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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

E-commerce: There is still a lot of untapped potential

Niren Shah
Managing Director-Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) India
Monday, June 4, 2012
Niren Shah
Niren Shah is the Managing Director, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) India. He has 18 years of entrepreneurial, finance, investing and banking experience from leading consumer oriented companies and global financial institutions. He serves as an advisor on India-based investments across a wide range of sectors and across various stages-from early and mid-stage venture to growth equity.

Prior to joining NVP India, Niren was the Senior Director of Strategy and Ventures at eBay Inc. He was also part of the Marketplaces Ventures leadership team, where he was responsible for considering new business opportunities, acquisitions and potential investments across the Global Marketplaces.


Technology Trends shaping the industry

As a country, India is growing well and the long term prospects look good despite some short term concerns. At NVP India, our focus for the last two years has been on early to late stage Internet companies, and we expect that this sector will continue to flourish for many years to come. Within the Internet space, eCommerce and ePayments and the eClassifieds segments continue to have significant potential. Internet is at an early stage in India but showing significant growth especially via mobile devices. This opens up a gamut of opportunities in terms of ePayment systems; proliferation of which will in turn drive the adoption of trends like eCommerce and eClassifieds. We also believe that the Adtech revolution is just hitting India. We are seeing this in our companies like Fashionandyou, Pepperfry, Quikr, Komli Media etc. Beyond this, we see ‘SaaS’ type models having tremendous potential, since startups and businesses in India can conserve their scarce resources by renting their software etc as a service rather than buying licenses.

In addition to this, at NVP India, we are also focusing on spaces such as consumer and healthcare especially in areas where one can use technology to significantly increase adoption. For instance, one of our portfolio companies, Basis, a U.S. based startup, brings game mechanics into your daily fitness regime. One can watch one's own workout, compare how you did against a friend, check out how long did you run, what was your heart rate and even stats like your sleep rhythm using a watch-like device to be worn on your wrist.


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