Chennai is heaven, “says Girish Mathrubutam, co-founder of Freshworks. Sitting at his home in San Francisco, from his new residence that moved to the United States last month, Mathrubutam is a passionate and passionate man while speaking in a video call with zoom in one morning. “What do you miss?” I askIt’s not so much, he says, while stirring his coffee filter cup that his wife is freshly made.
Chennai gives a slight smile: “It’s the city, the air, its people and more.”
“It was as if the universe was conspiring to keep me in Chennai,” he says. One afternoon, while waiting for his flight back to Bangalore airport to return home, Mathurabutam decided to forget Bangalore. Let’s stay in Chennai and build FreshWorks. “I’m glad I stayed,” he says after a pause.
Almost a decade later, FreshWorks is a unicorn, recently valued at $ 1.5 billion. However, Mathurbutam has changed Chennai’s base to Silicon Valley, even his company is ready for the Nasdaq OPV. And Chennai has become the hotbed of new software companies as a service (SaaS).
According to an estimate, more than 600 people resonate in the city and make their biggest anthem with Mathubutram. In addition to the current Zoho and FreshWorks unicorns, Zinov predicted that Chennai could see the appearance of seven other unicorns in the next five years, including data from UniPore, Mad Street Den, Charge by and Crayode. With 15,000 employees, Chennai’s mother-in-law’s income reached $ 1 billion with the financing of $ 500 million.
“Saas offers a $ 1 billion opportunity for India. We will take that wave forward,” said Suresh Sambandam, co-founder of OrangeScape, working closely with Mathurabootam to nurture Chennai’s startup ecosystem.
At the same time, IITM has changed gears in the last decade to deliver a much-needed ballast to the Chennai startup ecosystem. Its four incubators, eight centers of excellence and a new world-class research park with more than 1.2 million square feet have new deep technology companies: 190 and counting.
“We work in Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai and with IIT at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore,” says R. Raguttama Rao, the CEO, Gopalakrishnan-Deshpande Center (GDC) for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, established at IITM. It was there. 2017.
“We are trying to catalyze the market trip from a technology laboratory. IITM, with a vibrant ecosystem, seems to be ahead of others. “
Mumbai is the financial capital of Bollywood, with some glamor. In the north, the NCR political nerve center has it all, including some packaging and aggressions to become one of India’s main startup centers.
But Chennai, who considers himself conservative in his vision and is introverted in his worldview, has not attracted much attention.
Located in the south, the city is immersed in its rich culture and is a proud society of its centuries-old traditions.
Despite this, forget about the accelerated world of startups, even companies in the old economy will not receive much attention.
It is not that there is no one in Chennai. It has been the manufacturing center, which was once called Detroit of India Almost all IT giants, from TCS to HCL and Cognizant to Infosys, maintain large campuses in and around the city. In fact, some TCS began outsourcing their IT services from here.
Some of the largest multinationals, from Ericsson to Verizon, have important engineering centers.
However, in terms of indicating its existence and status, the Chennai Inc brand is barely registered on the map of India.
Mad Street Den co-founder Ashwini Asokan today feels like Chennai. “Forever, it was the talent that came out of Chennai.
With the mother-in-law and the advanced technology startup, we are seeing people who come back and many really come back,” says Asoka, who returned to the city to establish her startup from the US. UU. In 2014.
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