Expat Indians are leaving Big Tech and moving back home to launch companies of their own.
Chelsea Jia Feng, BI
Some expat Indians are moving back home to launch companies of their own.India’s booming market size, internet growth, and post-pandemic spending is driving their decision.They are returning home to improved ease of doing business and better support for founders.
Nithin Hassan, 41, has always been fascinated with building something of his own.
As a child in India, he would get in trouble for dismantling electronics around the house just so he could peek inside.
In college, in true startup fashion, he started working on a small business out of his parent’s garage in Bengaluru, assembling computers for friends and family.
It was the early 2000s and the internet was not the trove of knowledge it is today — Hassan was relying on books to learn. Finding mentorship and the right guidance was a challenge, too.
Everyone around Hassan told him that going to the US for a master’s degree was the next big opportunity. So he did.
Over the next 16 years, he put his startup plans on hold and worked at some of the world’s biggest companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
Nithin Hassan lived in the US for 15 years before returning to India last year.
Nithin Hassan
But the pandemic felt like a turning point. And its aftermath made India look like a lab-designed business environment: It had just become the world’s most populous country, the pandemic had created pent-up demand for consumer products, and growing internet adoption made commerce more scalable, he said.
So Hassan left behind about $500,000 in annual pay at Meta to move back to Bengaluru in December 2023 with his wife and two children. He has since launched two startups.
Hassan is part of a group of expat Indians moving back home to venture out on their own. As such, he’s also part of a decades-long trend of reverse migration back to India.
The trend began in the 1990s and picked up at the turn of the century, driven by the economic collapse in 2008, said Binod Khadria, the president of Global Research Forum on Diaspora and Transnationalism. Many of those who returned to India for work were largely working for multinational companies.
Today, the impetus for the move often looks a bit different: It’s driven by factors like unstable visa policies and economic recessions, which lead to uncertainty when it comes to jobs and duration of stay in these destinations.
Many returnees find work in tech, but the finance, retail, and climate sectors also absorb a large number of expat Indians, Khadia said. And some of the returnees are heading back to India to start companies of their own.
India is undergoing a startup explosion. The country reported over 140,800 recognized startups at the end of June — nearly 50,000 more than last year — and credited them with creating 1.6 million direct jobs.
To be sure, not all of these companies will make it big — and some do still stumble, like Oyo and Byju’s. But the chaos, where even established startups are trying and failing, makes India a fair playing field for new entrants, Hassan said.
Business Insider spoke to six first-time founders about why they have recently returned to India after spending several years, or even an adult life, abroad.
Fastest-growing economy
The health of the economy and interest from investors are fueling the entrepreneurship boom.
India’s economic growth in 2023 — 8.2% — was the fastest of all large economies worldwide. That’s led to greater purchasing power, which lets companies, including startups, sell more.
India’s inflation rate of about 3.5% is well below its annual wage growth of 9.6%. This makes inflation less of a challenge than it is for slower-growing peers, where consumer-focused businesses have been hurt by high prices.
Investors are getting in on the action.
From 2015 to 2021, the number of unique investors in India nearly quadrupled, though the number is tracking much lower this year, per PitchBook.
“Other than a slight downturn in 2022 and 2023 due to global macroeconomic factors, VC funding has been consistently growing in India,” said Ben Mathias, a managing partner at Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India.
Besides funding, domestic developments have encouraged founders and VCs too, Mathias said.
The Indian government’s Universal Payment Interface system has spurred consumers and businesses to pay online, and 40% of all digital payments globally happen in India today, the partner said.
Programs like Startup India, which provides founders benefits like tax exemption, easier compliance, and funding support, have made creating a company smoother.
Devyani Parameshwar worked in the microfinance and fintech space in India in the 2010s before heading to the UK and Africa. She returned to India in 2022 to launch a financial management venture.
