India's "Jio-fication" & the rise of EdTech, FinTech, AgriTech, HealthTech startups w/ Sanjay Nath

Welcome to another episode of investream. I'm Pankaj and I'm here with my friend Sanjay Nath, founder and managing director of Bloom Ventures. So now in terms of the founders, what are some of the interesting areas that are emerging? Right. Like you know, I remember back 2015 we had a mad rush towards food delivery which imploded. I was never a fan of the model. And you know, 2015, 2016, you know, I started looking at more India specific vernacular type of businesses like social cops and sheroes and some of those things that were solving very Indian problems. Now some of those have done well, some of those ideas haven't done as well. But we're starting to see like Indian content, vernacular content really explode, Share chat and some of these other apps. What are some of the things that you're seeing over there that is really exciting? Not today but exciting for tomorrow?

Yeah. So you know, you've probably heard of this paradigm and we talk about it that there are two Indias, right? There is the India consumption model which is really the China story, which is India consumer for India and then the B2B which is really built in India for global markets. So let's examine both of those. If you look at the first stage consumption, India 2.0 or rather India 3.0 which is really tier 2, tier 3 cities, the hinterland. The fact is that they all again thanks to geofocation, they're all Internet enabled, they're mobile enabled. Their mobile first mobile only idea starting today. So if you look at certain sectors like Agritech for example, right today we've done a company called, it's not really Agritech but it touches India 2.0, 3.0 stellaps, which is really a fitbit for cows, which is really streamlining that whole supply chain and bringing power to the farmers hands helping milk cooperatives using IoT sensors. So it's a bit of B2B but it's still consumer. Very interesting. Experienced founders that are starting up. So Agritech and everything that touches that is interesting. Look at Fintech. I think Fintech has moved from just pure wallets to lending to now lending for India 3.0. Right. To roll our drivers micro lending, peer to peer lending. Healthcare is very interesting. I mean we have Healthify me from Fund 2 and Tricorg Fund 1. We didn't do anything in healthcare Fund 2 we did four and now we're already looking at healthcare because it's so transformative, right, in terms of the impact. And then you marry tech, whether it is healthcare on the mobile device which is health and wellness app with AI or something like a tricorque which is, you know, B2B helping save lives. But again, you know, partnering with the ecosystem, whether it's GE or the others. So you're seeing healthcare impact both sides. B2C and B2C. So agritech healthcare edutech. I think edutech was also interesting. I mean.

Next question.

Well, byju's is interesting because it's got more of the feet on the street model. But if you look at own academy, Unacademy is a great example of like the way we're doing this podcast, right? Online only what YouTubers were to YouTube. You've got educators coming onto an academy. The way you know the millennials are learning today is very different. They are of course they, you know, they're doing rote learning and everything, going to school but they also ancillary they want to augment that learning and that's where you know, where online education comes in. So I think these very, very core to India's economy, right? Healthcare Edutech and Fintech and Agritech we weren't seeing ideas in Fund 1 at all and that is going to be a core focus or amongst the core focus areas in our fund.