Funding is no longer a major issue for startups in India: Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma
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While acknowledging that there is always a global shortage of capital to build ventures, Vijay Shekhar Sharma , founder and chief executive of One 97 Communications, which runs fintech platform Paytm , said that funding is no longer a major issue in India.'Investors across the world will value you for building for India or in India. And that, I think, is the greatest achievement of the previous generation handed over to the next generation,' Sharma said at the TIE Delhi-NCR summit on Friday.The Indian startup ecosystem , which experienced a significant funding slowdown in 2023, began showing early signs of recovery as deal activity started to improve in the second half of 2024. Per private company data provider Venture Intelligence, Indian startups had raised $10.9 billion as of December 13 last year compared to $9.6 billion in 2023.In addition, according to Sharma, startups no longer struggle with the talent shortages that companies had to deal with earlier. 'The problem we all used to face from the 1990s to the 2010s was that people coming out of engineering colleges, etc. were going abroad. Big companies and international jobs were the main reasons and drivers for this,' he said, noting that startups now actively recruit from colleges, with students showing equal interest in joining them.Sharma added that knowledge will be democratised, and those who know how to use AI will be ahead of those who don't. 'AI will help solve talent issues,' he asserted.While referring to Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal's call for Indian startups to move beyond delivery platforms to more advanced sectors such as semiconductors, robotics, artificial intelligence, and next-generation manufacturing, Sharma said that India's AI model needs to have a differentiating factor.'This talk is going on about who will make AI and what will they make. So, more than the challenge, I would say the expectation is that we will create a world product from India,' he added.
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