The world of entrepreneurship has been booming in India for the past couple of years. India especially has been doing great in this realm so much so that there have been various startups that have gained success in the global market. Many of these startups have been expanding their services to great heights. Here we are presenting the list of 10 Indian startups that went global:
1. Freshworks
On March 8, 2010 founders Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy got the idea to start Freshdesk, a customer service company, after a customer had a bad experience over a broken TV. On June 10, 2011 Freshdesk was launched from Chennai and its first signup was from Australia. Then, in 2015 Freshdesk started a Video chat and co-browsing platform named 1CLICK.io. On June 21, 2016, Freshdesk launched Freshsales, a CRM product. On June 7, 2017 Freshdesk rebranded itself as FreshWorks Inc as it had many more services available now than when they started off. FreshWorks also launched an AI called Freddy. Collectively freshworks still hasn’t lost its parent ground and has become a software with SaaS(Software as a service) cloud customer service engagement.
With its headquarters in California, United States, Freshworks extends its services across 90+ countries, making it one of the most successful Indian startups to go global. It truly is an inspiration as to how something that started off so small, went international and gained success.
2. Ola
Ola Cabs, which was founded by Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati on 3rd December 2010 in Mumbai, is now based in Bangalore. To fit the needs of their Indian audience Ola offered rickshaw service in both India and as of March 2019 in the UK as well. In October 2019, Ola was valued at about $6.5 billion making it a unicorn startup.
Countries Ola is available in:
Ola operates in the following Countries
- India
- Australia
- New Zealand
- UK
Subsidiary Acquisitions
Ola acquired FoodPanda in December 2017. At the time Foodpanda was struggling and Ola was looking to extend their services to food delivery as well. In April 2018, Ola made its second acquisition with Ridlr (formerly Traffline), a public transport ticketing app. In August 2018, Ola financed Series A funding of the scooter rent startup Vogo.
The services in different countries are quite similar to these. Ola has gained global recognition through its amazing services. Ola keeps growing and introduces new options quite often which shows us that they are always looking to improve.
3. Byju’s
Most of us might’ve seen that education ad by Byju’s featuring an old looking Sharukh Khan quite recently. Well, that’s because Sharukh Khan is the brand ambassador of Byju’s. Byju’s is one of the fastest growing and successful Indian startups out there. With a net worth of 3.05 billion USD, making it qualified to be a unicorn startup, which by the way it is!.
Byju’s is an online tutoring company and a revolution in ed-tech with Byju Raveendran as its founder and CEO. He got 100 percentile in the tests he took for his admission in Management Graduate Program of one of the reputed management Institutes in India but never opted for one. He decided to teach his friends and later in 2015 he launched Byju’s – the learning app. Byju’s is being recognized globally and will continue to grow in the future.
Countries Byju’s is available in:
At present, Byju’s has made its presence in the following countries.
- The Middle East
- UK
- South Africa
- Expanding to the US
With the amount of growth Byju’s has seen in the past few years, it has aimed for extending its venture and has acquired a few educational companies as well.
Subsidiary Acquisitions
- In July 2017, Think and Learn (Byju’s) acquired TutorVista (including Edurite) from Pearson.
- In January 2019, Byju’s acquired US-based Osmo, a maker of educational games for children aged 3–8 years, for $120 million.
- Byju’s also acquired Indian startup WhiteHat Jr for $300 million which has its ground across many countries like Germany, Australia, New Zealand etc.,
- According to a report, Byju’s has signed a deal to acquire Aakash Educational Services for US$1 billion
All of these achievements of BYJU’S have given it a global recognition. Indeed, BYJU’S is something to look up to if you are an aspiring entrepreneur.
4. OYO
This unicorn startup started by a young entrepreneur named Ritesh Agarwal has made its own identity and inspired many youngsters aspiring to become entrepreneurs. OYO is a hotel room and home service chain started in 2013 in Gurgaon. It has budget-friendly hotel rooms, which is why many people opt to go for it. In 2012, Ritesh Agarwal launched Oravel Stays and later on rebranded it as OYO in 2013.
