South Korean technology giant Samsung has made its first investments in India’s start-up environment, picking four tech start-ups in spaces like speech recognition, internet of things and system applications. Going forward, the company plans to invest in 100 different Indian start-ups over the next five years. Aloknath De, Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Samsung R&D Institute Bengaluru, speaks to Jonathan Ananda on how it intends to go about this initiative.
Why do you think this is the right time to begin investing in the Indian start-up ecosystem?
Samsung has been in India for 23 years and internally, we have made several commitments in R&D, factories, etc. From the beginning of the decade, we also began thinking about how to leverage the ecosystem and we started engaging with many start-ups.
For example, when we rolled out our operating system Tizen to different products, over 200 companies engaged with us in app building, etc. Then, we began working with them on a deeper level on products. Since we had begun ecosystem building and engagement at the product level, we believed this was the time to open up another dimension: strategic investment.
How many start-ups do you plan to invest in?
We aim to make 100 different investments in 5 years or so in a strategic fashion. At an average investment of between USD 1-5 million depending on what stage of development the start-up is in. There are definitely financial investors whom start-ups can tap for investments of such size, but, what they may not get from other sources is what we can offer them as a global technology company.
In which areas is the company planning to invest in?
We are looking into two things. First, deep tech companies, where we have a product and we want to build a solution… For example, gnani.ai is a speech recognition firm and that will be essential for any voice assistant kind of activity. The second area is services in spaces like mobile, health and insurance tech, vernacular content, consumer services, mobility solutions, etc.
Are there any issues in this area that you believe need to be addressed at a policy level?
One good thing in recent times has been the launch of initiatives like Start-up India, Stand Up India, etc. When you spend money, set aside a corpus for incubators, skill training, etc. When you give sufficient focus here, it definitely energises the space and we believe this has been going very well. Additionally, some of the pain points like angel tax are also getting addressed by the government. As far as our engagement with start-ups is concerned we have experienced a very amicable environment.