By Aayush Puri

For decades, the locus of global SaaS innovation has been California. From the leafy suburbs of Palo Alto to the cloud campuses of San Francisco, the Bay Area has churned out unicorns, set pricing benchmarks, and coded the backbone of the modern enterprise. But as we approach the end of this cloud-native decade, a quiet tectonic shift is underway. India, long seen as the back office of tech, is emerging as the front-runner for the next wave of SaaS infrastructure.

And this time, it’s not about cost arbitrage.

India now produces over 1.5 million engineering graduates annually, according to the All India Council for Technical Education. More critically, the nature of this talent has evolved. No longer just coders-for-hire, India’s SaaS engineers are product-native, API-obsessed, and user-centric. Companies like Postman, Zoho, and Freshworks have proven that India can build not just apps, but platforms.

The cost advantage still exists, building an engineering team in Bengaluru is 70% cheaper than in San Francisco, but the value story has shifted to capability. India is no longer just executing specs; it’s architecting global frameworks.

One of the most overlooked drivers of SaaS infrastructure is data sovereignty. With the EU, India, and several emerging markets pushing for data localization laws, the hub-and-spoke model centered around U.S. cloud data centers is becoming untenable.

India is uniquely positioned here. The upcoming Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP), while modeled after GDPR, offers a more interoperable sandbox for data compliance tooling. Indian SaaS infra startups are now building modular, jurisdiction-sensitive architectures that can be deployed globally. Companies like Druva (data protection) and Hasura (graphQL APIs) are at the vanguard of this.

What makes India’s SaaS founders unique is their training in constraints. They build for diversity, linguistic, infrastructural, regulatory, from day one. A CRM system that can handle 9 Indian languages and intermittent power isn’t just ready for Bharat; it’s resilient enough for Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

This has inverted the traditional go-to-market model. Indian SaaS infra is global by default, not design. They test at scale (India’s digital users surpassed 900 million in 2024), iterate fast, and deploy globally. According to Bain & Company, over 80% of Indian SaaS revenue is already coming from outside India.

Developer-Led Growth + Community-Led Scaling

India’s Gen Z tech community is deeply embedded in open-source ecosystems. Platforms like GitHub India, with over 13 million developers, are not just pushing code but building plugins, forks, and integrations that make Indian infra tools sticky.

This developer-first motion has become India’s SaaS export advantage. Products like Supabase alternatives, Indian observability stacks, and data lake orchestration tools are gaining traction in U.S. and EU developer forums without a dollar spent on outbound marketing.

In 2023, Indian SaaS startups raised over $5.1 billion, with increasing participation from global growth funds like Bessemer, Tiger Global, and Lightspeed. But more important is the maturity of Indian capital. Funds like Peak XV, Stellaris, and Together Fund are building thesis-driven SaaS portfolios with deep infra bets.

Add to this the SaaS-specific accelerators (Upekkha, xto10x), and India now offers a full-stack ecosystem for SaaS infra: from seed to Series D.

Where Silicon Valley SaaS focused on horizontal scalability and ARR metrics, Indian SaaS infra is reimagining the stack:

Compliance as Code: Tools that integrate data privacy workflows directly into CI/CD.

Distributed DevSecOps: Architectures optimized for edge cases and edge computing.

Financial SaaS Infra: API-led credit bureaus, alt-credit scoring, and micro-payments infra.

As the U.S. grapples with inflated burn multiples, an exhausted talent market, and increasing regulatory scrutiny, India offers a fresh canvas. Not just for cheaper execution, but for smarter innovation.

If the last decade of SaaS belonged to California, the next decade will be co-authored by Koramangala and Hyderabad. India is not just building SaaS. It is becoming the infrastructure layer of the global digital economy. 

The author is Head of Anarock. (Views expressed here are author’s own and necessarily those of financialexpress.com )