Sidharth Rao, the man behind WebChutney, starts a new mar-tech venture.
Sidharth Rao, the man behind web chutney, stepped down as Group CEO of dentsuMB India in May this year; he has teamed up with his close friend and serial entrepreneur Madhu Sudhan to launch a tech venture marketing (MarTech) called Punt Partners.
The two founders believe there is a $100 billion opportunity in the MarTech space that isn’t being correctly addressed right now – an industry where incumbents are IT services companies, nullified without the entire marketing landscape or traditional ad networks, for which we are now catching up with inorganic takeover strategies.
Rao co-founded one of India’s first and best digital agencies, Webchutney, in 1999, which was later acquired by Japanese international media network Dentsu in 2013. While he continued to run Webchutney, in 2021, he was appointed head of India’s dentsuMB unit, the company’s restructured global innovation network.
In 1999, Recognized the need for brands to go digital, maybe a bit prematurely, and was the first digital agency in India. It’s constantly worrying me when agents don’t fully grasp the urgency they need to build their marketing technology service system,” Rao told ET.
“Digital advertising overtaking TV spending globally is the end of an era. But it is also the beginning of a complex and ever-changing period, with the digital technology landscape in mind. Given the complexity faced by brands, I believe we are about to see a massive increase in large-scale MarTech service providers built out of India. And with Punt, we want to take it one step further. ”
The company will start with its first headquarters and delivery hub in Bangalore, with key founding team members in Delhi and Mumbai. In the coming months, they will enter into significant partnerships with MarTech players and integrate a team of 30 members.
“Marketers often don’t develop the special skills to get the most out of these products or to make sure they work well with every product they use. This leads to a problem. Poor results for marketers and product providers must give up. . Punt will address this problem by developing specialized skills to ensure that brands can identify and deploy matching products and drive results with optimal use of their mar-tech stack.
During the 80s and 90s, when the ITES wave created great opportunities for India and saw the emergence of large technology services companies, the two co-founders believed that the industry of The internet was at the beginning of a ”new era, one where technology is infiltrating marketing teams and creating a need for specialized skills to succeed. The company aims to be a professional partner helping customers with their sales and marketing systems with new age SaaS partners and powerful cloud platforms from Google, Adobe and Salesforce.
Punt’s ambitions include serving the North American/UK/Middle East markets with deliveries from India.
The focus is on starting Punt, said Mr Sudhan. The founders have had conversations with many exciting entrepreneurs over the past few months.
“The mar-tech Punt is on an early stage, so discussing its specifics is a bit too early, but we are certainly open to exploring growth in any form,” said Sudhan. We are entering the growing but relatively nascent mar-tech industry. The co-founders are currently funding the startup but are talking about raising seed funds.
