In an exclusive conversation with Storyboard18’s editor Delshad Irani, the Co-founders of Indian consumer tech giant InMobi Group, Abhay Singhal and Piyush Shah, share their views on the ‘funding winter’ and why this phase is good for the Indian startup ecosystem. InMobi was India’s first unicorn and Glance, the discovery platform that’s part of the InMobi group, also achieved unicorn status within a short span of time.
Piyush Shah, co-founder of InMobi Group and President & COO, Glance addresses funding winter and says, “With every cycle, we get far higher quality of talent and far more quality of ideas. All the companies that have come up and talked in the last 6 months have blown my mind on how they are talking about profitability… It’s not stopping. It’s the next 20 years of massive entrepreneurship from this country. We hope to play a small part, in catalyzing that and enabling entrepreneurs to build world class unicorns.”
Abhay Singhal, co-founder, InMobi & CEO, InMobi Advertising Platforms shares his perspective on funding winter and says, “Finally the Indian entrepreneurs are realizing that they have to be on their own and can’t be taking models that have worked elsewhere. If you were to pick any company that is by any stretch of imagination successful in India, there is no similarity between them and any company in the Western world.”
Singhal highlights Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s work with Paytm and said Sharma has revolutionized India. He also cites the example of Meesho giving birth to a completely new different kind of commerce model and teaching India how to do commerce. “None of these models exist in the global part of the world. This generation of entrepreneurs are realising that the market maybe small but the world is a much bigger place where we can make them sustainable global large businesses.”
“It is a subtle but important shift coming from this wave of entrepreneurship. I see people being more comfortable in their own skin. This wasn’t the case two years ago when we were trying to make Tiktok of A, Uber of B, Stripe of C, that’s not going to work in this country,” Singhal concludes.