A few weeks ago, I joined Austrian startups on a trip to London, where they could pitch their business ideas to investors from UK, visit coworking spaces and gain an insight into the local startup scene. One of my takeaways is the fact that moving your startup to London doesn’t only open the doors for you in the United Kingdom, but also to the whole Commonwealth are: Some of the investors where negotiating actively with Austrian startups who weren’t fit for the English market, but could do well in India.
A complicated, but attractive market
One investor with an Indian background told me that they are not only looking for startups with a strong business perspective, but also for ventures to which they can add value. As anybody who read my book knows, the Indian market is full of hurdles for anyone who is trying to do business there: I focused in my storytelling on the intercultural clashes, but you also have to take into account challenges in logistics, low credit card penetration and different consumer behavior – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
On the other hand, startups who move to India can benefit from a growing middle class, which is longing for new products. And for certain segments, there are still a lot of problems to solve – education, infrastructure and energy, just to name a few.
Startups who want to benefit from this can rely on their national trade representatives in India, on the coworking spaces, incubators and networking experts – or they use the experts from London as middlemen.
Go local in London
As I’ve written in my article on format.at, 581.173 startups were founded in the UK in 2014 alone, alternative financing has almost reached the mark of one billion Euros. One of the reasons for this is that investors enjoy massive tax benefits when investing in startups, namely the Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme.
For the investor to benefit from these regulations, the startup has to fulfill some requirements – the most important one being that he has to found a company in the UK. This can be easily done online via this link.