1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chandra of Unitary Helion Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Geographically, are we talking about non-major metros now?

Rahul Chandra: We are talking about the next 50 towns and cities. Especially if you travel there, you see the change happening. There is certainly a need to change the mindset of a VC while thinking about customers in these parts.

I came back from a tier-II city. When you go there and talk to younger people, there is even a higher need for accessing some of these services, which have not reached these parts. The Flipkart story of retail infra not being present in India but doing the digital leapfrogging for e-commerce also translates to several other products and services.

The acuteness of the problem is higher when you go to the next 50 cities. Purchasing power, of course, is concentrated in four areas. A bulk of the wallet share goes to agriculture or food consumption. Entertainment, as a share of wallet, is far lower here. Spending on financial savings and investments dominate.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of application areas are you focusing on? 

Rahul Chandra: We are seeing the marriage of the size of that opportunity and the adoption as well. The $2 trillion-opportunity is in FinTech. Fintech also marries itself well. We’ve seen a data company marry an insurance tech company or a credit company. The initial look of it is encouraging. It’s the widest opportunity pool that we see. Healthcare also seems to be a very large opportunity. Marrying computer vision with patient data seems to be very promising. Compared to FinTech opportunities, the timing of that seems to be a year or two further into the future.

Sramana Mitra: Can you synthesize the role of Jio? Jio is making huge investments where they can give out their device and services for free, and then monetize on data. How much of that has kicked in gear for Jio? Is Jio making money out of these subscription services? Is the Jio story going to end well?

Rahul Chandra: It’s a very future-oriented question. As market leadership goes, owning the market changes the rules of the game. We’ve absolutely seen that where other players have scrambled in the last few years. Jio is making those new rules as the market leader. It’s early days for the marriage.

In the last few years, we have seen them take market share from everyone. Unlike western markets, the story is not so much about taking market share as much as it is creating a new market for telecom. What Jio has done is to create a market that has not existed before.

The coffers are deep and I think there’s a lot of firepower. We’ll have to watch this space for a while to see the end story. I think market leadership is certainly in a good space in the next few years.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have a company in your portfolio that has been able to leverage the Jio channel effectively?

Rahul Chandra: Across the board, it’s not singular. You would have heard this from other participants from India where Economist just carried a story on the time-first economy. That has been enabled by the cost of data. That is well understood.

From our portfolio, building better travel apps for the next 200 million or a shared taxi company are some of the models driven by Jio adoption. The effects we are seeing are far and wide.

Sramana Mitra: It’s very exciting. It’s not only a tremendous opportunity. It’s exciting to see a population change its modes of behavior. It’s superbly exciting.

Rahul Chandra: It’s mind-bending actually. We’ve waited very long for this. We’re seeing so many people adopt. We tell ourselves that we wished it had happened sooner.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chandra of Unitary Helion Ventures
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