There is a an interesting battle for supremacy being fought in the Southeast Asian market, between two super apps, Grab and Go-Jek. The companies offer everything from ride hailing, to groceries, to financial services. Super apps, or apps that bundle various services into one platform, have also gained a lot of investor attention as they offer a way to collect massive amounts of data on customer behaviour by monopolising users’ time and provide a new way to engage with them.

However, will there be more super apps in India and other parts of the world in the future? It is definitely a model that a lot of new-age companies are gravitating to. Hans Tung, managing partner of venture capital firm GGV Capital, says there won’t be too many but a handful of such apps in every country and region.

He spoke to Fortune India about super apps and the Indian startup scene, on the sidelines of a summit organised by TiE Delhi-NCR in Gurugram. Edited excerpts:

You spoke about super apps in your presentation. Tell us more about it. Do you see super apps in India?

In China, WeChat and Meituan are good examples of super apps. In the U.S., Uber is becoming a super app. By super apps we mean an app that does more than one function, has multiple functions, all kind of related, so that they all can help to take a bigger share of the wallet from the consumers. Meituan is a super app because it offers ticketing, it offers flight sharing, it offers food delivery, it also offers B2B services: SAAS [software as a service] solutions for restaurants to use, manage their work processes. So when an app does several things well, it becomes a super app. Uber is a super app with bike-sharing, scooter sharing, and at the same time takeout, and now they have a rewards programme. So it makes it easy for consumers to use Uber for various needs.

We think that over time a company like Swiggy will end up being a super app in India. I don't think there will be many super apps but there will definitely be a handful in each country, in each region. That will be very meaningful and material, that the users will end up spending a disproportionate amount of their time on the wallet on super apps.

Talking of the startup scenario in India, what are the next set of technologies and the kind of startups that you see emerging in the country?

We are still learning about the Indian market. A lot of the apps are not just copies from overseas. Over time, small founders can come up with apps or solutions to address the needs of the local market. In China, we see a lot of apps that deal with demand aggregation. China has a lot of communities and high-rises. So you might have say a community of 10,000 people living in close proximity, so having an app that lets you purchase by building or by community makes it easy to (aggregate) demand and make delivery more efficient. We are also seeing things happening on the supply side; that’s just intermediation, that makes it easier for whoever produces the goods, the food, to get to the user through only one layer of marketplace, or of merchants, bypassing multiple layers of distribution. Whenever there is enough smartphone penetration, more people are on the cloud, more data on the cloud, it makes it easier for demand aggregation, supply chain disintermediation to happen much quicker.

Meituan

‘There won’t be many, but handful of super apps in each region’