BOLDER, FASTER,

STRONGER:
INDIA & SOUTH EAST ASIA
INFRASTRUCTURE STARTUPS
 Internet penetration has benefited consumers and has had a second-order impact on
businesses. For every Dropbox or Facetime, there’s also a Box or Zoom using digital tools to
build, test, and launch at breakneck speeds and then, in “consumer-ish ways”, brand, sell,
and monetise to enterprises. While India and South East Asia have already produced some
large ventures in the consumer space (Flipkart, Oyo, Byju’s, Gojek, Grab, and many others)
and traditional application layer SaaS space, we are now at the cusp of building out massive
generational devtools, enterprise-tech and open source businesses from here. There are several
trendlines fueling this wave that we have never seen before. The ecosystem has witnessed a
huge growth in the developer community and has come a long way from merely being the back
office of multinationals in the 1990s.

Source: Google Trends

Interest over time in search term devops

This trend is visible in several places: “devops” as a search term has seen significant growth in India
specifically. Over the past five years, search interest in terms containing “devops” has been higher
in India versus the US. In 2021, globally, around $37 billion of funding went into this space. In 2015,
in SaaS, only 15 companies in India were above $1 million ARR, now there are hundreds. There are
35 startups with more than $20 million ARR, up 7x from five years ago, and nine with $100 million+
ARR. Funding for SaaS in India is expected to rise 62.5% to $6.5 billion by this year, up from $4
billion just last year. Take the case of Postman, which has raised a total of $433 million. Abhinav
Asthana, the founder of Postman, talks about the growing importance of Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs) in the software world today.

“The world is using more software than ever. And since every
piece of software built today either uses an API or is an API, industry
leaders are realizing the benefits of an API-first world—a world where
developers build faster and better software. This is possible because
seamless collaboration is enabled at every level of the API lifecycle, and
APIs are treated as a primary building block rather than an afterthought.”
- Abhinav Asthana, Founder, Postman

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Postman now boasts of 20 million developers and recently started an API Lab in its founder’s
alma mater BITS Pilani to promote research. On the same note, Lightspeed-funded Hasura
recently became a unicorn and has raised $136.5 million.

We’re witnessing an increased pace at which developer startups can grow, increasing word-of-
mouth publicity and reducing acquisition costs for the most popular developer tool startups.

Zoho formed the first generation of this cohort as a purely SaaS company. Freshworks, Postman,
and BrowserStack were the second generation. Now, deeply technical companies such as
Hasura, Supabase, Atlan, Acceldata, Polygon (in the web3 space) are the youngest generation.

SO WHAT IS FUELING THIS WAVE IN INDIA AND SOUTH EAST

ASIA NOW?
While most of the activity is from India, South East Asia is witnessing the first few such businesses
being built. The whole region is inflecting for the following reasons:

1. Developers in the region have grown multifold, and India is the fastest-growing open-
source contributor. As per GitHub, over 8 million of its 83 million users in 2022 were from
India, making it the second-largest user base after the US. However, the Indian developer base
is growing faster, ~40% in 2020-21 compared to 16% in China and 22% in the US. GitHub
expects to see these numbers explode and potentially have ~10 million Indian developers
on its platform by 2023. Indian talent is growing within the thriving local startup ecosystem,
which gives them an edge in areas like product management, engineering, technology, SaaS
sales, etc.

GITHUB USERBASE AS OF 2022

As per GitHub, over 8 million
of its 83 million users are from
India, making the region the
second largest user base after
the US.
Source: Github Website

2. Startups have now witnessed the scale which would necessitate world-class
infrastructure. Cassandra came out of Facebook’s internal need, Google open-sourced
Kubernetes based on their internal container orchestrator Borg. Similarly, engineers and
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product managers coming out of Hortonworks, Freshworks, Flipkart, Hotstar, Ola, Capillary,
InMobi, etc. are founding new infrastructure and devtools companies.

In turn, startups can now build to get to product-market fit within their local market and scale
to other geographies immediately after. Take the case of Atlan; It started with a problem the
founders personally faced at SocialCops. Its first design partner was in India, which helped it
build a Minimum viable product (MVP) really quick.

