Can Startup Mahakumbh Become India’s Answer To Web Summit?

Announced in 2015 and rolled out the next year, Startup India is about to turn 10. And the inaugural Startup Mahakumbh in Delhi this week was a showcase of the first decade and how far Indian startups have come.

What started as an idea floated by some seasoned venture capitalists and entrepreneurs got the support of the government and Startup Mahakumbh showed the depth and breadth of the Indian startup ecosystem in 2024.

More importantly, with many noted entrepreneurs and CEOs on the ground, there was also a sense that this was something bigger than just another startup-centric conference. Could the Startup Mahakumbh turn into India’s answer to Web Summit in the years to come?

We’ll look to answer after these top stories from our newsroom:

• Ecommerce Revamped: As we gear up for The GenAI Summit, here’s a look at how generative AI will change the face of ecommerce in India — from customer support to content generation to marketing
• Snapchat’s India Surge: Snapchat is sharply focussed on building for the Indian GenZ population and its high-tech experiments are clearly paying off with 200 Mn+ users. Here’s the Snapchat India story
• The BYJU’S Legal Web: The edtech giant faces a web of legal troubles, including allegations of predatory practices and defaults on payments, with over a dozen cases totaling defaults and fines worth $1.5 Bn. Will it survive these challenges?

Startup Mahakumbh: It’s A Start

Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves; we are not saying that the inaugural edition of the Startup Mahakumbh was perfect. For one, the vastness of the pavilion zone meant many of the smaller booths got stuck in dead zones where there was low footfall. Some of the main pavilions had a high density of startups too, which was not great for visibility.

And it was not all about tech startups either, as many arts and crafts companies jostled with robotics startups on the exhibition floor, with no clear distinctions between sector-specific pavilions.

Perhaps the biggest gap was the limited public presence of venture capital funds as well as the low profile of foreign tech companies.

While plenty of marquee fund managers and investors were on the ground backing their portfolio startups and founders, the likes of Meta, Google, Amazon and others did not have a large footprint. These giants typically have large budgets for Web Summit or Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, but Startup Mahakumbh is obviously not yet a big marketing channel for them yet.

These are all teething issues, but those that need to be fixed when we look at the Startup Mahakumbh from a long-term perspective.

When we spoke to some of the members of the organising committee, it was clear that this is the first such effort and as such there will be plenty of learnings for the next run.

The organising committee for the inaugural edition was led by Prashanth Prakash, partner at Accel, and Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder and chairman of Info Edge, Archana Jahagirdar, founder and partner at Rukam Capital, and Sanjay Nayar, founder of Sorin Investment Fund, with support from government agencies and nodal bodies such as MeitY Startup Hub, GeM and the DPIIT.

Given the presence of more than 1,000 startups, the event required the mobilisation of a lot of resources and sources from the aforementioned group told us it was pulled off in about two months. Of course, this maiden run gives those in charge plenty of information about what to get right next time.

“At the next Startup Mahakumbh, we want to see even greater participation. India has a very large number of startups and thousands are joining each year. We obviously could not cover everyone in this edition. So the next one will be much larger — maybe even 2X of what we’ve seen this year,” Jahagirdar told us.

A New Stage For Startups

Besides this, by and large startups at the Startup Mahakumbh told Inc42’s on-ground reporting team that this is a unique and unprecedented sales and networking channel for them. The pan-India nature of the exhibitions and affinity of some models within the sector pavilions in particular were some of the positives.

For instance, Curefoods founder and CEO Ankit Nagori believes that the first Startup Mahakumbh is just scratching the surface. Even most of the funded startups did not have a major presence here, he pointed out. “The growth that we have seen in the number of startups, the number of funded startups, the number of profitable startups is tremendous, now startups are also going public. This event shows the entire journey of the past 10 years, but there’s a lot more to come,” Nagori told Inc42.

Startups felt the event helped them gain visibility about their offerings. For instance, a top executive of a Rainmatter-backed fintech startup said that his team was able to better explain the startup’s product of escrow accounts to customers and investors who were part of the target audience.

Engaging with the officials from ONDC, SIDBI, GeM was also a new experience for many of the startups that do not often have the platforms in their own states.

Given the hype around AI, we saw many startups rely on the buzzword to attract attention, but one cannot deny that deeptech startups and AI enterprise applications got plenty of attention from visitors, investors in particular. But of course, there were over 1,000 startups on the ground, and it’s hard to stand out in such a crowd.

The biggest outcome for startups is being able to leverage a nationwide platform and network with those who they would not ordinarily see. The Startup Mahakumbh was really a showcase of startups going mainstream in India — the number of Shark Tank India startups on the floor was just one indicator.

The Economic Upside

But there is a deeper narrative. Events such as this have the potential to bring in revenue for all involved in the future? Let’s take Web Summit for instance, which is more in the spirit of Startup Mahakumbh than something like CES.

Founded in 2009, Web Summit is an annual technology conference and also an organisation that conducts various other events, including SURGE in Bengaluru. The flagship Web Summit is held in Lisbon, Portugal every year with the biggest internet technology companies and venture capitalists participating in it. Fortune 500 companies jostle with startups.

If that sounds like an average tech conference, here’s some context: Web Summit’s economic impact for Lisbon and Portugal is estimated at $325 Mn a year. Lisbon signed a 10-year agreement to bring Web Summit to the city from Dublin, such is the economic upside of the event.

We don’t know how big the Startup Mahakumbh will grow or whether it will be India’s version of the Web Summit, but this is the start that was much needed.

BookMyShow’s founder and CEO Ashish Hemrajani, in particular, believes that India now has the infrastructure to build world-class tech-centric events like Web Summit and CES, and there’s also a lot of spotlight on startups in mainstream media. This is the time to capitalise.

“It’s a start. We need to see more foreign delegates coming in and we need to plan it well in advance so that the Startup Mahakumbh becomes the pride and joy of our ecosystem. This needs to scale up to a point where needle-moving things happen,” the BookMyShow CEO added.

Startup Spotlight: The Portkey.ai Story

Portkey began with a problem statement when cofounder Rohit Agarwal was still working with Freshworks, when the GenAI revolution was just bubbling. Along with cofounder Ayush Garg, Agarwal had the idea that companies will need to develop, launch, maintain and iterate their GenAI apps and features with agility.

At the core of Portkey.ai lies the startup’s vision to help businesses in managing and having oversight of all the GenAI solutions that have been deployed. Five months after the official launch in April last year, the startup raised $3 Mn in a seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.

Three months out of the beta phase, the startup is currently focussed on strengthening its language model operations (LLMOps) stack, ramping up the go-to-market strategy, and hiring

Read the full Portkey.ai story

Sunday Roundup: Startup Funding, Tech Stocks And More

• Funding Stays Stable: Between March 18 and 23, startups cumulatively raised funding of $204 Mn across 14 deals, just slightly lower than the $226 Mn seen in the previous week
• Builder.ai In Hot Soup: Builder.ai cofounder Sachin Dev Duggal has been named as a suspect in an alleged money laundering case, while the other cofounder Saurabh Dhoot is in dock in connection with an alleged loan fraud case
• CCI Blow For Startups: In a major setback for startups, the Competition Commission has dismissed interim relief applications seeking restrictions on Google in relation to its Play Store billing policy
• Policybazaar’s New Avatar: Fintech major Policybazaar’s parent PB Fintech plans to incorporate a new wholly-owned subsidiary to enter the payment aggregation business in addition to insurance and lending