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Become A Startup Insider With Inc42 Plus
Join our exclusive community of business leaders &makers for in-depth tech stories and intelligence on India’s tech economy you won’t find elsewhere.
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Inc42 and ServiceNow recently held a roundtable titled Achieving Hypergrowth: Deploying Innovations In Tech & Automation For Startup Scalability, exploring several critical areas such as:
- Demystifying hypergrowth and its key drivers – what it means for different sectors and startups
- Building a strong foundation for streamlining operations, standardising processes and deploying automation
- Aggregating data from various sources to eliminate data silos and enable predictive analytics
Moderated by Sunil Kumar, CTO at Shiprocket, the roundtable saw participation from Kanav Arora, SVP of engineering at Urban Company; Dhruva Shree Agrawal, CTO at Oxyzo.in; Rahul Chaudhary, head of product and technology at GlobalBees; Ankit Maheshwari, president of engineering and India operations at Innovaccer; Amit Choudhary, CPTO at Ecom Express; Gaurav Bagga, SVP of product and engineering at Pristyn Care; Vijay Aggarwal, CTO at BharatPe; Ankeet Bhat, chief strategy officer at MapmyIndia; and Sridhar Durairajan, head of ITX sales (India) at ServiceNow.
How Tech And Automation Are Fuelling Startups’ Hypergrowth
From ideation to starting up to entering the billion-dollar unicorn club, we are privileged to live in an era when the concept-to-implementation cycle is happening fast, and the world at large is benefiting from innovation at its best.
More importantly, India is at the forefront of emerging trends as it is home to the third-largest startup ecosystem. To date, more than 57K companies have been launched here, with a combined valuation of $450 Bn+. And tech has played a critical role in bringing the future forward and making things happen.
But the progress could not have happened without specific triggers and growth drivers. As we are well aware, data is the new enabler nowadays, paving the path for out-of-the-box digital innovations. In fact, today’s cutting-edge technologies, from cloud computing to AI-ML, automation and more, require businesses to gather and analyse vast amounts of data to derive actionable insights.
“Data democratisation is a very, very powerful thing. People may misinterpret data, but data itself will not lie,” said Vijay Aggarwal of BharatPe.
According to him, when businesses, products and tech work closely and understand each other, they bring forth the primary skill sets organisations will require to create value.
For D2C brands, a seamless customer experience is critical to scaling up, and tech is at the forefront of it. After all, it is pretty difficult to imagine that startups will require nothing else beyond human abilities/ingenuity to scale up.
“How to manage 15 Lakh shipments going through the system; how to do it at scale with a huge price-performance benefit graph in your favour unless you are machine-solving it,” quizzed Amit Choudhary of Ecom Express. His company is a tech-enabled logistics solutions provider catering to the ecommerce industry.
Incidentally, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic a couple of years ago also exposed the huge gaps in India’s healthcare infrastructure. Worse still, the underprivileged across the country, especially those in rural India, suffered most during those trying times.
It should be noted that homegrown healthcare startups are trying to bridge the gap between patients and caregivers. But it is no easy task in a vast country like India, and this is where data and technology can work in sync to solve critical healthcare issues.
As Ankit Maheshwari of the healthtech startup Innovaccer put it, data has to move from acquisition to standardisation and unification, after which tech can analyse the input and derive actionable insights at patient and population levels.
All relevant stakeholders should access these insights at the earliest opportunity to implement the right strategy at the right time. However, time and scale are of critical importance here, and healthcare goals cannot be achieved without automating the procedures and processes.
But scalability and security compliances are like two peas in a pod. Sridhar Durairajan of ServiceNow, a Santa Clara-based software company whose digital first business model enables their customers to innovate at scale and speed, says that there is a pressing need to develop a robust framework to spot, measure and prevent the cyberthreats triggered by various business functions. Again, tech plays a crucial role in ensuring a safe passage for healthcare services that can instantly reach people.
This is, indeed, intriguing.
In this era of rapid tech innovation, what initially appears as a roadblock can be countered with more advanced technology. Startups, too, need to adopt this approach in a bid to get ahead. The solutions may already be hidden in plain sight. All it requires is a little out-of-the-box thinking.
India has never lacked talent, and even in 2022, a year plagued by a global slowdown and a funding freeze, as many as 21 startups have made it to the coveted unicorn league, while 73 soonicorns are waiting their turn. The ecosystem is all set to combine innovation and automation to deliver cutting-edge outcomes that will catapult Indian startups towards disruptive hypergrowth.