Atlan founder Prukalpa talks about how it got started:

“While solving large-scale data for India, such as processing data

for 500 million Indian citizens and building India’s National Data Platform,
we started building Atlan as an internal tool to help our own data team
collaborate better. As a result, our team became 6X more agile, and
we could crack problems that earlier seemed impossible. Today we’re
building Atlan to help data teams around the world do more, together.
We’re building a fully global remote company with our roots in India —
our diverse team spans 14 countries from the US to the Philippines. Our
goal is to make Atlan an icon on the desktop of every data team and help
diverse humans of data inside a data team collaborate better.”
- Prukalpa Sankar, Founder, Atlan

3. With the sudden rise in developer salaries in India, devtools and open source, which were
traditionally hard to monetise, are now actively being bought by engineering teams.
Developers in the region prefer the trust, community support, and flexibility of no vendor lock-
in that comes with open source. This is further reinforced by the shift-left paradigm where lots
of tools now target developers, such as in security and devops.

4. Indian and South East Asian SaaS startups have significant cost advantages for hiring.
Geographically and culturally, India and South East Asia are well-situated to serve all of Asia,
being a 4-hour flight away from the major markets in the Middle East and China. Enterprises
are a massive opportunity in the Asian market since even large companies move directly from
no-software to SaaS. Often, there is no incumbent to displace. Given the Indian and South
East Asian markets are multilingual, they become a perfect place to build products for the rest
of the non-western world. It is also the perfect place for certain vertical-specific APIs such
as fintech (since regulations are different), and video infrastructure (since the consumption
patterns are different). There’s also a larger market for verticals like videos and games.

COVID has amplified some of these conditions. With the massive increase in remote jobs, there
has been a shift in salaries because of more competition for technical talent. Globally, companies
are now more open to buying over Zoom calls. Successful playbooks are being built for scaling
from India because of these trends.

Lightspeed has invested in several of these categories in companies, such as Supabase, Yellow,
Hasura, Razorpay, Rephrase, Acceldata, Project Discovery, and many more.
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 OBSERVABILITY & IDEs/ LANGUAGEs/ MODERN DATA VERTICAL SECURITY AND DEVELOPER
CI/ CD TESTING OPEN SOURCE
OPTIMIZATION FRAMEWORKs INFRASTRUCTURE SPECIFIC APIs PRIVACY PRODUCTIVITY

Note that the above market map is by no means exhaustive and some companies fit in multiple categories.
ProjectDiscovery

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Source: Traxn & publicly available information
INDIA AND SOUTH EAST
ASIA OPPORTUNITIES
FOCUS ON WEB DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
AND SIMPLIFYING BACKENDS
Development is becoming more frontend-heavy than backend heavy, popularised by frameworks
like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), increase in frontend web development, and faster ways
of A/B testing in the world, which has led to the rise of companies like Netlify, Vercel, Supabase
and Hasura. Supabase, a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) company built out of Singapore and an
open-source alternative to Firebase, is piggybacking on BaaS trends globally. Our view is that
this space will continue to grow and we will see clear winners emerging in this arena, especially
open source.

Paul from Supabase comments on how the shift towards open source is helping the product
grow while being built out of this region.

“Open-source software is central to everything we do at

Supabase. We wouldn’t be the company we are today without open-
source projects like PostgreSQL that came before us. That’s why we
open-source everything we do. We want to make it possible for other
projects to benefit from what we’re building, and give back to the tools
that made it possible for us to build an open-source BaaS”
- Paul Copplestone, CEO & Founder, Supabase

Hasura accelerates backend development by automating the creation of data APIs powered
by GraphQL. On the first day of launch, their GitHub repository gained thousands of stars and
organic enterprise interest, a rare occurrence in open source.

Hasura’s founder Rajoshi seconds the focus on developer productivity and how they simplify
data access for GraphQL APIs. Developer productivity, she says, is a critical focus area for
organisations today. One of the key bottlenecks for developer productivity is access to data —
especially as the volume and heterogeneity of data explode.
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 “At Hasura, our mission is to allow developers building modern
APIs and apps to access data over an API that they love — GraphQL. Hasura
automates the work that has to be done manually to build secure and
fast APIs so that developers do the less undifferentiated heavy lifting
and focus on building product and shipping value. Accessing a global
developer base with over 500 million downloads has shown us that good
software can be built and shipped from anywhere and we’re looking
forward to seeing the next-generation infrastructure companies built
out of India and South East Asia.”
- Rajoshi Ghosh, Founder, Hasura

DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY TOOLING

Code intelligence and testing tools which help in the build-step are seeing some movement.
Engineering leaders are consistently looking for ways to decrease the time that building and
testing take, especially since productivity has become a big concern in this part of the world as
well. Products such as Postman, Browserstack, and LambdaTest aim to reduce the time taken
to run necessary testing (like unit tests) so that feedback loops are shortened and developers
can iterate faster.

