 Thank you. Good morning to you all. I am Raj Srivastava, Deputy Chief of Mission in Embassy of India here. It's our privilege to be here on Tokyo Schloss to introduce Indian startup ecosystem and also look at India-Japan synergies. With me today we have Sumit Jan who is a symbol of Indian startup ecosystem. He will introduce himself later on and with us also we have Vikram Upadhyay who is not new to Japan. He has spent 15 years of his life in Japan and that's why he is very good placed to explain the India-Japan synergies. Let me start with few slides to tell you about India startup ecosystem. The first slide that you see on the left side you can see that India is number two in terms of number of startups today, roughly 6,600 of them and that explains also that there are two parts of it, tech startups and non-tech startups. That means that a lot of startups are actually solving society problems and that's why there are many of them which are related to agriculture, healthcare, food processing and that's a very unique feature of India's startup ecosystem. On the right side you can see that it is led by young India so 65% of India's population is below the age of 35 and that is where the startup system works so I think that is another strength of India. Of course ICT you know that India has jumped from agriculture economy to become a economy which is driven by services sector. We are behind in manufacturing and that's where bit of synergy exists between Japan and India. This is also important to know that there is a scalability in India. A lot of startups, 12 of them already have become unicorn and in the next few years we are expecting another 30 to 40 startups to become unicorn. Let me explain, use an acronym, F-I-E-L-D-S, Fields of India startup ecosystem. So this is just to make it easier to understand. I would say F because F is about frugal innovation in India a lot of things are being done today to make the cost make it cost effective, make it easily affordable and find solutions to the problem. There was a movie recently made called Padman about creating pad for the female usage and at a cost which was exceptional like at a cost of probably one 30th of a dollar. I think yeah. So I is about inclusivity. You will see that in Indian startup ecosystem a lot of people are involved including the weaker section of the society. There are some states which have created an ecosystem only for female entrepreneurs creating a startup ecosystem. E which is related to a lot of work going on on the E platforms. Meaning that you are creating platforms where society can utilize it. E platforms. Next one you have L where we are creating leaders and process innovations they are trying to improve the processes to get the best efficiency out of it. S for social entrepreneurship and I think there also there is a synergy between Japan's NPOs nonprofit organization and social entrepreneurship startups in India. So this feels gives you a broad flavor of what kind of ecosystem we have. There is deep start take startups also for D which is basically telling you the strength of vertical strength of technology in India. Let me tell you about what government of India is doing. Government of India is basically trying to facilitate the process of entrepreneurship which is already there. So Prime Minister Modi has said that it's very difficult to provide employment in India for everybody because we are a huge population but we can create creators of employment. So this effort of government of India is about to create pockets of creativity which can then generate employment by self-employing themselves. What we have done is creating a competitive system among the states so that one state learns from the other and that's why there are many states which are now creating their own startup policies and creating a very good healthy competitive environment. Next I think just one more point that I will mention that you know Prime Minister Modi has mentioned about that for any success you require three S's, the speed, scale and sensitivity and I think it is totally kind of fitting to what is happening in the startup ecosystem. You need a speed so that your ideas can come to the ground. You need a scale so that it is scalable and always keep society at the center, sensitivity. So I think with these few words I will give the floor first to Sumit who will explain about his experiences in the startup ecosystem of India and then I will go to Vikram. Thank you Raj. Hello everyone. My name is Sumit. I run commonfloor.com for eight, nine years. It was helping people buy properties in India and it got acquired by Quaker. That's a vertical classified platform. So essentially if I just talk a little bit about common floor what we were trying to do in India, typically a property buyer, he takes one year to buy a property. He traveled 300 kilometers and spent 720 hours in buying a property. We were trying to bring it to one day and that is just one of the story. There are people in India are trying to do, I would say solve tough problems because in India I don't think that you have to do a really good job to be an entrepreneur. Everybody is an entrepreneur. If you look around you have 50 problems to solve and so many things are broken that you can just pick up one problem and spend next 10 years in fixing that problem. So we have a huge demographic advantage. We are one of the youngest population in the world. As Mr. Raj said we are average age