Rostow Ravanan, one of the co-founders of Mindtree, the IT company that got taken over by L&T recently, has decided to float a venture of his own in the software as a solution (SaaS) space, reports Economic Times.
The startup that Ravanan plans to float will be run by him and the investment required to run it will be generated by him. He still owns a small portion of the equity in Mindtree, of 0.69% or 11,28,436 shares. He says he may sell these shares to raise the funds for the SaaS startup. As per reports, he is not looking for a partner or an external investor at this stage of the venture.
SaaS is a format of business where the software is created and hosted on a cloud and can be rented by the customers on payment. Ravanan has indicated that the sectors his company would focus on would be manufacturing and healthcare.
This would be a departure for Ravanan himself as Mindtree was all pureplay software development.
Industry experts however feel that the going may not be very smooth for Ravanan with his new venture unless he is able to come up with something that manufacturing and healthcare sectors have not seen before.
On the overall market for SaaS could be currently worth around $1 billion. There are major Indian players like Zoho and a number of global payers like Salesforce and Zendesk.
The Indian SaaS industry itself appears to be setting very ambitious target for itself. The industry hopes that it can grow to a $1 trillion worth business, with 1,000 companies clocking a topline revenue of $10 million each.