India startup ecosystem better than China and Isreal: Twitter investor Michael Marks

Putting India ahead of countries like China and Isreal, Micheal Marks investor in Twitter and SpaceX said in coming years the country will get benefitted most from its startup ecosystem.

“There is a cultural shift towards entrepreneurism which augurs well for India in the coming years but there is still the lesser number of VCs and angel investors compared to the number of startups,” Marks, who is also Managing Director of Innoventure Partners, was quoted as saying to ET.

He finds the investment opportunity in India at an early stage with funds majorly concentrated (75 percent) around in major metro cities. Startups are maturing, the market still needs to bring in more capital versus. It can innovate more on solving local issues.

He also said the Indian government can play a crucial role. "Regulatory issues have been an obstacle to bring in more capital to India but with demonetisation and GST, organically it will get better," he added.

Twitter investor venture capital firm, Innoventure Partners is now also collaborating with Bengaluru-based Startups Club to launch an accelerator along with a seed fund that will look to fund around $100,000 into startups with valuation of at least $1 million. It plans to reach out to smaller towns and cities across India.

The venture will focus on verticals like education, agriculture, robotics, healthcare, machine learning, analytics, and blockchain. “Apart from the regular fields, Blockchain is really exciting because which will accelerate safe transactions, solve issues like cybersecurity and help scale Fintech.”

They are also scouting for enterprise-focused startups as the mortality rate for B2C startups is quite high in India. He notes the future growth will be driven by B2B2C startups.

Earlier, John Chambers chairman of Cisco said that India startup ecosystem needs leadership and can become best startup market in the world. Comparing with the US, he said it is doing better but needs to take its growth to be around 50 percent from 10 percent at present.

He sees a huge opportunity for the Indian startups in artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, security and drone technology.

In 2017, the start-ups have raised around $8 Billion, compared with $4.6 billion in 2016.

The volume of deals has also gone down, according to data from Tracxn. Start-ups have raised roughly $8 billion in the first nine months of the year, compared with $4.6 billion in all of 2016, data added.