Big deals are emerging in the liquidity-flushed tech and digital space boosted by two primary reasons. One, consolidation due to the fast evolving online space, which many legacy companies cannot quickly adopt to, where the pandemic has also played a big role.

The second being the hunger of the unicorns to become decacorns of the future by beefing up the businesses, especially ahead of their IPO prep work as the investors have been very generous in ascribing them high valuations.

So the outcome is that we are now transitioning into an evolved business model of omi-channel approach and the lines between the off-line as well as the online businesses are blurring fast.

In this episode of Big Deal, CNBC-TV18’s Nisha Poddar spoke to Sahil Barua, co-founder & CEO of Delhivery; Sarbvir Singh, CEO of PolicyBazaar; and Ambareesh Murthy, co-founder & CEO of Pepperfry, to talk about this big transformational shift.

Sarbvir Singh said, “The whole concept of who is digital and who is not is over, everyone is digital. Initially it was really the early adopters who were buying stuff online, who were transacting online, or buying insurance in our case. Now those early adopters have even made through the early majority or late majority as the case maybe.”

“Now, there is a lot more people who are there and a lot of these people are not looking at it only as an online or offline they are looking at saying I want to buy insurance policy. So it is in our interest to make sure that we are available to them where ever they want us to be whether it is online where we started or whether we need to be offline which we now we are allowed to do as per our license. So that in a nutshell - those are the two reasons that I am sure are driving this change.”

Sahil Barua said, “As Delhivery one of the things that have been the cornerstone of how we have grown the business is really around technology and engineering. When you look at what has happened over the last two years in fact logistic companies are not just in India but around the world and in response to COVID has struggled to sort of re-engineer and sort operate in the same way that they were operating pre-COVID largely because of the absence of appropriate systems, and technology to guide their operations.”

“Technology has become critical for traditional offline heavy sort of brick and mortar companies to survive, I think that part is very clear.”

For full interview, watch accompanying video...

(Edited by : Bivekananda Biswas)