The Road to Startup Exits – Think Next Roundtable Recap

$8B of venture investment went into Indian startups in 2015 alone! Four firms–Ola Cabs, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Paytm–accounted for 32% of these investments.  However, on the M&A side, things have been slow. Since 2011, there have been approximately 190 transactions valued at a total of $2.3B (about $11M per deal), placing India way behind the U.S., Israel, and other startup ecosystems.

I recently hosted a roundtable on M&A at Microsoft Ventures’ Think Next in Delhi, called “The Road to Startup Exits.” Our star panel consisted of Ashish Gupta(Helion Ventures), Deepak Gaur (SAIF Partners), and Abhishek Kumar (Snapdeal). Among a marquee audience of VCs, entrepreneurs, and senior execs from the industry, we discussed the present M&A scenario, its gaps, and the future.

Here is a glimpse of the insights generated during the panel:

  1. There is a slowdown in private markets globally, including in the U.S. and India. Valuations are expected to come down in 2016 and will cause grief for some investors, but the long term promise of India is in tact. In other words, there is no issue with fundamentally strong companies being built in India, but there is an issue with them being overvalued.
  2. This is a normal cycle for the startup/venture space: there will be several startups who will not survive the slowdown and will get integrated into other startups or corporates. A slowdown is actually good for the startups that survive – they can finally focus on getting their unit economics right, hiring the right talent and focus on what needs to be done to get to the next level. This also contributes to the ecosystem’s evolution, shaping the next waves of entrepreneurs and their offerings.
  3. Some recent examples of companies who had a solid team and business model, but that were unable to scale (subscale), are Qikwell (acquired by Practo for ~$50M), Exclusively (acquired by Myntra for their private label offerings), and Letsbuy (acquired by Flipkart). TaxiforSure’s (TFS) acquisition by Ola was about the power of financing–Ola had raised significantly more money than TFS, and at that point, TFS’s volume was still interesting for Ola and Uber, which justified Ola’s decision to acquire TFS.
  4. Large startups are more open to leveraging other startups and their offerings. For instance, Snapdeal has been a prolific acquirer of Indian startups (15-16 to date), primarily to plug their own gaps in terms of technologies, products or customers. For example, the product from Martmobi became the basis of Shopo, the C2C platform for Snapdeal. Freecharge was one of the fastest growing mobile wallets in the country and post-acquisition now has become Snapdeal’s payments business.
  5. Companies stay private much longer in the U.S. This will play out in India, too, and fewer companies will go for IPOs in coming years–and the ones who do might not consider doing it in India. The capacity of the India market to absorb large IPOs is restricted–there is limited float. Although regulations are becoming favourable, the India market today still has very stringent guidelines on public listing with very high levels of scrutiny and liability. Hence, listing a company in the U.S. is a lot more attractive, even for an Indian company.

In summary, 2016 is expected to see a slowdown in the funding space both globally and in India, which in-turn will drive an uptick in the number of M&A transactions as companies who are unable to raise their next financing round will seek an exit option.

Want to see the entire Think Next Roundtable? Watch it here:

#TheWayForward for M&A in India

2013 was a hot year for Global Technology M&A:   204 announced Tech M&A deals took place at an overall valuation of ~$100B, of which 70% were pure software companies. Thanks to a strong stock market, 51 Tech IPOs took place in 2013.

The story for the India software product industry has been different. Despite huge innovation and rising entrepreneurship, most Indian product companies have lacked meaningful exits.

ThinkNext CorpDev PanelLast Friday, I hosted the M&A Panel at Microsoft Think Next in Bangalore, with a very interesting setup: 2 VCs, 2 entrepreneurs and 2 Corp Development folks from MNCs.   The theme of the discussion was “The way forward for M&A for the Software products out of India”.    Our star panel consisted of Ashish Gupta (Helion Ventures), Bharti Jacob (Seedfund), Ken Foo (Autodesk), Prashant Gupta (Microsoft), Sanjay Shah (Invensys Skelta) & Phani Sama (Redbus).   We had a marquee audience of VCs from IDG, Lightspeed, Qualcomm, Inventus etc. who contributed their insights and really made the discussion lively!

