1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about this company that you invested in from the Freshworks ecosystem. Is it built on the Freshworks stack?

Bhaskar Ghosh: The founders are second-time founders. Their first company, Rocketlane, was acquired by Freshworks. I just want to call something out. We are huge fans of the entrepreneur ecosystem coming out of Freshworks and Zoho, which have revolutionized the B2B SaaS ecosystem of India.

Coming back to Rocketlane, they’re built for B2B SaaS that are selling complex software and need an implementation cycle. You can think of Rocketlane as Asana plus for the go-to-market implementation and customer support cycle for all B2B SaaS. We learned so much from Rocketlane and the Indian ecosystem. They’ve been doing this build in India and sell in the US script. We are so excited to learn from them.

Sramana Mitra: We have been involved in Freshworks fairly early on. They were incubated in One Million by One Million for three years. We had just started at that time.

Bhaskar Ghosh: I didn’t know that.

Sramana Mitra: Not only that. The first person who wrote about Zoho was myself because Sridhar Vembu came to see me in 2007 and said, “Nobody wants to write my story because I haven’t raised gobs of venture capital.” I listened to him, and I thought he was super cool. That was the first story through which the world found out about Sridhar Vembu.

The reason I was asking you about the Freshworks ecosystem is they have tried to do a bit of PaaS/API ecosystem on their platform. Are you seeing stuff emerging out of that?

Bhaskar Ghosh: We are seeing on one hand, very mature and fast-growing tracks; and on the other hand, nascent tracks coming out of Freshworks, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Around departmental B2B SaaS, I would say two things are happening there. One is what you pointed out. A lot of these products are offered as unbundled services with very good APIs, so they are fostering a developer ecosystem on top. That is one.

The other is being able to keep CAC low and doing acquisition cheaply while using SEO/ SEM content much more niftily sitting in India at much lower price points. That, we’re seeing in the B2B SaaS ecosystem where they’re able to sell not just to large enterprises but to mid-market as well and still keep it cost-efficient. Second and third, we are seeing some movement in developer tools and QA. We are seeing founders doing open-source companies out of Jaipur and Goa. We find that extremely exciting.

If you look at Postman, we are beginning to see more core infrastructure companies around AI and data. A lot of the founders in that ecosystem have gone through the Google, LinkedIn, Facebook journey inside of India on the development side and they are starting these AI and cloud infrastructure companies. Track one is booming. Tracks two and three are showing signs of life. We expect great companies to come out of these tracks in the next 10 to 15 years.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC
1 2 3 4 5