To drive India’s next level of Growth, Startups must create businesses that deliver social impact

Chennai: Addressing founders of India’s fast emerging Startups on setting up successful and sustainable businesses in India, Mr Sanjay Viswanathan, Founder and Chairman of AdiGroup delivered an insightful keynote address at the Microsoft Startup Summit 2021. Taking the audience through various high points of AdiGroup’s journey, Mr Viswanathan spoke about the essence of creating a business with focus on sustainability and social impact.

With power-packed sessions, The Summit witnessed an overwhelming participation of over 100-plus entrepreneurs. Enlightening the entrepreneurs with interesting anecdotes from AdiGroup’s journey, Mr. Viswanathan advised having a Partner Ecosystem and creating Social Impact as core to tackle challenges of growth and value creation. Sharing insights on ways Startups can create global impact, Mr. Viswanathan said, “The next decade of excitement will be around accelerated digital disruption, hence D3. This is essentially about rapid compression of Time, Space and Matter.”

He also added, “It is important to be authentic in Customer Experience or CX, as customers today are extremely discerning. While in the past loyalty would be set in stone when you won a customer, that isn’t the case anymore. Hence it is critical to be authentic in CX”.

Presenting case studies from AdiGroup, Mr. Viswanathan mentioned their recent foray into Education. Sharing a few insights on this he said, “Education is fundamentally a sector where one can create sustainable Social Impact. So we chose to go with the National Institute of Open Schooling platform, (NIOS) - the world's largest open school based right here in India. Microsoft and we have come together to enable NIOS Study centres and students with Nextgen blended learning technology, BLEAP® from Ed4All. BLEAP® is built on Microsoft tech stack with the objective of impacting 250 million students in India. We are the only digital school offering NIOS curriculum on Jio Platforms and Flipkart. We will demystify and democratize access to Education. Hence anyone who aspires to pursue their formal school education from Class 9 to 12 at low cost, can now do so on BLEAP®. While good quality education in India costs at least a lakh or two per year, we are now delivering this entire product end-to-end for less than 5000 rupees for the whole year of Education. The objective is to create social impact and to transform a nation through Education.’’

Following this energising and insightful session, the Microsoft Startup Summit had interesting sessions covering a diverse set of topics ranging from Intelligent Technology to Cloud Optimization and end-to-end Encryption.