In 2014, Prayank Swaroop made a pitch to the storied venture firm Accel, where he worked as an associate, about future marketplaces to evaluate.
At the time, Flipkart and Snapdeal were the only two e-commerce startups in India that had shown a semblance of scale. Swaroop made a case that as more Indians come online, opportunities will emerge in food delivery, automotive aftermarket, warehousing, road freight, and social commerce among many other marketplace areas.
Swaroop, now a partner at the firm, turned out to be right. Urban Company, which operates in the domestic help sector, is valued at over $2 billion; Zomato and Swiggy are delivering food to millions of customers each month; Spinny and Cars24 are selling hundreds of thousands of cars each quarter; social commerce startups DealShare is valued at over $2 billion and Meesho just short of $5 billion.
Hundreds of millions of Indians have come online in the past decade and over 100 million are making onlin...
