Udaan takes flight with Microsoft Cloud to digitally transform India's B2B commerce

Founded by Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar, and Vaibhav Gupta, Udaan is India’s largest online business-to-business (B2B) marketplace and fastest startup to become a unicorn. Udaan has been associated with Microsoft since its beginning, having been a part of Microsoft Accelerator program (now Microsoft for Startups) and by running on Microsoft Azure from day one. “The day we were valued at a billion dollars, we just had 17 engineers. That’s the kind of productivity improvement that Microsoft Azure has offered,” Malviya says.

 

Amod Malviya was best known in the startup ecosystem as the man who built Flipkart’s technology backbone. Today, he’s better known as the Co-founder of Udaan, the B2B marketplace that raced to unicorn status in under 26 months. Amod has champion on, the “artificial separation between thinker and doer, or decision-maker and executor”. He has a strong believ on, the role of engineers in an increasingly 'algorithmised' world.
 

 

Talking about their decision to get into B2B commerce, Amod says – “We laid down three criteria for us to decide what we’d do. The first was it has to be a large problem to solve. It couldn’t be an incremental utility for someone, it has to make a big difference for a large number of people. Second, it has to be in an area where it is possible to create disruption through technology. And finally, it has to be something that has a unique Indian flavor.”

 

Udaan was part of the 2016 cohort of Microsoft Accelerator (now Microsoft for Startups). Speaking about how that program helped Udaan, Amod feels the Microsoft Accelerator program was the Azure credits but what really took him by surprise was how vested the Microsoft team was in the success of the startups in the cohort. Microsoft also enabled go-to market programs for other startups in the cohort experience. Amod explains this further - “Microsoft was most prompt and eager to get our business. And once that initial engagement started, they’ve continued to demonstrate a high amount of focus and energy in ensuring any issue we run into is resolved. What really mattered to us is the public position that Microsoft has taken. We see Microsoft as partners who empower us to be successful, and we don’t have to worry that someday they’d compete with us.”