“It’s changed dramatically. I remember standing in line at various ministries in Delhi trying to get meetings and then trying to get answers and it wasn’t easy in the past,” she said of her memories of India.
Now, she can use an online platform to ask the country’s central bank and banking regulator questions.
It’s easier than ever for foreign companies to invest in India, which means startups have a clearer exit path through acquisition — something VCs think hard about before entering new markets or writing checks.
Market ripe for the taking
For Rohan Bhide, who spent most of his college and professional life preparing to launch something of his own, a trip home in 2017 while he was studying in the US was a turning point.
Indian telecom giant Reliance had recently launched a cheap unlimited data plan, which spiked Indian internet adoption. India was charting among the countries with the highest online transactions.
“That really, really drew my attention,” said Bhide, who worked at Meta after graduation. “It was my dream come true — a huge market, a huge user base, and at the same time, the ability to adopt technology was incredible.”
Bhide returned to India in January, leaving behind about $580,000 in total compensation at ticketing platform StubHub. He and a cofounder are working on launching a consumer tech product later this year.
Rohan Bhide returned to India in January after working at Meta and StubHub in the US.
Rohan Bhide
Most Indians grew up wanting to work at a multinational company — but that’s changing, Bhide said.
Freelancing, running your own business, or working for a startup is much more socially acceptable now, because people see the success of other Indian startups. The country has the third-largest number of “unicorns” — companies worth $1 billion or more — with 64, per PitchBook.
Boom in entrepreneurship culture
A lot has changed since Hassan first wanted to launch his hardware startup in the early 2000s.
Tech hot spots like Bengaluru and Gurugram have seen a boom in entrepreneurship culture in the last few years, with meet-ups, networking mixers, and even morning walks with like-minded builders.
Dhruv Anand launched an AI services startup after moving back to India.
Dhruv Anand
Dhruv Anand, who left Google in the US to move back to India in 2021 to launch an AI startup, said that there were lots of other founders and mentors to help guide him.
“If you want to figure out who’s the right chartered accountant to talk to, who’s the right lawyer to help you draft agreements, all of that stuff is very easy,” Anand said.
“It’s been a really, really supportive community,” Bhide said. There are people “telling you about their entire lives just because they want to help you and they’re hoping that you pass the favor onto the next person who moves to India and wants to start their own company.”
Not everything is perfect
Although these founders made the decision to return to India, that doesn’t mean they no longer see the benefits of operating in the US.
Ruchit Garg founded an agriculture startup in Silicon Valley in 2016, with a focus on supporting farmers around the globe. In 2019, he returned to India, where his late grandfather worked as a farmer.
Garg has been building in India ever since, but he says its startup ecosystem cannot yet compete with the Valley’s decades of experience.
“The overall ecosystem was more mature back in Silicon Valley. It’s still one of the best places for entrepreneurs. India isn’t there yet, although it’s growing pretty drastically,” he said.
Despite efforts to digitalize key processes, many bureaucratic challenges persist.
For most founders, after living in US cities where populations are a fraction of those in Mumbai and Bangalore, congested roads and poorer air quality are also everyday annoyances.
But India provides some big perks, including affordable domestic help and the appeal of building solutions for problems they witness firsthand.
“It’s a different joy to be able to build for problems that you feel for very personally,” Parameshwar, the fintech founder, said. When she worked in Africa, she needed translators. Now, she can speak with her users herself.
Bhide said the general sentiment among local founders is shifting from “Build from India” to “Build for India.”
For some founders, being surrounded by family and the culture they grew up in was another selling point.
Niranjan Vemulkar moved back to India in 2015 and later founded a digital legacy planning platform.
He said that he never fully felt at home in the US, where he lived for over a decade.
“For us, it was the fact that we wanted to raise a family in an environment where the children would have access to the grandparents and Indian culture,” Vemulkar said. “The fact that you could come back to India, start something of your own and figure things out in an ecosystem which was potentially booming for startups, was just a cherry on the cake.”
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