Nandan Nilekani pitches ONDC to start-ups to democratise e-commerce

VC firm Antler has collaborated with Nilekani, FIDE and ONDC and launched the country's first ONDC-focused venture platform to help entrepreneurs create businesses and succeed on the open protocol

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, who spearheaded the country's massive unique identification project, on Wednesday, pitched Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) to an audience of start-ups, techies and entrepreneurs here. He asked them to build innovations on top of the government-backed platform to democratise e-commerce.

To achieve this, Antler India, a leading early-start investment platform, has collaborated with Nilekani, Foundation for Interoperability in Digital Economy (Beckn Protocol) and ONDC and unveiled the country's first ONDC-focused venture platform. The Antler ONDC platform brings together capital, content and community to help entrepreneurs create businesses and succeed on the open protocol. 

"We are going to democratise e-commerce in India. It won't be limited to a few players," said Nilekani, Chairman of Infosys and a member of ONDC's advisory council, at an event in Bengaluru. "Everyone, every supplier including Kirana stores, grocery retailers, electronics retailers, small vendors, and restaurants should participate in the digital marketplace on an open platform."

 

Some experts believe that ONDC would help small businesses compete with players such as Walmart-owned Flipkart, Amazon, Reliance's JioMart and Tata-owned BigBasket in the e-commerce space, which is forecasted to grow to $350 billion by 2030 and reduce their dominance.

"This (initiative) is about expanding the market for everyone. If you don't do these things, you would have only 5 per cent to 6 per cent of people (companies) in e-commerce," said Nilekani. "If you want to create a digital economy, you have to create it for everybody to participate and to benefit. I think more people would come into the fold of the e-commerce world."

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Nilekani said it is up to the companies that are not outdated and do not have any baggage to embrace technologies like ONDC and build on top of it and create successful firms. "ONDC and Beckn are at a prime time and it is up to the great innovators in this room to build on top of them," said Nilekani. "I want to congratulate the Antler team because they had the foresight to see that is one more (gap) that is coming up and if it is tapped into, it is going to create a lot of great companies." 

The newly launched programme by Antler offers pre-seed capital of $300,000, along with an additional investment of up to $200,000 from key partners (including unicorn founders and strategic backers) in the Antler network, for ready-teams with an idea.

"India has digitised identity and payments, and we believe it is time to now set our sights on the next major unlock - digitising commerce," said Nitin Sharma, Partner at Antler in India. Sharma said only 6 per cent of MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) are active sellers on digital platforms. With ONDC, he said this has the potential to grow to 30-40 per cent over the next decade, boosting massive growth for India.

"The opportunity to build new exciting companies goes through the roof. We talked about the mobile (revolution) and I think we'll see this as a similar type of revolution," said Magnus Grimeland, founder and CEO of Antler. "Looking at the world right now, India is the biggest opportunity."

The newly launched programme is also designed to support pre-team and pre-idea founders with a curated community to help them supercharge their early journey by building alongside experts, operators and top network participants such as Namma Yatri, Plotch.ai, SellerApp and Magicpin. The community will also facilitate problem-solving sessions and office hours with leaders in the digital public infrastructure ecosystem, such as Dr Pramod Varma (Co-founder, FIDE), Vibhor Jain (COO, ONDC) and Abey Zacharia (ONDC Specialist). Furthermore, a select number of aspiring founders building on ONDC and looking for founding teams have the opportunity to be fast-tracked to Antler India Residency.

Rajiv Srivatsa, partner at Antler India and Urban Ladder's former co-founder, said they would be scaling up these ideas through the programme.

"These (ideas) have to scale up," said Srivatsa. "We might not have $5 billion to $8 billion companies, but we might have $500 million to $1 billion companies. That is how we see it."

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The open network for commerce has already shown very promising initial traction. For instance, ONDC CEO T Koshy said the platform has clocked over 100,000 daily transactions across use cases like grocery and mobility while enabling new business models to flourish within these sectors. For example, the ride-hailing app Namma Yatri has organically enabled over 6.7 million auto rides and onboarded over 1.6 million users and 85 thousand auto drivers with zero marketing spend.

Fintech major PhonePe recently forayed into e-commerce with the launch of a shopping app, Pincode, on the ONDC platform. The app focuses on hyperlocal commerce. The Pincode app promotes local shopkeepers and sellers. It aims to digitally connect each city's consumers with all their neighbourhood stores that they usually buy from offline. PhonePe said this would be done with the convenience of online ordering, discounts and instant refunds and returns. Sameer Nigam, chief executive officer and founder PhonePe, recently said the aim is to list all sellers democratically. Pincode surpassed 50,000 installs on the Play Store within a month of launch. It was processing more than 5,000 orders per day, marking its popularity in Bengaluru, where it serves customers buying daily necessities and ordering food.

Plotch.ai, the largest ONDC rails infrastructure company, and IDFC First Bank said their payment solution, Nodepay for ONDC network payments, has gone live. Nodepay is based on the RSP framework of ONDC. Through Nodepay, a buyer app or seller app can pay another network participant in ONDC seamlessly through a payment switch. Also, Nodepay will give detailed reconciliation to network participants so that they can validate the payments easily. Later, Nodepay will also enable payments to sellers, which will help build trust from smaller merchants and retailers as they will receive payments in almost real-time. Nodepay will support payments in multiple domains of ONDC, including retail, logistics, fintech and mobility. "Together we have given motion to a payment channel which will define how billions of payments will flow in ONDC network every day," said Manoj Gupta, CEO of Plotch.ai.

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When asked if the ONDC platform and Beckn Protocol can have use cases in other parts of the world, Nilekani said that such need exists everywhere and there is a lot of global interest.