. 

We also have AWS Start-up ramp, which helps early-stage technology start-ups focused on the public sector to build solutions on AWS. We have several programs across sectors, to allow start-up ideas to flourish, and we have them across a start-up’s journey, because the needs of a start-up changes as it scales, and our programs are built to support them throughout. 

Major Sectors fueling the Start-up Economy

Financial Inclusion: The biggest number of investments went into the fintech space. India has witnessed a lot of innovations across variety of use cases, cutting across payments, insurance or banking. However, one of the most powerful changes that we saw through the fintech acceleration in the country, was financial inclusion. For instance, CreditVidya, promotes financial inclusion by digitizing salary payments for many of their customers who have never had a bank account. They’ve reached >70Mn users, and they’ve changed the notion of access to financial services for so many. Innovations like these have made a big impact in the fintech space. We also have had a big uptake of retail investors in capital markets. Built on cloud, start-ups like Zerodha and Upstox, have made trading a lot more intuitive and easier, and made the whole experience smoother than what was traditionally available in the capital markets. 

SaaS: When you consider SaaS, Indian SaaS start-ups have aimed to go global from Day 1, and the AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure enables them to do that. India is the SaaS factory of the world, and SaaS start-ups, such as Freshworks, have had a tremendous impact. According to some estimates, India could be on the cusp of unlocking a $1 trillion opportunity for SaaS companies, creating nearly half a million new jobs by 2030. The talent available in this space has evolved as well, which provides further impetus to the growth of SaaS start-ups in the country.

Healthcare: We also see great momentum in healthcare sector. Start-ups are using cloud technology in incredible ways to provide better and easier access to healthcare, and many of our customers played a pivotal role in mitigating the effects of the pandemic. For example, HealthifyMe, launched an app called VaccinateMe during the pandemic, to provide broader access for booking vaccination appointments. Through this app Indians made over 50Mn vaccination bookings. There is investment happening in preventive healthcare as well, where start-ups such as Fittr and Curefit, are making a huge difference. Furthermore, healthcare providers that are looking at a patient’s journey from end to end, will see momentum with the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission as well. 

Gaming: We are also seeing innovation happening in the gaming space. For example, Rooter Sports, one of the largest live-streaming platforms, is using Amazon IVS for low latency, interactivity, scalability, cost, and ease in managing their services. This brings a lot more interactivity, and it's fully managed so they don’t have to do any undifferentiated heavy lifting. As a result, they have seen a lot of improvement and efficiency in their internal processes. Another example is, Games24x7,India's leading gaming company, ramped up its utilization of Amazon SageMaker to personalize user experience with machine learning and scale user base by 400% in 2 years. Given the boom in this sector, we expect this to be a significant growth area as well.

We have been supporting start-ups from the inception, since 2006. 

Through all these parts of the journey, at AWS, we always focus on cost optimization, and how much we have optimized our customers’ costs is a key focus area for us. That's an ongoing journey that we work on with our customers all the time. 

We are completely committed to India. We recently announced our second region launch in Hyderabad, which is estimated to support more than 48,000 full-time jobs annually through a planned investment of more than $4.4 billion in India by 2030. The construction and operation of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is estimated to add approximately $7.6 billion to India’s GDP by 2030. We want to be a force that takes India forward, and the launch of Hyderabad region supports India’s digital transformation. It is part of our long-term investment in the country.

Start-ups across the country are using AWS technologies to innovate, experiment, grow and scale. When you look at the mid to long-term, the fundamentals are still there for the start-up community, with a strong ecosystem, and also strong regulatory tailwinds. We feel confident that the start-up ecosystem has this opportunity to shine through. We continue to invest in, and find new ways to support, the start-up ecosystem in India.