Webchutney founder Sidharth Rao launches a new martech venture, Punt
- ByStartupStory | September 2, 2022
Sidharth Rao, who stepped down as group CEO of dentsuMB India in May of this year, has partnered with his close confidant and serial entrepreneur Madhu Sudan to form Punt Partners, a new business in the marketing technology (MarTech) industry. The two founders believe that there is a $100 billion opportunity in the MarTech space that is not being properly addressed at this time — an industry whose incumbents are either IT services firms, which are hampered by a lack of complete marketing context, or traditional advertising networks, which are currently catching up through inorganic buyout strategies.
Rao co-founded Webchutney, one of India’s earliest and most successful digital companies, in 1999, which was later acquired by Japanese multinational media network Dentsu in 2013. While he continued to lead Webchutney, he was appointed as the head of the India unit of dentsuMB, the company’s reorganized worldwide creative network, in 2021. “Back in 1999, I saw the need for brands to migrate to digital, perhaps a little too early, and chose to launch one of India’s first digital agencies. “Today, I have a constant sense of déjà vu as I watch agencies fail to recognize the urgency with which they must construct their marketing technology services stack,” Rao stated.
“The end of an era has arrived when digital advertising surpasses TV spending globally. However, it is also the start of a complicated and ever-changing one, with the mar-tech landscape gaining importance. Given the complexity that companies face, I believe we’re about to see a massive wave of large-scale MarTech service providers emerge from India. and we want to get a head start with Punt.” The company’s headquarters and first delivery center will be in Bengaluru, with key members of the founding team based in both Delhi and Mumbai. Over the next three months, they will form crucial collaborations with MarTech players and hire a 30-person staff.
“Marketers are dealing with a growing number of complicated goods in their sales and marketing stacks to boost acquisition and retention. The majority of products are point solutions that address analytics, attribution, communication, intelligence, automation, enablement, and engagement. “Sudan, another co-founder, was added. “Quite often, marketers do not have the abilities necessary to fully utilize these items or to ensure that they perform properly with all of the other products they use.” This creates a two-pronged problem: bad results for the advertiser and churn for the product provider. “Punt will address this issue by developing specialized capabilities to ensure that companies can discover and apply the proper products while driving results with the mar-tech stack they have chosen.”
Much like the ITES wave created massive opportunities for India and saw the emergence of large technology services firms in the 1980s and 1990s, the two co-founders believe that the internet industry is on the verge of a new era—an era where technology is penetrating deep into marketing teams and creating a need for specialist skills to succeed. The company intends to be a specialist partner, assisting clients with their sales and marketing stacks with both new-age SaaS partners and large cloud platforms such as Google, Adobe, and Salesforce.
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