of population in India is 28. In China it is 38 and in Japan it is 47. So we are 20 years younger than Japan. We are adding 12 to 13 million people every year in the work force. What can be done with these 12 to 13 million people is tough to imagine. Just imagine if these people start creating what kind of opportunities we are talking about. Also I will talk about cultural advantage as a country. In India every parent, every parent want their child to be an engineer and we have best of the talent in the country trying to become engineer. We have almost 16 IITs, 30 plus and IITs plus hundreds of good engineering colleges which give huge tech talent to the country. So every good people in India is trying to be an engineer and trying to solve some using technology. And if we talk about from the ecosystem point of view India has been as a country providing services to the world for last 30 years. We have been solving tech problems not just in India around the world and obviously being a services mindset we have not focused a lot in the country but in last decade what I have seen is quality of talent has gone up significantly and the quality of entrepreneurs have gone up significantly. People who went out from the country some of them are coming back. The kind of talent which is available in the country is formidable. We are having access to all the cutting edge technology and trying to use those technology into solutions. From an ecosystem point of view the government is doing very good. We have seen very good intent from the government in simplifying ease of doing business in startup policies. Government is putting huge impetus to digitization. I think that is one thing which we never heard of right? We are talking about the government is talking about using blockchain for food distribution, for relief matters and we are talking about the planning commission has been renamed to Niti Aayog and we have got very capable people out there who are listening to us as an entrepreneur. I think it was the first time any of the entrepreneurs met our prime minister in the last two sessions where he met the champions of change. In India it is very important that when we are talking about 12 to 13 million workforce coming into the force, entrepreneurship is something which we can't avoid, we can't resist, we can't ignore because that is essentially India as a country is a country of small and medium businesses. 65% of the working population is engaged with small and medium businesses. When you talk about any industry, you talk about real estate, we are talking about huge set of brokers, you talk about jobs market, we have huge set of around million job consultants, we have 1 million job consultants in India who are helping people find jobs. We have more than 1 million property brokers who are helping people find jobs, who are finding properties. We have huge number of small and medium businesses. This ecosystem what we are talking about is that we can really create using technology and bring them, make them more efficient. And the last most important thing is a market. As a market India is the largest consumer market. We are talking about one of the largest consumer market and from the innovation what happened in last, I would say 10 years, we have become one of the largest telecom market, right? In India we have jumped, leaf frog the whole innovation, all infrastructure thing. In India we have mobile phone in the cities where probably we have power for 2 hours in a day. We are talking about people are using mobile phone, it has become the communication device, it has become the entertainment device, it has become the computer in their hand. People are not using mobiles, people are not using laptops, that is the only computer device they are having in their hand. And by 2020 India will have 10 billion mobile application downloads. So we are a country which is running on, I would say fast speed, obviously we have a lot of catch up to do, but I think in next 10 years what a country like India can do, I am very excited to see that. Common floor, your own experience. So in common floor we have done many things, like one is we talked about, we did augmented reality where you can, using the application you can look at any property and say how many properties are available in that particular building. Because in India the pin codes are not properly defined, it is not properly defined that this property, what is the address of this property. So the interesting thing in India is that there are so many things broken that as an entrepreneur you end up actually feeling that you are really truly changing things. In our board meeting I got funding from excel partners, tiger global, Google capital in common floor and we were, when we were discussing about what we were doing in common floor they used to ask us, isn't that government supposed to do what you guys are doing? And we say that hey government has so many things to do and as an entrepreneur we feel stakeholder in the whole development of the country. And we were the first company in the world to bring virtual reality in the whole real estate space. So Google Cardboard we were the first company to use that Google Cardboard to help people buy property. That was one of the direction which we were trying to take of helping people buy property within one day. So in India the distances are long, right? And we're talking about the last mile connectivity. So India also is one