In line with our mission to shed light on the many investment opportunities popping up across Asia and Australasia, FinanceAsia is showcasing the entrepreneurs who are leading the wave of technological disruption in different countries and across a range of sectors.
Their companies range in size and maturity, but these people share a common drive and vision to compete against established institutions, whether in financial services, retail, energy, robotics, or logistics, to name just a few of the industries featured.
Following our methodology, we have selected five entrepreneurs from each of Asia Pacific's largest economies. Today we explore India's entrepreneur scene.
INDIA
Indian startups are more consumer-oriented than in other countries across the region. Case in point, the world’s largest democracy by population was home to the largest online retail deal in history last year, when Walmart acquired a majority stake in Flipkart for $16 billion.
RITESH AGARWAL
Company: OYO Rooms
Headquarters: Gurgaon
Year founded: 2013
Industry: Accommodation
Prominent backers: Softbank Vision Fund, Grab
Aged just 25, OYO Rooms founder and chief executive officer Agarwal has already created a hospitality empire. OYO is an international network of accommodation for budget travellers that started with a single hotel in Gurgaon, India, in 2013.
After graduating from secondary school, the entrepreneur created his first startup: bed and breakfast aggregator Oravel Stays. Agarwal received backing from venture capitalists and was the first Asian recipient of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s fellowship programme.
The Thiel fellowship requires recipients to drop out of university and pursue a business idea with $100,000 backing from the programme. This led Agarwal to develop Oravel, which targeted the Bed & Breakfast market.
After finding limited success, the entrepreneur decided to target a wider market with OYO.“Worldwide there is no hotel chain in the fewer-than-100-rooms segment and 90% of hotel assets worldwide have fewer than 100 rooms,” Agarwal told the audience at the Young Turks 2018 Conclave.
“I saw that there was a big opportunity for small hotels which people could franchise and lease and use technology to operate very efficiently.”
Today, OYO is the third-largest hotel chain the world with, for example, 10,000 rooms in Malaysia, 20,000 in Indonesia and more than 500,000 rooms in China. Besides hotels and hostels, OYO recently entered the co-working space sector and rents offices in New Delhi and Hyderabad.
BHAVISH AGGARWAL
Company: Ola
Headquarters: Mumbai
Year founded: 2010
Industry: Transportation
Prominent backers: Softbank, Tiger Global
Aggarwal is co-founder and chief executive of Indian ride-hailing and car rental company Ola which, in July, completed its Series J round of funding.
The entrepreneur graduated from Mumbai’s Institute of Technology (IIT) in 2008 and his tertiary education experience mirrors the success of his later startups. He failed his first entrance exams to IIT and waited a year to retake them. Similarly, the entrepreneur’s first venture, Olatrips, proved a failure before pivoting to become Ola Cabs.
“While [working on Olatrips.com] we very quickly realised that transportation is a much bigger problem,” Aggarwal said in an interview last year with CNBC. “We had our own pain points when we tried to sell trips to consumers, they were telling us ‘please help us with the transportation’.”
Ola Cabs, which he co-founded with several university classmates, has become a ride-sharing platform with a market share to rival that of Uber.
This year has seen a rapid national expansion of the company’s transport offerings. Ola bike taxis are now available in more than 150 cities across India, while Aggarwal recently unveiled an electric car fleet. There have been discussions of self-driving vehicles as well.
Besides moving people, Ola functions as a food delivery app as well as a financial services platform offering micro-insurance and credit to users.
Ola is now aggressively looking for new international markets and in August launched on Australia’s Sunshine Coast.
INDERPREET WADHWA
Company: Azure Power
Headquarters: New Delhi
Year founded: 2008
Industry: Energy
Prominent backers: Helion Venture Partners, IFC
Wadhwa is the founder and recently retired chief executive officer of Azure Power. The company produces on average 1.5 gigawatts a year – equivalent to the energy consumption of Inner London for seven and a half months.
In 2016, Azure became the first Indian power company to list on NYSE and released the nation’s first solar green bond the following year.
PRASHANT TANDON
Company: 1mg
Headquarters: Gurgaon
Year founded: 2015
Industry: Health, E-Commerce
Prominent backers: Redwood Global Healthcare Fund, Sequoia Capital
Tandon is the co-founder and chief executive officer of online health portal 1mg, India’s largest medical website.
The entrepreneur studied at Delhi’s Institute of Technology before moving overseas to pursue a master’s degree at Stanford. On his return to India, he co-founded Healthkart.com, which was the precursor to 1mg. Tandon was among the first entrepreneurs in India to capitalise on the booming online pharmaceuticals business.
VIJAY SHEKHAR SHARMA
Company: Paytm
Headquarters: New Delhi
Year founded: 2010
Industry: E-Commerce, Payments
Prominent backers: Ant Financial, Alibaba
Sharma is the founder of e-commerce and mobile payments platform Paytm, which launched nine years ago and processes more than 400 million transactions each month.
Forbes ranked Sharma as India’s youngest billionaire in 2017 with a net worth topping $2 billion, but as the son of a schoolteacher in northern India, his origins are humble. While studying engineering at university, the entrepreneur started his first business, Indiasite.net, which he sold two years later.
Sharma founded Indian telco One97 Communications with the proceeds of the sale. Paytm is owned by One97 Communications and specialises in telephone bill and utility payments.
Today customers can book movies, flights, trains, accommodation and events, as well as a range of consumer goods online.
