IoT Startups in India Grow 10x in Last Four Years

Startups in the Internet of Things (IoT) segment has grown ten fold, according to IoT Forum, a think-tank to build the IoT Ecosystem in India.

In 2014 India had only 126 IoT Startups and today the number of IoT startups in India have increased to 10X in last four years, with 31% growth alone since last year, according to Venkatesh Kumaran, Somshubhro Pal Choudhury and Arvind Tiwary, co-chairs of IoT Next.

IoT Forum, which was launched in 2014 is an initiative by TiE and IESA to engage startups, corporates and investors across the country.

Back in 2014, it was just a handful of IoT start-ups, with no ecosystem support and hardly any investors. Today, we have over 1,250 IoT start-ups, many generating revenue not just in India but globally and smaller size exits already happening, they added.

The effort is to raise the IoT Quotient of India by developing business case and ROI for industrial IoT, cyber security and edge computing, as companies globally are increasingly getting digitised.

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According to 2017 study report by Management Consulting firm Zinnov, the city of Bengaluru is the prime destination for IoT startups to set up a base in the Indian subcontinent. Bangalore comprise nearly 52% of India’s total Internet Of Things startups.

Additionally, the major MNCs are doing substantial portion of their IoT development in India. A number of Systems Integrators with IoT practices, and a growing ecosystem of investors, incubators/accelerators, angel community, mentors/advisors are there to add the IoT Quotient of India.

Between 2014 to 2018, a lot had been done in IoT ecosystem in India by global as well as local industry bodies. In 2015, global chipmaker giant Intel had launched Intel Maker Lab in India for IoT innovators and startups in the country.

In the same year, a report by Gartner had predicted that India will boast of at least 5 IoT startups with billion dollar valuations by the year 2018. The report also suggested that about 20% of the Indian white-collar workforce will be able to access enterprise data on their personal electronic devices by the end of year 2017.

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Prakash Mallya, Managing Director, Intel India, Sales & Marketing Group said that with the introduction of the technologies like 5G, coupled with affordability of sensors, IoT is set to be a part of our daily lives.

The annual IoT Next 2018 summit brought the entire community together discussing and debating state of affairs and future trends, connecting with global IoT counterparts, and showcasing the start-ups from India.

Ravi Gururaj , President, TIE Bangalore said that the aim to build IoT landscape from sensor to the cloud for making the technological evolution deeper.

Research by McKinsey Global Institute estimates the impact of the Internet of Things on the global economy will be $6.2T by 2025. NASSCOM and Deloitte recently pegged the IoT market in India at $5.6B in 2016, growing to over $15B by 2020.