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iSPIx is a Public Good that will help us in our vision of making India a Product Nation.

The Indian Software Product industry has undoubtedly become a burgeoning sector. It is on way to claim a significant share of the global mutli-billion dollar enterprise software product industry. iSPIx-B2B is an initiative from iSPIRT to put exact numbers on this exciting growth story.

iSPIx stands for ‘Indian Software Product Industry Index’ and read as ‘i-specs’. The index essentially captures the value of the top 30 Indian B2B Software Product companies along with a bunch of other statistics and information (employee numbers, company profile, product focus, funding type etc.). While the general data is used to get a broad picture of the industry profile, the key piece of information in this exercise, is the anonymize and aggregated valuation figure of the top 30 companies. This is used as a metric to gauge the size and growth of the Indian Software Product industry.

To our pleasant surprise, this turned out to be a $10.25 Billion figure recording double digit growth rates!  These 30 companies are gunning across the business horizontals and verticals with their strong product portfolios. They directly employ over 21000 people. Click on this info-graphic to know who these 30 companies are (listed alphabetically and not terms of value size).


This iSPIRT hangout did provide an overview of the iSPIX initiative by iSPIRT and why it is necessary for the product ecosystem with its focus on B2B companies in the Indian context. The Indian B2B software product industry has been growing nicely outside of the spotlight – the enterprise value of the top 30 companies is $10.25 billion (₹65,500 crores) and they employ over 21,000 people. With such encouraging growth and global focus, it becomes important to see what insights we can gather about this relatively unsung group of companies.

The Hangout was moderated by Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder, iSPIRT and had Dev Khare, Fellow at iSPIRT & Partner at LightSpeed India & Raghu, Fellow at iSPIRT

To our pleasant surprise, this turned out to be a $10.25 Billion figure recording double digit growth rates!  These 30 companies are gunning across business horizontals and verticals with their strong product portfolios and directly employ over 21000 people. Click on this info-graphic to know who these 30 companies are (listed alphabetically and not terms of value size).

Read the November 2015 edition of the iSPIx-B2B report to know more and watch the video if you are curious about how we put the index together.

We believe iSPIx is a Public Good that will help us in our vision of making India a Product Nation.

Guest Post by Raghu, Fellow at iSPIRT

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India B2B Software Products Industry Clocks Solid Growth from 2014 to 2015

India’s B2B software product industry has grown nicely since we published the first edition of this index in November 2014 – the top 30 companies are valued at $10.25 billion (₹65,500 crores) and employ over 21,000 people.  The index has grown 20% in USD terms and 28% in INR terms from October 30, 2014 to June 30, 2015.

There has been an acceleration since 2010 in the pace of creation of B2B companies.  Vertically-focused offerings in retail, travel, financial services, media have reached scale and we are likely to see some larger exits in terms of IPOs or M&A over the next couple of years. In parallel, we are seeing horizontal offerings targeting global markets emerge and start to breakout of India into the US and other global markets – we are starting to see not only India-based venture funds backing these companies but also Silicon Valley funds coming in once there is initial customer adoption in the US.

A new set of founders are coming into the B2B software products ecosystem. These include an increasing proportion who have worked at consumer and B2B startups that have scaled in India and who have identified problems that they can solve with software automation.  We are also seeing continued venture creation from founding teams that have backgrounds from established enterprise software companies and some from IT services companies.

In terms of target markets, fast-growth Indian companies (in sectors such as organized retail, organized healthcare services and technology startups in product commerce and services commerce i.e. online-to-offline) are starting to purchase software from Indian B2B software product startups and have globally-aligned requirements, helping these startups get closer to product-market fit before or in parallel to starting to sell globally. We are also seeing many startups go global from day-one through a desk-selling model, as evidenced by many of the companies in the index. And finally, several startups have moved founders to the US and are succeeding in direct selling models there.

Some of the numbers: 80% of companies have global customer bases, while the rest are India-focused.  67% of companies are domiciled in India, with the rest principally in Singapore and the US.  Bangalore and NCR account for half the companies’ principal city of operations with Chennai and Pune as key secondary hubs – there is a trend to newer companies starting up in Bangalore, Chennai and Pune and away from NCR.  Average enterprise value per employee is climbing toward Silicon Valley levels – the index currently nets out to $480k per employee.

The top 30 companies in alphabetical order are:

Here’s the report in its entirety:

Thanks to all the volunteers at iSPIRT who worked on this project as well as Professor Sharique Hasan of Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; Professor Rishi Krishnan of IIM-Indore; as well as Signal Hill for providing public market valuation comparables and Rakesh Mondal  for designing the document..

We will publish an updated iSPIxB2B index every year starting with the next one in June 2016 – please do click here to submit names of companies you think should make this list.

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iSPIRT now Tracking the Size and Growth of the Indian B2B Software Products Industry through iSPIxB2B Index(Oct ’14 Edition)

iSPIX-b2bWe believe the discussion about India’s technology industry – whether in government circles, the media or in Silicon Valley – overlooks India’s B2B software product companies which sell globally as well as into India. Instead, there is a lot of discussion about IT Services companies and E-commerce players.

We would like to shine a spotlight on these Indian B2B software products companies through the India Software Products Industry Index – B2B (iSPIxB2B), which we are launching today. The index tracks the thirty most valuable B2B software product companies headquartered in India and companies headquartered elsewhere in the world where cofounders are in India right from the creation of the company onwards.

The data suggests that the B2B software product industry has been growing nicely outside of the spotlight – the enterprise value of the top 30 companies is $6.2 billion (₹37,500 crores) which is higher than we would have imagined before starting out on this effort.  The top 30 companies employ over 18,000 people.

iSPIx-B2BAnd the top thirty companies in alphabetical order are:

We have descriptions of the top thirty companies, aggregate statistics and methodology for computing the index in the report itself. We’ve pulled out a couple of the findings here:

–     For those companies started pre-2006 (50% of the list), they were generally bootstrapped to scale and then about 40% of these companies raised growth capital. These companies are mainly domiciled in India and many are verticalized, selling into banking, financial services, retail and travel.

–     For those companies started post-2006 (50% of the list), about 73% have got early-stage venture capital into them now – the majority by far are not bootstrapped. 50% are domiciled in the US or Singapore and many more are horizontally focused in areas such as CRM, collaboration and ad-tech.

We will publish an updated iSPIxB2B index every six months – please do send us names of companies you think should make this list and we will make sure to contact them. In the meantime, please share this document with your colleagues in the software industry and participate in the discussion around these findings in the comments section here.

Thanks to all the volunteers at iSPIRT who worked on this project as well as Professor Sharique Hasan of Stanford Graduate School of Busines, Stanford Univerity; Professor Rishi Krishnan of IIM-Indore; and Klaas Oskam of Signal Hill for providing input and guidance.

We will publish an updated iSPIxB2B index every six months – please do send us (at ispix(at)ispirt.in) names of companies you think should make this list and we will make sure to contact them.