of the largest cost of logistics. So the cost of logistics in India is 13% of GDP, which is one of the highest in the world, right? We talk about US, China is 8%. So logistics is one industry which is getting disrupted a lot and people like common floor or people who are trying to bring the information online have a lot of things to do. In fact, I feel very strongly that any problem in the world can be brought down to information problem. If we solve information problem, we solve 90% of the problem. So, and we are talking about information technology is all about how do you store information, how do you capture it, how do you store it and how do you make the information available. So a lot of interesting things happening around AI, big data in the country and we are very excited to see the deep tech, how can it actually change the Indian face. So I think after hearing, Sumit, let us move towards the second topic of the discussion which is about India-Japan synergies. And I would like to establish three important points in the synergy as we see from the two governments. Japanese capital is looking for opportunities for growth and I think you know that India is the largest, single largest economy in terms of growth rates. So there is a synergy in terms of capital in Japan and the growth potential in India. The second important synergy I would see in the demography. As I mentioned that 65% of population of India is below the age of 35 and I think by 2025, this statistics will be very similar in Japan only the other way around that you will have 35% of your population above the age of 65. So there is a demographic complementarity between India and Japan. And the third one which is very, very important for the start of space is that India is very good at ICT and Japan is very good at manufacturing technology. The two together is nothing but internet of thing, IOT. So I would say that that is the biggest strength of India-Japan synergy and partnership. This is a recognition now in the mind of the government also. That's why when Prime Minister Abe last time visited India in September, the two prime minister had actually directed the bureaucracy to establish a start-up hub between India and Japan and we are very close to actually establish it within few months time. I would now request Vikram to say his experience about what kind of synergy he sees between India and Japan and actually Vikram is doing a human service in terms of creating this accelerator, GHV accelerator which is now promoting the start-ups from idea to actually the fruition. So I would request you to say it. Thank you Mr Raj. Hi everyone, Konnichiwa. Today is very nostalgic day for me because this is the perfect time the right context, the best ambience I could see in Tokyo with cherry blossom outside. I stayed in Tokyo for almost 15, 16 years before moving back to India and I was very happy here and the reason I moved back because I saw there is an opportunity much bigger than what I was doing along with many big corporates in Japan way back in 2009-2010 and the opportunity I identified with two big problems in the two countries, the respective areas. So I used to run a system integration company in Tokyo back in 2009 and was also doing an investment making advisory between India and Japan. So the first biggest problem I identified was a lot of Japanese companies were investing in India but the results were not very satisfactory from Japan point of view and somewhere or the other I was involved in many projects along with them and the second problem which I identified was through my angel investments in India back in India. I used to live in Tokyo at that time and those startups were doing really wonderful. The startups I invested a very small seed amount with a lot of mentoring and advisory sitting in Tokyo to the guys in Bangalore, New Delhi. They were growing very fast. So the problem I identified in these angel funding is like the talent pool is there in India but they are not having the right set of guidelines or the paths to follow to become a very scalable business models for the global market. And I used to have a very basic question like why India is not having a Google? Why India is not having a Microsoft? Whereas in India is empowering Google and Microsoft globally. So with that bug in my mind I was not ready with the solution for the two problems. I decided I can't solve this problem. These two problems alone. First I should move back to the problem statement the area where the problem is happening. So I moved back to India in 2010 and I worked very closely with a lot of my friends back in India. We created the India's biggest angel network incubator called Indian Angel Network we launched the incubator there also and I used to keep investing at the early stage in the startups there. And in 2013 I identified one logical probable solution for the two problems I identified between the two countries. And the bottom line was of that solution was like it cannot be solved overnight it will take years to solve it. And this was a 15 years plan we made and this plan was with a theory of hip hop and jump where the first phase will be basically engaging startups at a early stage where we mentor them not only invest in them and help them to understand the business metrics healthy and make a scalable business model. Now it was very easy to mention that I was in need of capital to invest in these startups so I reached out to my alumni