1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s unpack each of those a little bit. Let’s talk about B2C tech India-facing. Although we talked about the 1.3 billion population and a much larger market, internet consumers are a segment of spenders. They are the high-income educated group that is technologically savvy. Along the way entered Reliance Jio and democratized access in a big way. Have you started seeing a meaningful expansion of the Indian consumer space? 

Sasha Mirchandani: Yes, we have. We have several consumer internet companies whose sales dramatically improved in the smaller market. There are still markets that may not pay as much, but we’ve seen a tremendous appetite in these markets.

It’s a very exciting period. In the next couple of years, we expect to see tremendous growth from these markets because a lot of these folks are going digital-first from day one because they don’t need to have stores. In India, it’s very difficult, expensive, and tedious.

The experience online is efficient, because the customer is ready to go digital from day one. So it’s a huge opportunity for these companies to carry these markets. It’s a good way to expand the market overall.

Sramana Mitra: If you double click down into consumer tech, there are three or four segments that ought to be looked at. One is e-commerce. This is the leader in consumer tech. The second is online education. The third is FinTech. The fourth is healthcare. Could you comment on each of those?

Sasha Mirchandani: We have companies across all four and we are equally excited. It eventually comes down to the entrepreneurs that we pick in these categories because the market opportunities in all four of these are huge.

In the very early days in India for any of these four categories, you’ve seen some amazing stories. In EdTech, the company BYJU is now worth more than $10 billion which is incredible. In Fintech, several unicorns are now coming out of India. RazorPay became a unicorn in the middle of COVID. In consumer tech, we have a company called 1mg, an online pharmacy business that is scaling tremendously fast. When COVID hit, no one wanted to go to the pharmacy. No one was allowed to go. Anything that can be delivered to your doorstep in a safe, efficient manner is great. 

Sramana Mitra: That’s more e-commerce.

Sasha Mirchandani: It has an e-commerce story but the rest was of course a very good example of FinTech. LegacyPay and companies like that are doing extremely well and are scaling exponentially.

Sramana Mitra: Is telehealth scaling?

Sasha Mirchandani: Telehealth is getting exponential. We have a company called Qure.ai. It’s an AI company for radiology scans and now they do COVID scans. They are doing business all over India, but they now have FDA clearance. Not only are they taking care of opportunities in India but globally as well. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020
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