With over 6 million software developers, we see India as a critical market with a thriving startup ecosystem: Sid Puri, Retool

With the pace of digital initiatives accelerating at a fast pace, Retool, a company that allows developers to compose any app interface using drag and drop features, is finding huge acceptance in the Indian market. India is already the company’s fastest-growing foreign market, with organisations such as CRED, Coinswitch, Sharechat, and Unacademy using Retool in their daily operations. Sid Puri, Head of India, Retool, shares more details on the scale of the opportunities in a country like India

Some edited excerpts:

What is the scale of opportunity for Retool in India?
Retool has been working with Indian startups since our founding in 2017. We’ve had Indian customers since day 1 when we were in Y Combinator. With over 6 million software developers, we see India as a critical market with a thriving startup ecosystem. Just in 2021, Indian startups raised $42 billion making it one of the fastest-growing technology centers of the world. We already work with a handful of these newly minted unicorns who started using Retool last year, like CRED, CoinSwitch, Sharechat, and more.

As these companies start scaling, we see Retool as an enabler for this hypergrowth by making it easier for teams to build and ship software faster. In today’s ecosystem, speed of development holds a key competitive advantage, and we see more Indian companies adopting our platform to enable this growth.

Compared to other global markets, are there any specific trends that is unique to India?

With the hyper-growth of Indian startups and the sheer scale of the problems they need to solve, we see more use cases, more users and broad adoption of new technologies. We have noticed Indian startups and developers tend to adopt new technologies faster. Startups here are always looking for new ways to solve problems, and with the fast growth of their workforce they tend to have a lot of operationally intensive use cases with large back office operation teams.

As Retool works towards changing the way software is built, India plays a key role in helping us reach this vision.

How is Retool positioning itself to take advantage of a market that is clearly one of the biggest in the world?

Much of our traction in India, which is our fastest growing foreign market, comes from word of mouth. We have many passionate evangelists who discover Retool on their own and bring it into their companies. We saw this growth opportunity early and set up our first international office in Bangalore.

Given our recent fundraise, we are ready to double-down on the Indian market. We want to focus on getting Retool in the hands of more developers by offering a new unlimited Free plan, exclusive to India.

Can you brief us on some of the key initiatives taken by Retool in the Indian market?
We recently announced an India-only Free plan with unlimited users with no credit card required. We believe this will be a first step to getting more users on our platform. Over the last year, we spent time building key partnerships in the region with VCs and incubators like Sequoia, Angelist India, Blume Ventures, etc and we will continue investing in more key partnerships. We plan to announce new product lines catered to the region over the course of the year.

How successful has Retool been in the Indian market? Can you let us know on some of the use cases specifically in India?

We’ve seen remarkable traction in India; user growth is up 500% year over year. We are lucky to work with companies like CRED, Sharechat, Unacademy, and Coinswitch. The use cases are pretty broad across internal business tools for support, sales, and business teams.

Some interesting use cases from two Indian companies are highlighted below:
1. LBB uses us across multiple teams. The Marketing and Visual Merchandising Team use a Retool app for offer and collection management.  The Merchants Team relies on Retool to onboard merchants, manage merchant information, and moderate the catalog.  The Finance Team has a Retool app that helps them reconcile records, make ledger entries, and detect errors. The Logistics Team uses a Retool app to manage pin codes

2. Pepper Content users Retool to onboard 45,000 creators

Future plans — What are some of the initiatives planned in the next one year

We plan to announce new product lines catered to the region over the course of the year and we plan to hire engineers to work closely with our India based users