BENGALURU: Internet search engine giant Google, which last year reorganised itself as Alphabet, is currently in talks with a number of local telecom operators to kickstart its ambitious Google Loon project, months after chief executive Sundar Pichai managed to secure support for the project from the government.
Last year, Google set up an office in India for its late-stage investment fund Google Capital.
"Google Capital is here (in India). Google Ventures is only a matter of time... India actually has 50 Series-A investors, we only have five Series-D investors. So, there is a gap in late-stage investing and we decided to close that gap. What are the gaps? How can we as a company help address those gaps? So, that's the lens that we apply — we just don't want to do that because you have something," said Anandan, the managing director for Google South East Asia and India.
"Google Capital is here (in India). Google Ventures is only a matter of time... India actually has 50 Series-A investors, we only have five Series-D investors. So, there is a gap in late-stage investing and we decided to close that gap. What are the gaps? How can we as a company help address those gaps? So, that's the lens that we apply — we just don't want to do that because you have something," said Anandan, the managing director for Google South East Asia and India.
For now, Google wants to focus only on mentoring early-stage startups, instead of immediately setting up Ventures. Anandan said that Google Capital would increase the pace of investments in India. "So for earlystage we said, instead of ventures, let's focus on mentoring.
The reality is that there are enough people writing cheques. We want to improve the quality of the founders and the products," said Anandan, who is an active angel investor with dozens of startup investments and also used to head Dell's India operations.
"(Google Capital has) done four investments here. We've just hired someone from Google Capital here.
You're going to see us do more and more investments here," he said. For the Loon project -- the balloon-powered program that aims to provide internet access to remote parts of the country -- Google is currently in talks with local telcos such as BSNL as it looks to pilot the program in India, according to people aware of the discussions, who declined to be named. Anandan declined to comment on the service providers that Google is in talks with.
"To me Loon works — but at a simplistic level, it is infrastructure in the sky. And we'll partner with a local telco. Because the actual provisioning of the service is done by a local telco. So, we're talking to a number of local telcos.
We can't do a Loon pilot without partnering with a local telco. We are talking to a number of them," he said. "The government has been very supportive — we are working on a pilot and we are working our way through it. In India, the important thing is to work through things," he added.
Google is also "looking into the 6% equalisation levy," Anandan said. Last week, the government imposed the 6% levy to indirectly tax companies such as Google and Facebook, a development which could set the stage for taxation of cross-border digital transactions and potentially drive up costs for advertisers.
