Newley Purnell reported in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that, “Lured by a flood of venture-capital funding, relatively inexpensive labor and the size of the potential market in the world’s second-most-populous country, entrepreneurs and technology workers with Indian roots have been coming home in increasing numbers.
“Among the highest-profile returnees is Kunal Bahl, who moved back to India after working for Microsoft Corp. and co-founded online marketplace Snapdeal, based in New Delhi. Snapdeal, owned by Jasper Infotech Pvt., is now valued at $6.5 billion.
“Others have come back to work at different so-called unicorns, or startups valued at $1 billion or more. Three Indian-born executives from Alphabet Inc.’s Google returned last year to work at the country’s largest startup, e-commerce company Flipkart Internet Pvt. Ltd. of Bangalore.”
The Journal article indicated that, “The trend is a turnaround of sorts for a country that has long seen its ambitious, highly educated workers leave to seek their fortunes elsewhere…[T]here were about 4,200 startups in the country in 2015, according to Indian tech-industry group Nasscom. That is nearly as many as in the U.K. and is more than three times as many as India had in 2010.”
