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 the Microsoft Accelerator program (now Microsoft for Startups) and by running on Microsoft Azure from day one. Malviya says that the day they were valued at a billion dollars, they just had 17 engineers. That’s the kind of productivity improvement that Microsoft Azure has offered, he says. 

Talking about their decision to get into B2B commerce, Amod says that they laid down three criteria for them to decide what they’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, he says. 

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