Making the closed open!

India’s private market is “closed”. 

You’re probably thinking, we have seen over 20 unicorns being created this year, “retail-like” participation in startup investing is happening at a pace and scale we have not witnessed before and our largest technology companies are now listing (Zomato and Freshworks amongst others) – what is Nimesh saying? India’s private markets are far from being closed…

Well, as an insider (for what it’s worth) I see that we are just at the start, or like I’ve said before, we are only at the lunch session of Day 2 of a cricket test match. Where we go from here is anyone’s play 🙂

Today, we have less than 100 unicorns between India and South East Asia, yet India is the third largest startup ecosystem globally. The US and China together have 800 unicorns and this should give you an idea of the strides that need to be made.

What’s holding us back? Information asymmetry and relationship arbitrage which I believe brings inefficiency to transactions and keeps the private capital market small and broken.  

One of the reasons for this is the way in which equity is managed. While most startups today use automation tools to run sales, marketing and even manage financials, managing equity — which is the most valuable asset of a startup — is still done manually on Excel or spreadsheets. This not only leads to errors but also silos information on an asset that is common to many stakeholders — founders, board, investors, employees.

Having been a part of India’s banking industry and public capital markets for the better part of my career, I truly believe that when technology is applied to better organise data, information and knowledge for the individual it has a huge multiplier effect on what happens for a group. If we have to leverage the deep pool of domestic and global capital available to startups in India, there is a need for a technology platform that brings trust, transparency and timeliness to equity management and liquidity.

… and that is what we are here to do with trica. 

Over the past 18 months of building trica, we discovered the following:  

• Founders today, even at a relatively early stage, are keen to automate and digitise processes at their companies for efficiency — this is where the cap table and ESOP management product makes sense for them — we’re calling this trica equity
• Investors too, have over the past few years become digitally savvy and seek to mirror the transparency and digital processes they have in the public markets — our product trica capital enables this for them.

Here’s to making the closed open — with trust, transparency and technology — #ourtrica. What’s yours?