A change in the investment outlook of venture capitalists over the next decade following the Covid outbreak has helped the valuation of Indian startups with 40 companies breaching the $1 billion mark in 2021.

While India has lowered the gap with the US and China in terms of the average time taken to become a unicorn, chasing valuations may not always be a prudent strategy according to officials of Indian unicorns, who participated in a session at Infocom 2021, the flagship B2B event of the ABP group.

“Post Covid, there is a fundamental shift in how venture capitalists are looking at the next decade,” said Gajendra Jangid, co-founder and CMO, Cars24. “Valuation will come of its own. Once you start chasing valuation, you will go off track,” he said.

“The next 3-5 years is really going to be good for anybody to kickstart their business,” said Vipul Parekh, -founder, CFO and CMO, Bigbasket, a Tata Enterprise.

Arjun Mohan, CEO India of Upgrad, said: “The game changer will be the new education policy. India will be one of those few countries which is now allowed to give formal education online.”

“Today we have almost 800 million internet users and this is creating a conducive environment for startups to experiment and drive new ideas,” said Avinash Deepak, senior vice president, vertical head - IT/ITES & Startups, Airtel Business.

“With advanced connectivity coming in, data will be the most important thing for the future,” said Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO — enterprise business, Airtel Business.

NTT expansion

NTT is looking to invest $2 billion over 4 years in scaling up data centre infrastructure in India, said Sharad Sanghi, CEO, NTT Ltd in India.