back in Tokyo University. So one of my senior from Tokyo University really liked the idea and Thaiso Sonsan was one of the mentors who mentored me to build this model GHV accelerator and we got funding in this GHV accelerator from Japan's biggest fund called Will followed by Mr. Takano who is the CEO of Forbes Japan and Sega Semi. So they empowered our idea to launch India Japan first of its kind India Japan accelerator for the startups in India and the objective was once we make these startups ready at a particular threshold there in their balance sheets then the Japanese companies can have a first look to participate along with them as a business partner or as a equity partner and we started in 2014 the first batch I should not call it a batch we are not doing a batch we are doing a business sector agnostic focus for the consumer tech we call it a real tech in Japan and so far we invested in 13 of them so while doing this experiment I will call it experiment so far because the results are a year to come we realize that the startups in Japan also needs to expand beyond Japan the market is very small they have to go beyond Japan and India is a big market for them so with the GHV accelerator when we are building portfolios in India the Japanese not only the investors the Japanese the startups will get an opportunity to expand and grab Indian market so think about a company for example we invested in a company called Fit me in which is the SaaS platform for business sector in India they aggregate the gyms in India and they are the CRM for the various health center the wellness centers in India so they got collaboration with Japan's biggest wellness company called Fink similarly a taxi company got a collaboration with a Japanese taxi company called Neon Kotsu so that collaboration really helped both the size to understand the technology from Japan to India and the market from India to Japan so coming back to the subject of the synergies between Japan and India so how it is to be done and I can share from my experience only it was very difficult to pick up the best ones in India so we built an investment thesis called Test POC which stands for TE stands for team with the execution capability who can do the scalable business model using technology and definitely a proof of concept has to be there so think about if I have to invest in a real estate I would have invested in the Sumit's company the third month when he was launching that's the stage at which we invest helped them to grow for 6-12 months now what Japan is looking now towards India definitely India is a big market population wise big government policies are very favorable from India for the global market including Japan I will give an example and it's easy to understand so while living in Japan I experienced that there is a culture of making soba the soba culture it takes time to build soba to use procure wheat right wheat from the right fields then make a dough prepare the soba boil it and serve it to the customer it takes time and it's very healthy soba parallel to soba is called 2 minutes instant noodles with just 2 minutes you need not to worry about it and it's not healthy eventually so when you look from Japan to India India you have to think a soba culture you have to build slowly and gradually the investments you are doing in India and that's what most of the Japanese companies are looking at it we have more than 30 odd LPs to fund will who invested in us and same is another D4V fund they all want to look at Indian market in a long term and that's how they are entering an Indian market now why it is required a 2 minute noodle is good in taste and it gives you satisfaction but only for a day the next day you realize it was really not good but the soba at the same time it takes time to prepare but once you have it you like it and it's healthy also so similarly the investments when Japanese companies look at India so that's my advice for all of us when we look at Indian start-up ecosystem do not rush with the results ready in the 12th month on the same financial year for you the returns will come over a period of time I think some of it is the best one to take a second that thought that the results come with the time and be along in the journey with the entrepreneur whether good or bad do not look only the financial returns look at the holistic view and give back to the society I think that's what a synergy is required and it is happening big time between Japan and India with that note I would like to thank you all and back to Mr Raj thank you it is a very good way to understand what a practitioner view is one more point before we finish 30 seconds are left that in all this start-up ecosystem kind of talking to each other most important is movement of people and I think that's where government of India and government of Japan are working together to improve that situation and I think lot of things have been done in the last two years so you will find very easy to move to India and backwards similarly what we are doing in India is creating Japanese industrial townships so that you get a Japanese ecosystem within India and there are 12 of them so that you don't feel that there is a cultural barrier and the last thing is about skill development which is also we are doing together in India and trying to get some demographic movement towards Japan thank you very much and we look forward to have some questions in the cafe thank you thank you