Countries OYO is available in:
OYO currently pirates in 7 countries namely:
- India
- China
- Indonesia
- Malaysia
- Nepal
- The UK
- UAE
Subsidiary Acquisitions
- In March 2016, OYO acquired the team of Qlik Pass, to set up and lead its Data Science Department.
- In March 2018, OYO acquired Chennai-based service apartment operator Novascotia Boutique.
- In 2018, the company acquired Weddingz. in, a Mumbai-based online marketplace for wedding venues and vendors.
- In May 2019, OYO announced the acquisition of Amsterdam-based Leisure Group, Europe’s largest vacation rental company.
- In July 2019, OYO announced the acquisition of Innov8.
- In August 2019, OYO made its first major investment in the United States by purchasing the Hooters Casino Hotel, near the Las Vegas Strip, in partnership with US-based real estate company Highgate, for $135 million.
OYO is a promising example of how even young entrepreneurs can be successful at an early age and come up with groundbreaking ideas. These ideas can prove to be revolutionary.
5. Zomato
Zomato is an online food delivery service startup founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. It was first launched in July 2008. With over 5000+ employees across the globe, its success story is quite remarkable. Initially, Zomato was called Foodiebay and later was rebranded. Their (Founder’s journey of Zomato) journey started when they discovered the difficulty of the employees in ordering food. They uploaded the restaurant menus online which became time efficient. However, these menus were only available to the office staff so later on, they made it available to everyone online.
With this, the two friends first started FoodieBay which was only available in Mumbai and Kolkata. One of their biggest hurdles was being able to cover all the areas in the country. But somehow with the help of their team, they pulled it off.
Countries Zomato is available in:
Zomato is available in 24 countries which include:
- The United Arab Emirates
- Sri Lanka
- Qatar
- The United Kingdom
- Philippines
- South Africa
- New Zealand
- Turkey
- Brazil
- Indonesia
- Portugal
- Canada
- Lebanon
- Ireland
- United States
- Australia
and many more. In addition to this Zomato also has its app and website available in Turkish, Portuguese, Indonesian and English Languages which talks about a global impact!.
Subsidiary Acquisitions
Zomato has acquired 12 startups on the global market:
- Zomato acquired its first company by buying Menu-mania.
- Later Zomato acquired lunchtime.cz and obedovat.sk for a sum of US$3.25 million.
- Zomato acquired Gastronauci, a poland based restaurant, on September 2014
- Later in the year 2014 in December Zomato acquired Cibando, a platform for restaurants in Italy.
- Zomato acquired Urbanspoon, a Seattle based food portal, for $60 million.
- Zomato acquired a Delhi-based start-up called Mekanist, then MapleGraph and lastly a US-based startup called NexTable, a table reservation and restaurant service platform.
- Zomato also acquired Sparse, and Runnr the food delivery start-up which was later renamed to roadrunnr.
- TechEagle Innovations, a Lucknow-based startup, that works exclusively on drones, was also acquired by Zomato.
- Uber-eats was also acquired by Zomato and was given 10% of the business.
Zomato proves that with hard work, perseverance, and consistency even the most impossible goals can be achieved.
6. Razorpay
Razorpay is a full-stack financial solutions company founded by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar in May 2014 in Jaipur. With over 300 million end customers Razorpay is one of its kind. With its headquarters in Bangalore, Razorpay aims to revolutionize money management for online businesses. In 2015, Razorpay became the first India-focused company to be selected by YCombinator and received a funding of 120 thousand USD in addition to 3-month acceleration support and mentoring from Silicon Valley investors and mentors.
Shashank and Harshil quit their jobs at Microsoft and Schlumberger respectively to start their business at Jaipur with the help of startup oasis. They started Razorpay after realizing how the US payment systems were not suitable for companies which intended on accepting payments from India. Razorpay is available to every company that is available in India. Even though the online payment system wasn’t stable enough in India, both the founders managed to solve this problem and successfully built Razorpay.
Razorpay accepts 100 currencies that can be converted to Indian rupees, therefore, you can access it from 100 different countries.
