Tatas allow freedom to experiment and fail: Curefit founder Mukesh Bansal

Tata Digital was not different from any large scale digital startup in India which allows entrepreneurs autonomy and the courage to experiment and fail, Mukesh Bansal, president of Tata Digital and founder of Curefit said at an event.

"We have team members of the Tata Group who understand (how to) scale and build profitable business. Then there are a number of people like me who have been part of the digital ecosystem. It is a faily independent set up. The way our place is set up, our culture is not that different from what you find in any large scale digital startup," he said in a conversation with Rajan Anandan, managing director of Sequoia at Nasscom's Leadership Summit.

"There is a lot of autonomy, independence, freedom to experiment and fail. and that way I feel right at home," he added.

Bansal joined Tata Digital in an executive role as a president soon after the wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons invested $75 million in Curefit last year.

Before setting up Curefit, he founded Myntra - which he later sold to Flipkart in 2014.

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CureFit is, notably, among India’s leading online fitness platforms. Tata Group investment into Curefit, marked the conglomerate's huge ambitions for the e-commerce space which is currently dominated by Amazon, Walmart-owned Flipkart, with Reliance Industries also expanding aggressively through JioMart.

The group is building a super app under Tata Digital, with plans to add categories such as groceries, health, education, entertainment, electronics, fashion, travel, beauty and lifestyle. It also plans to leverage the strength of group companies such as Titan, Voltas, Trent, Tata Consumer Products, Tata Motors, Vistara, Tata AIG, Tata Capital and Taj Hotels, offering users an array of services in one app.

Last week, it also announced the extension of N Chandrasekaran as its chairman in a move which is expected to turbocharge its digital ambitions.

While Bansal did not divulge much about the super app, he said that the attempt of Tata Digital will be to bring all the assets together under a single platform.

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The group is soon expected to launch its Neu super app, a service where users can order medicines, buy clothes, and where reward points from disparate Tata services- from Starbucks Coffee to Vistara Airlines- can be used interoperably.

Talking at the event, Bansal also said that besides healthcare he was optimistic about sectors such as D2C and electric vehicles. However he said that India still had a small number of people who were accounting for most of the purchases online.

"500 million users are part of digital life but they are mostly consuming content at a very very cheap bandwidth. They are not buying anything beyond that," he said.

"This is the key realisation despite India being a large country. We have some ways to go to truly unlock the digital potential which also in some ways is quite exciting. The total size of online product and service commerce is $75 billion today but in the coming decade it will go to $500 billion. We have six time market creation ahead of us," he added.

According to Bansal the key to crack the next set of consumers in India will be by catering to price points that's relevant for them -- possibly in the range of Rs 200-300. He also applauded Meesho and Flipkart for already trying to do it sucessfully.