SL start-ups need to think global
Kerala – Sri Lanka has many of the characteristic for a thriving digital start-up ecosystem, but has been hindered by the lack of global expertise and funding.
Sri Lanka needs to ‘think global’ to build scale and start going regional. Thanks to democratisation of technology, modern day innovation is not limited and Sri Lanka should follow countries like Israel – the country with the most start-ups worldwide, Co-founder of SEAFUND, Manoj Kumar Agarwal told the Business Times in an interview at the Kerala Start-up Mission (KSUM) in Thiruvananthapuram, India last month.
SEAFUND is an early stage venture Angel Fund focused on early stage Technology startups.
“Israel’s model follows a ground-up talent-development approach that encourages and fosters local talent,” Mr. Agarwal said noting that major global companies including Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and Intel have research and development centres in Israel.
A Sri Lankan start-up based in a cloud platform dealing in retail (connecting small shops in Sri Lanka in a process to enhance, enable and enrich the business of the retailer solution providing a media and advertising platform for stores to advertise brands, promote products and services, build customer loyalty and also create interactions with end customers to get real-time insights on consumer behaviour) has plans to enter the Indian market, he said noting that India is a big opportunity for local start-ups. “This retail start-up is a scalable model.”
Dr. Saji Gopinath, CEO KSUM is very keen to work with local start-ups. “We are very keen to associate with Sri Lanka in exploring synergic linkages between two start-up ecosystems,” he told the Business Times.
According to the Sri Lanka Association of Software and Service Companies (SLASSCOM), 55 per cent of Sri Lanka entrepreneurs’ start-ups are generating early revenues but only 14 per cent new start-ups are growing into new markets. New IT innovations can reverse this low percentage to higher levels, analysts say. There are a lot of projects and a lot of themes that are ready to be defined for international capital but all these need to be scalable models which can go regional.
Locally, agencies are trying to get start-ups to raise capital. The Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) in association with the Securities and Exchange Commission continued to encourage technology start-ups to raise funds by listing on CSE’s ‘Empower Board’ by organising an exclusive forum for the membership of the Federation of Information Technology Industry Sri Lanka (FITIS) recently. Tech companies present at the forum were offered perspective on capital raising opportunities available through going public, where the event also featured a special discussion on the Empower Board launched by the CSE.
A start-up is not about a fantastic idea or an awesome product, Mano Sekaram, Founder and CEO of 99X Technology, a software engineering company that specialises in delivering high-end software product development services, noted. “Building a start-up is about a repeatable and scalable business model.” Dr. Gopinath agrees. “A start-up is commercially viable when it has exponential growth potential,” he added.