Meet the desi aunty playing match-maker for Indian startups

One of the channels Indian startups use to make a dent globally is a well-heeled and networked diaspora that can make connections in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. It aimed to catalyse ‘exits’ through mergers and acquisitions which were far and few from India in relation to investments in enterprise software and deep tech startups. The programme has connected 46 startups to Fortune 1000 companies and created over $300 million in value in terms of partnerships, sales and acquisitions, according to Chintan Mehta, co-founder and COO at CXOBridge, as Startup Bridge is now called. So we moved from a non-profit pro- bono model that had its limitations in just making introductions to scale the programme up with a larger mission focusing not only on Silicon Valley but including Fortune 1000 companies in other hotspots like Japan,” explains Mehta about the morphing from Startup Bridge to CXOBridge. And we’re like a desi aunty or startupshaadi.com, doing the match-making.” BLIND SPOT One of the hardest things, especially for deep tech startups, is to discover specific international pain points in their domain, and then to articulate their pitch to the target persona in a large corporation.