Here is a glimpse of the insights generated during the panel:

– “Discovery” continues to be problem #1 for India software product companies.  Most Indian startups don’t show up on the radar of the big US acquirers. Autodesk first discovered Qontext (their marquee acquisition in 2012) through analyst reports in the US, and didn’t know they were an India company until later in the process.
– Corp development folks are mostly agnostic to the location of the company.  As Ken Foo from Autodesk put it, “we don’t start our day thinking:   today I will acquire an Israeli company … or an Indian company”.  They are looking for a specific product or technology fit & location is secondary.
– One interesting insight was the Investment bankers didn’t really seem to play a role during the discovery process, and all of the participants (buy side, VCs and entrepreneurs) felt that startups shouldn’t expect a banker to help with strategic engagements.  iBanks do play an important role in helping negotiate the deal and running the process to a positive conclusion.
– Acqui-hires (acquisitions with the sole intent of acquiring engineering talent) are extremely hot right now, due to the shortage of big data, analytics & android/iOS engineers.  Obviously, VC investors are less excited about acquihires & view them as a “last option”.  As Ashish put it, a VC will entertain an acquihire deal only when he believes that scaling the company is no longer possible, and the company is in danger of running out of cash.  On the other hand, Corp development folks at the MNCs view acquihires as a ‘badge of pedigree’ for the founders!
– Entrepreneur readiness continues to be a challenge during the M&A process.   Indian entrepreneurs traditionally are techies and don’t spend time building a clear differentiation story or preparing themselves for organizational and financial diligence.  iSPIRT does offer an “M&A hotline” to entrepreneurs where we formally provide advice in the event of an inbound M&A interest.
– A new generation of MNCs: Traditionally, MNC companies have established captive R&D centers in India (eg: Intel, Cisco) and then looked at M&A to enter the India market or identify new technologies.   However, the panelists beleived that M&A activity in software products will be driven by a new generation of MNC companies, such as Facebook, Salesforce, Autodesk etc. who have limited or no presence in India, and are looking to use M&A as a means to acquire global talent and/or establish a presence in India
– Future M&A:  Based on the “Virtual Mandates” that iSPIRT has received, we believe that future technology M&A is likely to happen in the areas of Machine Learning & Analytics, SaaS disruptions like HR and Recruiting, Cloud Infrastructure & Mobility.   Companies that have aggregated large groups of customers & partners within India (small medium businesses, classifieds, consumers for finance etc.) are also interesting for acquirers.

I enjoyed the frank conversation & clear thinking from the panelists, and left with a  huge amount of learning and ideas that I will use to guide iSPIRT’s M&A connect program.

A “Virtual Mandate” from Silicon Valley companies for M&A

2013 was one of the most prolific years for M&A worldwide with 3169 acquisitions taking place across the globe. India had its own share of successes with RedBus, Little Eye Labs etc. going through acquisitions. However, in general, relatively few Indian startups figure on the list of acquisitions.

Last week, I hosted an iSPIRT M&A Roundtable in Palo Alto along with Jay Pullur. Attendees M&A - Connect1included corporate development, M&A and senior business unit folks from several key companies including Google, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, Groupon, Intuit, Box, VMware, Cadence, Docomo, LG, etc.

Manik Gupta (Global Product Manager – Google Maps) kicked off the Roundtable with a discussion around Google’s experiences with various acquisitions in the mapping space, both within the US and in Israel. We also had a good discussion on how to bring Indian startups into the mix.

The Roundtable was very well received by the Corporate Development attendees. Here are some takeaways for us in the Indian software product industry:

  • Indian product startups, unlike Israeli startups, are just not on the radar of US acquirers. This means that our efforts to improve ‘Discovery‘ are well timed and badly needed.
  • M&A connect2Acqui-hires are extremely hot right now. Almost every company is short of engineers. Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, Analytics etc. are all in big demand! However entrepreneur preparedness in Indian startups is low. Please use our hotline to get ready in you are approached.
  • Almost all acquisitions have a strong BU sponsor. Business engagements are a stepping stone to future M&A.
  • Acquirers are asking iSPIRT to expedite its ‘playbook‘ that articulates the process of doing an acquisition in India.

 

iSPIRT now has a good number of ‘Virtual Mandates” from the Silicon Valley companies. We are using these to make carefully targeted introductions to Business Exchange Associates.

Exciting times ahead… stay tuned!