Microsoft ranks Indian B2B start-ups on readiness to work with enterprises

Bengaluru: Customer support software maker Freshdesk Inc., warehouse automation robots-maker Grey Orange, and advertising technology provider InMobi are among the most “enterprise-ready” start-ups in India, according to a report released by Microsoft Accelerator on Thursday.

Despite the demands on enterprises to innovate quickly and integrate new solutions, they find it difficult to identify partners they can work with and cannot be sure if their partners would be able to deliver, the report said.

On the other hand, there are a large number of start-ups that focus on selling to businesses that find it hard to get access to enterprise clients. To help with this, the report highlighted the companies which had the necessary traction and products to be able to easily work with large and small enterprises.

It took into account a company’s customer traction, funding, and size, to compute what it called an “enterprise readiness score”. Microsoft scored 151 companies (which were founded after the year 2000 and headquartered in India) in 10 sectors according to this metric.

About half of the start-ups shortlisted are in healthcare, retail and banking sectors, with the others belonging to sectors like Internet-of-Things, security, ed-tech, data sciences, manufacturing and media.

Indian start-ups that sell to enterprises have a cost-advantage over their counterparts in western countries, if they make quality products. Enterprises are also increasingly relying on buying services delivered via the Internet, which also gives start-ups based in India a winning chance.

“Our research shows that contrary to popular belief, the most conservative yet disruptive sectors (such as BFSI) are embracing start-up solutions more openly than others,” said Ravi Narayan, global director, Microsoft Accelerator, in a blog post announcing the findings of the report. BFSI is short for banking, financial services and insurance.

“This should inspire other sectors to also open up to finding solutions from start-ups. The rapidity of changes in the business environment and global climate can no longer be addressed in enterprises by incremental changes from traditional vendors, but small and nimble start-ups,” he said.

In this report, Microsoft Accelerator assesses the maturity of Indian start-up ecosystem, when it comes to being enterprise-ready.

The top fintech start-ups according to their scores are MSwipe, TechProcess Solutions and BillDesk.

Start-ups in manufacturing which are helping traditional companies with industrial Internet-of-Things solutions and automation saw a six-year funding high in 2015 having raised $700 million. Grey Orange, chip-maker Ineda Systems and IoT firm ConnectM are the three most enterprise ready start-ups according to the report.

In healthcare, Practo, pharmaceutical company Celon Laboratories, and genomics-based diagnostics solutions Medgenome Labs are the three start-ups with top scores.