India is home to over 51 million SMEs. However, the lack of a credible platform to identify and verify global opportunities and the limited access to market research and trade intelligence brings with it the complexity to understand global trading policies and practices. Thus, only a fraction of them enter overseas markets, that too with a greater degree of risk. Similarly, only a fraction of 40 million internationally competitive overseas SMEs trade with India because of lack of credible information on trade insights, trade resources and trade counterparts here in India.
Seeing this glaring gap, Pawan Gupta’s venture
Connect2India, was established with a single goal of evolving and simplifying the complete global trade ecosystem in India, enabling Indian SMEs to start and grow their business globally and overseas SMEs to effectively trade with India. The MVP was launched in Dec 2015 and the full platform was launched in April 2016 for Indian and Overseas SMEs. The company started generating revenue from last quarter 2016 and is currently operationally profitable and cash-flow positive. Connect2india is based out of Faridabad (Delhi NCR area). The idea behind the venture is to provide an integrated trade platform for Indian SMEs to effectively trade globally and for overseas SMEs to effectively trade with India. Connect2india’s one stop integrated trade platform itself is the company’s USP. The platform offers end-2-end global trade offerings such as trade intelligence, trade counterparts, trade resources and trade solutions etc., enabling SMEs to effectively scale globally.
The company currently has 60,000 unique business visitors per month on its global trade platform and plans to increase that to 1 million by next year and to 5 million visitors in 3 years’ time. Connect2India currently has a presence in 5 major overseas locations; it plans to increase its presence to 25 countries and to 20 metros in India by next year.
While talking about the company’s future plans, Connect2india, Founder, Pawan Gupta said, “Future plans of the company include establishing the company brand as the most trusted global trade source for India and do whatever is necessary and required for doing that. The market and the opportunity in enabling global trade from SMEs are huge as this is a completely unaddressed need. We will continue to scale our sales and marketing operations to expand nationally and internationally and continue innovation in our trade platform to make trade safer and easier.”
Connect2india is currently raising pre series A funding and have received interest from couple of investors in India and abroad.
About the founderPawan Gupta, Founder, Connect2india is a B.Tech (First class with honors) from NIT Kurukshetra and an MBA from London Business School.
Pawan has worked as Group CTO for the second largest privately held enterprise software company in the world (Trilogy / Versata Enterprises). He also set-up and successfully run Global trade venture his own international consulting and global trade company in London, U.K. Interacted with reputed clients all over the world. He made the company IBM and SUN Advanced Business partner and signed up reputed customers worldwide. Pawan has worked for leading technology companies such as IBM, Siemens, HCL Hewlett Packard and worked on solutions for Fortune 100 companies as well as worked for startups.
Pawan wants Connect2India to become synonymous with global trade within next 5 years. He feels the venture and its growth so far are only because of the awesome team that he has. Pawan says “We won’t be here today being both operationally profitable and cash flow positive within 1 year of full platform launch, if not for the great work from our team. We had zero attrition since the beginning and it’s not my venture, it’s the team venture. We are a team of 12 at the moment.”
