BANGALORE: The software product start-up ecosystem in India has strengthened significantly over the past few years with several global majors but getting discovered by potential buyers is the top most challenge for Indian entrepreneurs.

Business standard reports that according to software product think-tank iSpirt and Microsoft Ventures India, "most Indian startups fail to show up on the radar of the large acquirers in the US. Discovery is the number one challenge facing Indian technology product start-up."

Sanat Rao the head of the mergers and acquisition (M&A) connect programme for iSpirt gave an example and said, “U.S.-based Autodesk that acquired Indian social collaboration platform Qontext in 2012 had first identified the target company through analyst reports in the U.S. and not directly through the Indian startup ecosystem.”

iSpirt and Microsoft Venture said. "Indian entrepreneurs traditionally are techies and don't spend time building a clear differentiation story or preparing themselves for organizational and financial diligence. Another significant obstruction to M&A activity in the country is entrepreneur readiness"

iSpirt and Microsoft Ventures are also planning to conduct workshops for entrepreneurs to prepare them for M&As and related activities. These workshops will help them to focus on due-diligence and present their case to potential acquirers.

Based on the interests from potential buyers that iSpirt has received Rao said, "Acquirers are mostly agnostic to the location of a company...They are looking for a specific product or technology fit, and location in secondary. Acquirers are eying areas such as machine learnings and analytics, software-as-a-service (SaaS) disruptions like human resource and recruiting, cloud infrastructure and mobility."