ENTREPRENEUR SPECIAL.....Meet the entrepreneurs at the heart of India's digital transformation

Meet the entrepreneurs at the heart of India's digital transformation

Almost half a billion Indians are now online – nearly 400 million of them on mobile devices. Meet some of the entrepreneurs serving one of the world’s greatest growth projects.

The healthcare disruptor

Shashank ND, Practo

Shashank ND, founder and CEO of the health company Practo

Sam Mohan

Health company Practo matches demand with supply; in this case, doctors and the patients who want to consult them. The eight-year-old company has impressive reach - in the past year, there have been 40 million appointments booked with, it says, 200,000 doctors on its flagship platform.

Its acquisition of four companies in 2015 has enabled it to expand into pharmacies and preventive healthcare. The goal of the founders, Shashank ND and Abhinav Lal, is to create a "Practo hyperloop" that would put consumers and enterprises on the same platform: consumers will create and update personal health records that medical professionals will be able to access.

Currently operating in 35 Indian cities, plus Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, Practo says it will expand to another 100 cities by the end of the year.

"Lifespans are increasing, and it's important to make sure that longer lives are also a lot healthier," ND says. "That can only happen when patients and medical professionals have access to health-related data."

The advertising mogul

Naveen Tweari, founder and CEO of InMobi, India's first unicorn

Martin Prihoda

A rare technology unicorn from India, InMobi arrived in the ad tech space with a bold vision and a product strategy that set out to make consumers love something they hate - advertising. And it's doing that on a global level: InMobi is in direct competition with Facebook, Apple and Google, and counts Ben & Jerry's, Kia and Spotify among its clients.

The company's discovery platform, Miip, learns and refines its recommendations according to consumer response to conversational prompts. Users are able to purchase from within the platform, meaning that e-tailers can drive sales beyond their online stores.

The Bangalore-based company claims to serve more than 120 billion impressions per month for more than a billion users, and that it is now the biggest mobile advertising platform in China. "If you focus on building the best product, profits will come," Tewari tells WIRED.

The software concierge

Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk

Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshdesk, a customer-support platform

James Albon

Freshdesk is on a buying spree. Since August 2015, the rapidly growing customer-support platform has acquired an online collaboration software company, a live video-chat provider, a social recommendation app and a messaging app. In 2010, its founders, Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, gave themselves nine months to make a success of the business or they would return to their corporate careers.

Plan B, however, was never needed, after the startup raised a $94 million from, among others, Accel Partners and Google Capital. It has a valuation in excess of $500 million and claims a client base of more than 70,000 - including brands such as Honda and Hugo Boss - across 145 countries.

The transport visionary

Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola

Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of Ola, India's largest cab-hailing app

Sam Mohan

Ola, India's largest cab-hailing app, is holding its own against Uber. Its advantage? An understanding of the Indian market. Only three per cent of Indians own a car - its cities simply don't have the space to park them - and Ola's strategy is to offer cabs of all sizes (sedans, compacts and hatchbacks) as well as shuttle services and auto-rickshaws.

"We will leapfrog the phase of car ownership and instead consume transportation as a service," says Ola's founder Bhavish Aggarwal. The company claims to have a market share of 60 per cent, with more than 200,000 vehicles across 85 cities.

"When Uber came to India three years ago, we were tiny," Aggarwal says. "We were doing 2,000 rides a day and had two crores (£207,000) in the bank. They could have crushed us within 15 days. But what worked for us was that we're built ground-up for India, which is reflected in the breadth of our platform. It's how our brand connects in the real India and how our drivers think about us. Everything is very local."

With more than 65 per cent of the Indian population under the age of 30 and the economy growing quickly, accessible and affordable mobility is a key lever for development. Ola, which has raised $1.5 billion (£1.04bn) in funding, was the first Indian company to develop the concept of driver-entrepreneurs, giving them access to training, technology and a livelihood.

"My parents call Ola a travel agency, they think I'm crazy," Aggarwal says. "Until last year, my dad would ask me, 'When are you doing your MBA?' And now he's asking me when the company will turn a profit. Most Indian middle-class families have an attitude like that. But it's becoming more acceptable to launch a startup."

