1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about companies that are uniquely Indian? What about enterprise software that is facing the global market? India is facing e-commerce and the whole digital commerce world. What about categories or styles of companies that are uniquely Indian? Is that on your radar?

Vishesh Rajaram: If they are on the enterprise side, they will be on our radar. The Indian enterprise market is still early. I think the SMB market and their ability to pay is still early in the Indian market.

We are seeing a few companies going after them and going after modern creators and technology stacks with them. However, the monetization is still early. 

Sramana Mitra: The main issue is that the buying side is still slow. It requires such a high catch, but it’s not profitable because of that category. 

Vishesh Rajaram: The ACV, propensity to pay, and value creation is low, but it’s still in the early days. I think, in a few years, we will think differently about it. 

Sramana Mitra: What is your analysis in FinTech and healthcare which are big open problems in India because there is a lack of services in general. 

Vishesh Rajaram: They are both different in their ways. There is a large population in the country that everybody talks about. They talk about going digital, using digital wallets, and digital mechanisms to borrow, lend, and invest money. There are a few companies that have come up that have built a huge base of customers.

One thing to remember is that FinTech is a thin-margin business. You generally have to build scale and that is key to surviving in the long run. We’ve seen some successful larger companies that have built payment platforms that support businesses to have recurring transactions.

They were able to get into a company and have repeat income or SaaS-like revenues out of it. It’s a lot harder to make that kind of money on just retail and payments.

For healthcare, there is a lot of action that we’re going to see out there. It’s still in its early days. I’m sure a few companies are starting to build those stacks. There is just a lot of scope of digitization and benefits from data science.

We’ve not even scratched the surface yet. FinTech is a little ahead. You have early companies that are building up. Meanwhile, healthcare is still an open game to play. 

Sramana Mitra: You have an audience question who is congratulating you on the Scapic exit and asking for more discussion on that topic. 

Vishesh Rajaram: That was our second exit. We are very happy for the company for their future. 

Sramana Mitra: I was going to go somewhere else with one of your portfolio companies. Pick one enterprise software company that you feel strongly about and one that you think would be a full-scale venture style company.

When did you find them? How did you find them? What did you see in them in the beginning? Where are they now? What is their trajectory? 

Vishesh Rajaram: Wingman is a company that was founded by three entrepreneurs. One founder spent time in Google and Amazon, another worked with Amazon and Uber, and the third one was at an IT venture fund and had worked at Goldman Sachs.

The three of them were in the US and they moved to India to set up a company from the ground up. One of the sweet spots that they picked up while working for big companies was the convergence of voice and AI. They have gone on to build a sales intelligence product that listens to conversations between sales and customers.

It helps increase sales efficiency. It helps with the sales pipeline based on intelligence coming out of customer conversations. It’s similar to companies like Gong and Chorus. Both are Israeli-US companies that have done fairly well. 

Sramana Mitra: Is the conversation listening happening in a way that is attached to a telephone line? How is the conversation being recorded and processed?

Vishesh Rajaram: This is a company that is targeting a segment called inside sales which is largely SaaS companies selling products. They are salespeople using dialers, Zoom, or other forms of conference tools to talk to customers. 

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that they are integrating with those tools?

Vishesh Rajaram: Yes. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest
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