{"id":53196,"date":"2026-07-28T18:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T13:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailynewsindia.co.in\/index.php\/2026\/07\/28\/the-founders-taking-indian-innovation-to-the-world-stage\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T18:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T13:06:08","slug":"the-founders-taking-indian-innovation-to-the-world-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailynewsindia.co.in\/index.php\/2026\/07\/28\/the-founders-taking-indian-innovation-to-the-world-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"The Founders Taking Indian Innovation to the World Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], July 28: <\/strong>Not long ago, seeing \u201cMade in India\u201d on a product tag felt almost like an apology. But honestly, that\u2019s quickly changing, mostly thanks to founders who didn\u2019t let geography define their ambitions. Whether they\u2019re straight out of college or knocking on sixty, these entrepreneurs didn\u2019t wait for a ticket to Silicon Valley \u2014 they built for the world right from home.<\/p>\n

Building Global Companies Without Leaving Home<\/h4>\n

Take Sridhar Vembu. Everyone else in his generation seemed to move to the US for funding and customers. Not him. He built Zoho out of a small town in Tamil Nadu. The company now powers tens of millions of users in offices everywhere \u2014 and Zoho did it all without early-stage venture capital. They survived on profits, not promises. That focus made Zoho lean, scrappy, and ready to challenge giants like Salesforce and Microsoft. Vembu didn\u2019t need a Palo Alto address to play at the highest level.<\/p>\n

Girish Mathrubootham charted a different course, but the spirit was the same. Freshworks started as a simple customer support tool, aiming to take on Zendesk. Today, it\u2019s one of the rare Indian SaaS companies to make it to Nasdaq. But that\u2019s just the glossy highlight. In reality, the early years meant sending cold emails to American businesses, tweaking the product based on every little support ticket, grinding day after day. That public market debut? It was just the end of a very long, very ordinary slog.<\/p>\n

The API Economy\u2019s Quiet Indian Roots<\/h4>\n

Some founders keep a lower profile. Think Abhinav Asthana of Postman. Most people have never heard of it, but developers everywhere use Postman every day to test and build APIs. Asthana and his co-founders didn\u2019t win with marketing \u2014 they just got obsessed with solving a hard, technical pain point better than anyone else. That paid off. Tiny startups, Fortune 500 companies\u2026 they all use Postman \u2014 but nobody stops to think of it as \u201cIndian.\u201d And that\u2019s the real win: the product grew bigger than its roots.<\/p>\n

Rewriting the Rules Back Home, Then Exporting Them<\/h4>\n

Other founders flip the playbook. First, they tackle India\u2019s huge, price-sensitive market, then test those ideas abroad. Nithin Kamath built Zerodha by ditching percentage commissions and just charging a flat fee for stock trades. No advertising. No expensive campaigns. Zerodha grew into India\u2019s biggest brokerage purely through word of mouth and smart tech. Now, fintech entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia and Africa are studying his playbook. Turns out, what works for India\u2019s young, mobile-first population can travel pretty far.<\/p>\n

Hardware startups are running the same experiment. Local brands focused on affordable wearables and audio gear are popping up in markets across the Middle East and Southeast Asia. They\u2019re betting that what won over value-conscious Indian customers will work elsewhere, too. No bold acquisitions or splashy launches here \u2014 just slow, steady growth, country by country.<\/p>\n

The New Frontier: Building India\u2019s Own AI Stack<\/h4>\n

And now there\u2019s a new challenge: artificial intelligence. Startups like Sarvam AI and Krutrim are building AI models that get India\u2019s wild range of languages and dialects \u2014 instead of just assuming English does the trick. It\u2019s tough tech, but it\u2019s also a statement. India isn\u2019t just using AI made somewhere else. It\u2019s crafting its own, and maybe leading the way for other multilingual countries that face the same problems.<\/p>\n

What Actually Connects These Stories<\/h4>\n

So what really ties all these founders together? They don\u2019t see \u201cIndian\u201d and \u201cworld-class\u201d as opposites. They aren\u2019t just making cheaper knockoffs for the local market and hoping they go global. They\u2019re actually solving hard problems \u2014 stuff shaped by India\u2019s real challenges: spotty bandwidth, tight budgets, endless languages. And when they nail the solution, it turns out the rest of the world needs it, too.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the real shift: Indian brains used to power someone else\u2019s dreams overseas. More and more, those minds are staying put, building world-changing companies from home. The next big thing? Don\u2019t look for it in Bangalore or Mumbai. It\u2019s probably brewing in some small town you\u2019ve never heard of, from someone who\u2019s quietly reshaping how the whole world works \u2014 and no one will even think to ask where it started.<\/p>\n

PNN Business<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], July 28: Not long ago, seeing \u201cMade in India\u201d on a product tag felt almost like an apology. But honestly, that\u2019s quickly changing, mostly thanks to founders who didn\u2019t let geography define their ambitions. Whether they\u2019re straight out of college or knocking on sixty, these entrepreneurs didn\u2019t wait for a ticket to…<\/p>\n

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