Last9 is a cloud-native reliability platform for Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Piyush, the founder
of Last9, explains why he feels strongly about building from this region.

“The market for devtools and technology is gaining pace in South

East Asia and India. It’s no longer a question of if, but only when we start
shipping deep tech to the world. It’s easier to find developers with the
required talent to be technology builders and not just storytellers”
- Piyush Verma, Founder, Last9

No-code, low-code platforms make for another recent trendline. Recent low-code, no-code
platforms have enabled several use cases, such as app development and machine learning
development, creating opportunities such as Kissflow. Retool alternatives such as Appsmith,
ToolJet, and Intercom alternatives such as Chatwoot have sprung up and gained a lot of traction.
Appsmith is one of the most popular open-source alternatives to Retool. With the adoption of the
Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) paradigm, engineering teams want to

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codify their release automation process to make it repeatable, fast, and error-free with products
such as Devtron Labs, and others.

SECURITY
Open-source and shift-left security are a fast-growing trendline (CAGR is ~100% since 2017).
Snyk in the US, a code scanning tool that caters to developers, is the largest player in this
space with a valuation of $6.5 billion. While the old paradigm in security siloed the function of
security teams, Snyk enables teams to “shift left” by providing code scanning to developers to
identify vulnerabilities directly from the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and during
code review, rather than waiting until code is in production. This is also critically important to
ensure code security proactively, as open-source adoption increases. Lightspeed-funded Project
Discovery is an open-source project originally started in Jaipur, India, that is capitalising on this
trend.

RISE OF VERTICAL APIS

India is the largest consumer of YouTube videos in the world. With Reliance Jio reducing data
costs and making it ubiquitous in India, online videos h
‌ ave seen an explosion. New use cases have
sprung up and companies are figuring out ways to solve core infrastructure problems for video.
We’ve seen 100ms, coming out of Hotstar, building audio and video Software Development Kit
(SDKs) for a video-first world. Similarly, Dyte also offers video and audio SDKs. More recently,
Rephrase.ai uses generative AI wherein deep-learning algorithms are used to generate, from
scratch, entirely new video content with just text, audio, or photos as inputs.

Here’s how Ashray, the founder of Rephrase.ai, describes it:

“At Rephrase.ai, we have built one of the best deep learning

teams to help make video creation as simple as writing text. By enabling
real human video creation to be an API instead of a service, we enable
businesses to create video first customer journeys (marketing and
sales journeys) to reduce CAC and increase conversions.”
- Ashray Malhotra, Founder, Rephrase.ai

This space has already seen several fast-growing startups being built. We expect consolidation
in the near future, and the emergence of category leaders.

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Similarly, fintech is one of the most exciting spaces in India and South East Asia today and has
attracted the most capital in recent years. Razorpay is building the financial infrastructure for
India and was last valued at $7.5 billion. The open banking model and its equivalent in India
Stack, has also gained popularity. Companies like M2P (valued at over $600 million) and Setu in
India and Finantier in South East Asia are building the next-generation infrastructure for fintechs
and banks.

Here’s what Shashank from Razorpay had to say about building a fintech company for the
emerging economies of the world:

“Razorpay is building a world-class API-first financial

infrastructure company from India and we are bullish that in the
broader ecosystem, API-first companies from India will become very
large globally. The developer ecosystem in India is among the largest
in the world and it’s growing and maturing at a fast clip. Razorpay is
focused on building the best financial infrastructure for the fastest
growing economies worldwide — India and South East Asia. The depth
of the talent pool and ability to build deep tech solutions will help India
produce multiple really large global API-first companies in the time to
come and we have only seen a glimpse in the last five years.”
- Shashank Kumar, Co-Founder, Razorpay

INFRASTRUCTURE & DATA MANAGEMENT STACK

The movement towards containerisation has led us to a whole new generation of startups to solve
the problems related to managing the scale and dynamism of containers. Common problems
such as monitoring, security, logging, tracing, and many more require a completely new product
to solve the same problem. We are seeing a lot of activity in this category.

Last9 is building a cloud-native reliability platform for SLOs and SigNoz is developing an open-
source Application Performance Management (APM) platform, Zipy is building a session replay,
frontend and network monitoring layer over logs, and Hasura is simplifying data access. Druva
started in a smaller city in India, Pune, and has a valuation of more than $2 billion. The company
initially focused on providing management software to financial companies before shifting to
general enterprise data management.

