Vanakkam Chennai: Notes from Our First-Ever Founder Meetup

Explore the highlights of WeWork's first Founder Meetup in Chennai, featuring startup ecosystem leaders discussing mentorship, funding, and building global champions from Tamil Nadu.

What strikes you about Chennai right away is how it's encased in beautiful beaches, eclectic music or even the striking yellow and black autos ferrying commuters across the city. Slowly but surely, between the co-existence of the old and new in the bylanes of this city, a thriving community of startups has grown.

This, of course, comes as no surprise. It was ranked 18th in the Asia Regional Rankings amongst the Top 30 Startup Ecosystems besides having generated approximately $27.4 billion in ecosystem value between July 2021 and December 2023.

This significant growth can be attributed to key ecosystem enablers within the city. Through them, startups essentially are given a launchpad to test out their ideas, find potential audience sets and focus on validation through networking and resources.

So when WeWork India opened its doors to the city in June this year, offering its first-ever flexible workspace, we at WeWork Labs were compelled to give these startup enablers a space to explore the landscape. It also felt like the right time to introduce to Chennai our value-driven initiatives. This is what brought us to our first Founder Meetup on Building Global Champions from Tamil Nadu, a topic apt for the ever-growing ecosystem of startups in the city.

Our evening started with an insightful discussion on this topic between Kuppulakshmi Krishnamoorthy, the Global Head for Zoho for Startups; Sivarajah Ramanathan, who is the Mission Director of StartupTN and Dhanush Ram, the Investment Principal at Speciale Invest in Chennai.

Kuppulakshmi touched upon how fortuitous the timing was for Zoho for Startups, as it started in 2016-17, around the same time as the Government of India was focusing greatly towards the ecosystem with the formation of the Startup India and Invest India initiatives. “There was a huge yearning whenever we saw other ecosystem players like T-Hub and Kerala Startup Mission, and with our experiences in meeting audiences from cities like Coimbatore and Madurai, we realised we had an opportunity to positively impact this ecosystem with our initiative, just like the other players had done,” she said.

Need for greater recognition

Kuppuswamy’s take on the ecosystem helped boost interest about startups to the group gathered. According to Kuppuswamy, Zoho for Startups currently holds the largest number of incubation centres, with 124 centres in Tamil Nadu. “The first step we took was to build 10 regional hubs in Tamil Nadu. Along with that, we are also creating a fund of funds for each of these regional hubs where the government will make a considerable contribution as well,” she added.

To Sivarajah, funding and mentorship were more immediate needs for the startup space in the state. “With mentorship, we realise that while a lot of Chennai-based startups have the exposure and understanding of growth, other cities need the support a bit more to be able to grow at the scale they want, so our incubation centres are there to facilitate the same.”

Funding in Tamil Nadu

One of the funds that was creating impact in the state, according to StartupTN was Speciale Invest. Dhanush Ram, who is an investor with Chennai-based Speciale Invest, said the fund was looking to support startups in the state more closely. “Chennai is always known for its SaaS-focused startup community, and we will keep focusing on the same. However, we do see the emergence of deep-tech startups here, especially space tech, robotics, dev tools, data infrastructure,” he said.

According to Dhanush, it won’t be long before talent from Chennai counters global talent from elsewhere, like SpaceX.

With their words resonating throughout our Olympia Cyberspace arena, our raucous crowd of over 150 enthusiastic entrepreneurs and startup professionals hung onto every word, and even had the chance to interact with our panellists post the discussion, engaging in quality networking and denoting our event in Chennai as a resounding success!

One thing is for sure, the future is looking as bright as the sun reflecting off the Marina Beach, and more is yet to come. See you in the next WeWork Labs blog!