The quest to create Olympian start-ups from India

Manav Garg

23 July 2024

The Summer Olympic Games begin in Paris in a few days. The biggest sporting event in the world will bring together the best athletes competing for medals in 32 sports. As all eyes in our part of the world are on the Indian contingent, it takes me back to a string of conversations in 2019 between Freshworks co-founder Girish Mathrubootham and me. It would culminate in creating Together Fund, an operators-led investment firm, to unearth the Olympian start-ups from India.

Formation of SaaSBoomi

At the time, we reflected on the strides that the Software as a Service (SaaS) community in India had taken over five years. We had met during the formation of SaaSBoomi in 2015.

SaaS founders like Girish, Krish Subramanian of Chargebee, Suresh Sambandam of Kissflow, Avinash Raghava and I were passionate to a fault about making India a ProductNation – a vision that India’s software products industry will emulate the success of its world-class IT services industry. That led us founders to form SaaSBoomi, a community of, by and for SaaS founders that is rooted in a pay-it-forward and giving back culture. Girish and I are part of the SaaSBoomi founding team and governing council.

SaaSBoomi has been vital in not only creating the playbook roundtables for SaaS but key pillars of scaling a SaaS company from India.

Angel investing and helping founders

By 2019, both of us had more than 100 angel investments – in ventures like Zenoti, Chargebee, Unbxd and Whatfix. And, SaaS had entered the start-up mainstream. Little wonder, many of our weekends were devoted to helping hundreds of founders.

In the SaaS ecosystem, there were four companies from India with annual recurring revenue (ARR) between $100 million and $500 million (Zoho, Freshworks, Icertis, Druva), at least another four ventures with ARR between $50 million and $100 million like BrowserStack, and 30+ companies between $10 million and $50 million. Overall, India had over 150 SaaS start-ups that were generating revenue of more than $1 million in 2019.

Girish would get busy making Freshworks ready for its initial public offering (IPO) – a seminal moment for India’s SaaS industry in 2021. I got occupied in scaling Eka cloud offering in a traditional vertical.

Birth of Together Fund

It was clear to us that the community needed a fund led by operators like us to spawn world-class companies from India. Like Olympic athletes needing consistent training and preparation, startups require the right elements at the right time and place to become category leaders or creators and scale to $1 billion in ARR.

Our thesis was clear: while there was plenty of capital in the ecosystem, no entity provided the necessary operational help to founders. Girish and I wondered if we could repeat the success of Freshworks and Eka Software, and multiply the impact. Could we build an institution, which can help entrepreneurs with different aspects of building a business?

By 2021, we decided the answer was an emphatic ‘Yes’, with the same nervousness and trepidation that we had experienced as founders on Day 1 of our respective start-ups.

That’s how Together Fund was born.

In 2021, we onboarded Shubham Gupta to join as the Founding Partner of Together. Shubham was a SaaS investor at Matrix Partners India. Further, we reached out to 150+ operators in India and Silicon Valley who would help our portfolio companies scale.

Together Fund’s unique approach

We have chosen to differentiate ourselves by leveraging our strengths as operators to help founders face unique growth challenges. We’ve experienced these challenges first-hand as founders and CEOs – from go-to-market strategies and building sales organisations in the US to achieving successful exits. This muscle memory stems from Freshworks’ IPO on NASDAQ in 2021 and my strategic sale of Eka Software earlier this year. For instance, there is tremendous value operators can add from their experience when it comes to building an AI strategy, scaling a US organisation, or how to create a win-win proposition for all stakeholders in planning a start-up exit.

Based on our experience with the first Together Fund, we identified three key stages where founders need the most help:

  1. Getting to Product-Market Fit (PMF)
  2. Early Revenue ($0.5 million to $2 million)
  3. Scaling to $10 million and beyond

For each stage, the go-to-market (GTM) strategy is critical. Many SaaS founders have successfully built solid products and marketed them from India, achieving inbound and product-led growth. However, expanding to enterprise clients requires a deeper understanding of the market, discerning buyer personas, and building an effective sales engine.

  • Getting to PMF: We help portfolio companies with design partners, refine their customer value propositions, create categories, and identify the right buyer personas. Founders often ask, “How do we scale our product-led growth function?” and “What are the key drivers of ramp time and sales productivity metrics?”
  • Early Revenue: We advise on GTM experiments to identify scalable channels and assist in hiring GTM personnel. Key questions here include when to hire an overseas salesperson, how to structure commissions, and determining the cost of customer acquisition over time.
  • Scaling to $10 million and beyond: Our support extends to organizational structuring, hiring leadership teams, personal scaling of the founder, and fundraising. A common challenge is hiring a ‘VP – Sales’ in the US. Many founders lack experience in this area, making it a significant decision to hire or build a sales team in the US.

Together Fund’s goal is to help create scalable companies that can gain significant market share globally. That’s how SaaS and AI from India will grow.

Creating Olympian Start-ups

Our journey from founders to operators-turned-investors has just begun. Girish and I have transitioned from our CEO roles at Freshworks and Eka to fully focus on nurturing the next generation of SaaS champions through Together Fund. We’ve successfully deployed our first fund and are now excited to launch our second, an AI fund, which promises to unlock even greater potential.

Our operator DNA equips us to solve the unique challenges that SaaS and AI founders face, from go-to-market strategies to building robust sales teams in the US. India’s SaaS and AI landscape is ripe with opportunity. With over 6,000 start-ups, 15 surpassing $100 million in ARR, and many more poised for rapid growth, the future is bright. Together Fund is committed to transforming these potential-filled ventures into global Olympian champions.

As we look ahead, we are more excited than ever to create and support world-class SaaS and AI companies from India. The global IT services market has already demonstrated India’s prowess, and now it’s time for our SaaS and AI industry to shine even brighter on the world stage. Join us on this journey. Share your thoughts in the comments, let us know which Indian Olympians you’re cheering for in Paris 2024, and stay tuned for updates on our progress with the second fund. Together, we can achieve remarkable heights.