Anil Kumar returned to India after working in technology companies in Seattle to be closer to family and take advantage of lower startup costs. He noticed people cared more about their cars and TVs than their health, motivating him to start SmartRX, a cloud-based software platform using mobile devices to update patients after leaving the hospital. SmartRX is testing in Seattle Children's Hospital and plans to raise funding from Singapore and Silicon Valley investors. Seclore Technology also illustrates the trend of Indian companies becoming global from the start, with over half its customers outside India on its first day. Building companies in India provides a large, technically qualified workforce, though challenges remain such as potential shutdowns from political protests.

1. April 23, 2013, 6:02 PM ET
ByDeborah Gage
Anil Kumar
Last year, Anil Kumar, a technology executive who spent more than 11 years working at Microsoft
and other technology companies in Seattle, returned to India to live. He said he wanted to be
closer to his family, and to take advantage of how much cheaper it is to start a company in India
than in the U.S.
After he arrived in India, Kumar bought a car, and while he got regular messages on his mobile
phone from his car dealer, he noticed that he never heard from his doctor.
“I started looking at how people take care of their TVs and cars much better than their health, and
it was a motivation for me to start thinking about how to make health care more interactive,” he
said.
The result, SmartCloud Technologies, doing business as SmartRX, is a cloud-based software
platform that uses mobile devices to update patients on their care after they leave the hospital,
extending their care in a way that wasn’t possible before.
Building Indian Companies for the Global
Market
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2. Sateesh Andra
The software is now being tested in Seattle Children’s Hospital, among other places, and
SmartRX plans to bring in angel investors from Singapore and Silicon Valley to close the
company’s first funding round as part of a “truly collaborative model here, where early-stage
funds and angels from different continents come together to build global technology companies,”
said Ventureast Tenet Fund Managing Partner Sateesh Andra.
Board members include an Indian cardiologist, Ventureast Venture Partner Ramesh Byrapaneni,
who said he left medicine after 35 years of practice to become an investor because he thought
that helping to create innovative companies would have a bigger impact on patients.
SmartRX is one of several Indian companies that quickly became global, a trend that both U.S.
and Indian investors are now exploiting.
Last year, Ventureast Tenet Fund, an Indian seed stage fund, hired Andra, formerly a venture
partner with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, to invest in Indian companies, taking advantage of a
growing Indian economy and a growing number of Indian technologists like Kumar who are
returning home.
General Atlantic this month hired four new investors in India with an eye toward investing in global
companies, and India’s Eka Software Solutions, which is backed by Nexus Venture Partners and
makes commodity trading and risk-management software, acquired a Canadian company,
EnCompass Technologies.
Ventureast’s portfolio companies have tended to be global from the beginning, and another one
of the firm’s recent investments–Seclore Technology, which was founded out of India Institute of
Technology Bombay to help companies control who has access to sensitive corporate
information—also illustrates this trend.
More than half of Seclore’s customers were outside of India from the company’s first day,
according to Andra.
“The Facebooks and Skypes of the U.S. are the Facebooks and Skypes of India too–when
companies are gaining traction in Silicon Valley, they’re used even in India or Europe or Egypt or
Turkey,” and the reverse will be true as well, Andra said. “…Customers are open to adopting
technology if it works for them and the price is right.”
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Seclore has won several global corporate customers, including Daimler and Panasonic, for
software that lets companies constantly monitor and control the use of documents, emails,
designs and images, determining whether they can be printed, copied, distributed or even timed
out so that they disappear off a user’s device.
Although Seclore has several U.S. competitors, it’s taken a smart, layered approach to its
architecture that avoids dependence on other applications so that it can stay current regardless
of any changes that other software vendors make, according to Raghu Mendu, general partner of
Ventureast Proactive Fund, another Seclore investor.
Helion Venture Partners, which led Seclore’s $6 million Series A round, will also help Seclore
expand from Europe and Asia into the North American market.
One advantage of building a company in India is that there’s a large pool of technically qualified
people, said Seclore Chief Executive Vishal Gupta, even though India is still seen by some
people as a services and outsourcing center for North American companies–a perception that
Gupta said will change as more Indian companies emerge.
Building companies in India is still challenging—DFJ Managing Director Mohanjit Jolly, in an
interview with Venture Capital Dispatch, cited roving shutdowns that can occur because of a
protest on fuel prices, for instance, or the death of a movie star or politician–but the country has
changed a lot since the late 1980s, when venture capitalists wouldn’t look at Indian companies,
Mendu said.
Write to Deborah Gage at deborah.gage@dowjones.com. Follow her on Twitter at
@deborahgage
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