Companies acquired by Razorpay
Razorpay has acquired 2 startups:
- Opfin Software Private Limited in the year 2017
- ThirdWatch Data Pvt. Ltd. in the year 2017.
In a time when technology was yet developing in India, Razorpay managed to become a hit and go global as well.
7. FusionCharts
FusionCharts is a software provider of Data Visualization products. It was founded by Pallav Nadhani in the year 2003 with its headquarters in Kolkata. With over 23,000 customers in over 120 countries companies like Apple, Google, ZOHO, Cisco, Facebook, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, EMC, Nokia, Tibco, as well as The Weather Channel, NASA, and the Federal Government of the United States which are considered to be tech giants use its services. FusionCharts has been a revolution in the field of IT which is pretty obvious considering the pristine list of users it has. Pallav Nadhani was only 16 when he came up with the idea for FusionCharts.
Countries FusionCharts is available in:
FusionCharts serves across 118 countries in total which includes:
- The US
- The UK
- Australia
- South Africa
- Russia
- Argentina
- UAE
- Sri Lanka
- Portugal
- Brazil
- Indonesia
Achievements
In June 2018, FusionCharts was ranked among the top 7 data visualization tools in the world by Forbes.It also has various awards to its name like ComponentSource Best Selling Product, Publisher etc. In 2010, FusionCharts was put one among the 15 companies to become the next Infosys. The company was included in NASSCOM EMERGE 50 Leaders in 2019.
8. Magzter
Magzter is more or less like an online bookstore or a magazine newsstand. With over 8000 magazines from 3,400+ publishers globally, Magzter is the world’s largest digital magazine shop. It was founded by Girish Ramdas, Vijayakumar Radhakrishnan in 2011. Its headquarter is located in New York City, US. In 2012, Magzter was named the highest-grossing app in Asia on apple store. In 2013 Magzter in collaboration with Amazon’s Kindle Fire launched their publishing platform. In 2015 Magzter launched a subscription model which provided access to an unlimited amount of magazines and newspapers from across the world.
Countries Magzter is available in:
Magzter is available in 51 countries some of which include.
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Bangladesh
Brazil
Canada
Chile
China
Costa Rica
Croatia
Czech Republic
France
Magzster’s meticulous choice of a startup which could be viable in any day and age allowed it to gain success globally. Indians are capable of creative thinking and this startup is the proof of that.
9. Cleartrip
Cleatrip was founded by Hrush Bhatt, Matthew Spacie and Stuart Crighton. With its headquarters in Mumbai and Dubai, Cleartrip is an online travel company which provides services like flight and train bookings, accommodations and tourism activities and serves globally. It was founded as a result of the poor travel sector in India and to make travel and tourism simple and easy.
Countries Cleartrip is available in
- India
- Saudi Arabia
- UAE
- Egypt
Subsidiary Acquisitions
Cleartrip acquired Saudi Arabia’s online travel aggregator Flyin which has direct access to over 3 lakh hotels and more than 450 airlines.
10. GOQii
GOQii was founded by Vishal Gondal who was once the founder and CEO of Indiagames. Its headquarters is in Menlo Park, California. GOQii is a fitness technology company which provides health and fitness care. It also manufactures a fitness band. It has monthly subscription packages which have a variety of options you can choose from. Vishal got the idea of starting GOQii after discovering that he wasn’t just using fitness trackers for his use but the data was being shared to his trainer who would then provide him with advice for a healthier lifestyle.
Countries GOQii is available in:
GOQii is available across several countries which include:
- US
- China
- Middle East
- Singapore
Its investors include Mitsui, NEA, Galaxy Digital, Mr. Ratan Tata etc.
Partnerships
- GOQii has partnered with Edelweiss a financial services firm in 2016.
- It also partnered with Axis Bank in 2016 as well.
- In 2017, Max Bupa Health insurance entered a three-way partnership with GOQii and global reinsurance company Swiss Re.
GOQii is one of the largest fitness technologies in India and Vishal Gonadal’s prior experience with startups sure does play a major role in its growth. However, it is to be noted that only a great idea can reach heights in the entrepreneurship realm and GOQii is no exception.
