Even as the Indian start-up market is still behind China's, it has "tremendous potential" and is worth betting on, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin has said.

Saverin added that with a better macroeconomic environment and a more mature market, the Indian start-ups market would be one “to bet on, combined with Southeast Asia.”

"I think India is a huge market with just tremendous potential,” CNBC quoted Saverin as saying at a panel discussion in response to a query on why the Indian start-up ecosystem has not generated better returns.

Speaking at the Forbes Global CEO Conference in Singapore this week, Saverin said that his investment company B Capital had invested in start-ups in India and was exploring long-term success of new companies in the country.

B Capital was founded by Eduardo Saverin and Raj Ganguly in 2015 and is focused on helping start-ups gain scale and transform their industries. The company has USD 6.5 billion in assets under management and over 125 portfolio companies, Bloomberg reported. Recently it was reported that Indian health-tech Mojocare was close to raising nearly USD 20 million through investors led by the venture capital firm.

However, Saverin said that the pace of growth of the Indian start-up market was slower than China in areas such as ease of asset exits and the liquidity of the market.

Saverin said the growth was expected to come from enterprise tech companies, which create software to serve businesses.

Delivering the keynote speech at the same conference, Indian industrialist Gautam Adani said that more than 670 districts in the country of the total 760 had at least one registered start-up.

A recent report by Inc24 titled “The State of Indian Startup Ecosystem Report, 2022” revealed that India has grown to become the third largest start-up ecosystem after the US and China.

Since 2014, Indian start-ups have seen annual venture capital funding grow eightfold from USD 5 billion to USD 42 billion in 2021. At the same time, the number of unicorns has grown around 18-fold from 6 in 2014 to 105 till the first half of 2022. The country has launched 57,000 start-ups to date and their combined valuation stood at over USD 450 billion.

E-commerce was the top sector in the Indian start-up ecosystem with USD 30.4 billion funding, followed by fintech (USD 23.7 billion) and consumer services (USD 11.9 billion). Enterprise tech came in fourth with USD 11.7 billion funding amount till now.

This year, cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi ranked among the top 40 start-up hubs across the globe, a report by leading policy advisor and research firm Startup Genome revealed. In the first five months of this year, Bengaluru ranked 5th globally for tech venture capital investment, raising USD 7.5 billion in VC funding during the period, The Times of India reported.

First Published:Sept 30, 2022 2:15 PM IST