A member of the top 100 from the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, co-founder and CEO of One97 and its Paytm online payment platform, cites Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank as his inspirations, according to a profile in the Financial Times.
Perhaps luckily for him, therefore, he has an opportunity to thank them for their inspiration, as both are shareholders.
Founded in 2000, One97 oversees a range of online services as well as corporate venturing unit One97 Mobility Fund, but is best known for Paytm, the online payment platform it incubated and launched in 2010.
Alibaba and its financial services affiliate Ant Financial invested $680m in One97 in September 2015, after acquiring a 25% stake earlier in the year as part of a strategic partnership.
One97 had raised about $20m in initial funding from SoftBank’s SAIF Partners before securing an undisclosed amount of series B capital from SAIF, Silicon Valley Bank and chip manufacturer Intel’s corporate venturing unit Intel Capital, in 2009.
Alibaba and Ant Financial now hold a combined 40% stake in the company, with SAIF owning 30% and Sharma about 20%.
Sharma has learned that corporate venturing can bring success. When nominating his colleague, Kiran Vasireddy, as a GCV Rising Star 2016, Sharma said: “Kiran has been a true rock star in all the deals we have done. His negotiations skills are especially great. We, being a corporate investor, need rights beyond the capitalisation table spreadsheet. We need to build synergy with our core business.
“We were able to get better value in competing deals and could create tremendous shareholder value too.”
Recent deals for One97 include a $10m investment in logistics technology developer LogiNext Solutions and another $10m in an automotive rickshaw hire service. One97 led the $50m financing round for consumer lifestyle marketplace Little. There were a dozen startups in Vasireddy’s pipeline, he said in January.
Nearly two decades on from his early software developments for RiverRun, Intersolutions and India Today, Sharma is in many ways the successful face of entrepreneurial India in the way Ma and Son have so often been seen in China and Japan, respectively.