We believe data infrastructure is ripe for disruption. Although there are many well-funded
companies in several key emerging categories, including business intelligence and operational
analytics, feature store, metrics store, Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) and reverse ETL tools,
data warehouse, Product Led Growth Customer Relationship Managements (PLG CRMs),
managed data stack-as-a-service, and many others, the overall space is still very fragmented
and does not yet have clear winners.

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Rohit, founder of Acceldata, a modern data infrastructure player that helps get visibility into
modern data systems, confirms this hypothesis.

“With the growing adoption of open-source, developer tools and

the continued explosion in data-intensive content and apps, enterprises
need to adopt a modern approach to manage their data stack. The
Acceldata data observability platform provides unique insights into
data layer performance, automated data pipeline reliability, and spend
intelligence across customers’ data journey”

- Rohit Choudhary, Founder, Acceldata

The number of sources from which data is analysed and collated continues to rise, making the
stack more complex. Hevo Data is an example of a modern data infrastructure pipeline pulling
data from various sources for faster analytics.

Manish, founder of Hevo Data reaffirms the no-code wave for data infrastructure.

“Watershed events in the last few years, such as the separation

of computing and storage, and adoption of SaaS, have removed two of
the biggest data challenges: accessibility and applicability. Today Hevo
is enabling 1000+ businesses to take effortlessly smarter business
actions by harnessing their data from 100+ sources and delivering
intelligence back into the end-user software to drive a plethora of use
cases, all within a no-code platform”
- Manish Jethani, Founder, Hevo data

The recent PLG wave has fueled the growth of companies such as Toplyne, Outplay, and
RevenueHero. 5x data simplifies getting started with the modern data stack and takes advantage
of the cost arbitrage in this region. Meanwhile, other categories such as the metrics layer (where
Transform and Supergrain operate) have seen the likes of DataBrain spring up.

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CONCLUSION
Despite the current environment, there are very strong fundamental shifts supporting the next
generation of infrastructure, devtools, and open source companies coming out of this region,
with India leading the charge and South East Asia showing early signs. The startups in this
region are quickly catching up with global trends in several areas. We’re seeing early breakouts
within developer productivity and data infrastructure as well as the emergence of the first few
start-ups in newer categories like open source security. We expect great companies to continue
to be built and great founders to attract the right capital, and great teams to build generational
companies. Thanks to all our contributors, GitHub and Google. If you are building in this space,
please get in touch with us.

ABOUT LIGHTSPEED INDIA SAAS TEAM

Lightspeed India’s SaaS and enterprise team brings together decades of experience in prior
founding journeys, business and product building, and investing across India and US markets.
We have built hardware and software products across application and infrastructure SaaS and
developer tools for global companies, including Google, Flipkart, AMD, Stripe, and more, and
invested in companies such as Darwinbox, Hubilo, Acceldata, Yellow.ai, Pixxel, Rattle, Supabase,
and many more.

Vice President Partner Senior Investment Partner Investment Associate

manjot@lsip.com hemant@lsip.com Associate dkhare@lsip.com rikkin@lsip.com
rohil@lsip.com

ABOUT LIGHTSPEED
Lightspeed is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations
and trends in the Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Fintech sectors. Over the past two decades,
the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 500
companies globally including Affirm, Carta, Cato Networks, Epic Games, Faire, Forty Seven, FTX,
Guardant Health, Mulesoft, Netskope, Nutanix, Rubrik, Sharechat, Snap, TripActions, Udaan,
Ultima Genomics and more. Lightspeed and its global team currently manage $18 billion across
the Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in the U.S., China, Europe,
India, Israel, and South East Asia. www.lsip.com
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 ABOUT GOOGLE
Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful. Through products and platforms like Search, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google Play, Chrome,
and YouTube, Google plays a meaningful role in the daily lives of billions of people and has become
one of the most widely known companies in the world. Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

Head of Partnership Solutions, Cross Partner Manager, VCs

VCs & Startups & Startups Partnerships
achamaria@google.com thakurniharika@google.com

ABOUT GITHUB
GitHub is the developer company. We make it easier for developers to be developers: to work
together, to solve challenging problems, to create the world’s most important technologies. We
foster a collaborative community that can come together—as individuals and in teams—to create
the future of software and make a difference in the world.

Director, Developer Ecosystem Manager, Startup Program

& Market Engagement 04surf@github.com
gsamant@github.com

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