The sight maker

K Chandrashekar, Forus Health

Martin Prihoda

Forus Health's flagship product, 3nethra (pronounced "three-nay-thra", an allusion to the Hindu god Shiva's third eye, signifying all wisdom), is a portable, low-cost device that detects common eye diseases such as cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and corneal problems.

Founders K Chandrashekar and Shyam Vasudeva Rao say they have prevented 300,000 people going blind in a country where 80 per cent of blindness is preventable and the doctor/patient ratio in eyecare is 1:60,000. A technician can screen a patient in less than five minutes using 3nethra and a basic PC, before uploading patient files for a doctor to access the records and provide a diagnosis.

Since the company was founded in 2010, its 550 3nethra machines have examined 800,000 people in 25 countries, at one-fifth the cost of a similar machine made in the developed world.

"In India alone, the diagnosis of such cases of preventable blindness can save $500 million that is lost in productivity each year," Chandrasekar says. Worldwide, that figure climbs to $5 billion.

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The corporate minde

Jaspreet Singh, Druva

Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of Druva, a mobile data-protection service

James Albon

"Traditionally, enterprise data protection has been complex, error-prone and expensive," says Jaspreet Singh, the co-founder of Druva, a mobile data-protection service. "It was built on dated technology and created independent storage silos that prevent a company from doing more with valuable corporate data."

The company, founded in 2008 by Singh and Milind Borate, manages business-critical data in the cloud for 3,500 clients, including Nasa, Pfizer, Tesla and PwC. Now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Druva has raised over $70 million in funding.

The furniture dealer

Rajiv Srivatsa, Urban Ladder

Rajiv Srivatsa, CEO and founder of Urban Ladder, a curated online furniture seller

Martin Prihoda

Buying contemporary furniture in India used to mean an extensive search, followed by having to work out how to get your purchase home. Rajiv Srivatsa and Ashish Goel went through the process when setting up their homes in Bangalore in 2010, prompting them to leave successful corporate careers to change the furniture-buying experience. Launched in July 2012, their web store, Urban Ladder, offers 5,000 items of affordable, high-quality furniture.

"Our designs are backed by extensive consumer research," Srivatsa says. "This has helped us carve a niche for ourselves. We converse with the best designers across the globe to interest them in creating products for India."

Core to the startup's strategy is its delivery service: Urban Ladder has built its own logistics team to serve 19 cities, rather than relying on third parties. This means that it's able to control the customer experience and reduce damage to goods. Urban Ladder has also developed technology to address the "touch-and-feel" gap by enhancing product visualisation through augmented and virtual reality.

Those initiatives have translated into a net promoter score - a measure of customer satisfaction - that Srivatsa says is, at 0.75, higher than those of Amazon and Apple, suggesting that even high-value large items can successfully be sold via e-commerce.

The atelier owner

Sujayath Ali, Voonik

Martin Prihoda

Until recently, the fashion e-commerce market in India was dominated by e-tailers like Myntra that sell well-known offline brands to affluent online shoppers. However, a large market - women with limited budgets - was underserved. Voonik has created an online marketplace that brings together the limited-budget shopper with the unbranded supplier while delivering a high-quality service.

It launched its Android app in September 2014 and, at February 2016, had eight million customers. "Young Indians aspire to better lifestyles than their predecessors," says Sujayath Ali, co-founder of Voonik. So the best way to appeal to them is to combine value with a best-in-class experience."

The money exchanger

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm, a mobile wallet app

James Albon

With the world's second-largest amount of people accessing the internet - and 94 per cent doing so on mobile devices - Indians are embracing mobile wallets. Paytm is one of the fastest growing, with 120 million wallets in use.

The company's founder, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, loves tweeting about how Paytm is gaining acceptance with small vendors. That might well become a full-time job, given that Paytm carries out more transactions than any other bank or card network in the country. The next step: taking on the banks. "We're building a mobile bank to take financial services to half a billion - a little under 50 per cent of the population - by 2020," Sharma says.

By SHRADHA SHARMA

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/indias-digital-entrepreneurs

(COURTESY PUSHKAR GHANEKAR)