Cloud software and data analytics company Axtria, which helps life sciences-based businesses bring therapeutics to the market faster, looks to increase its headcount at its newly launched Bengaluru office to 1,500 by the end of this year, a senior executive told.

"Today, we have over 2,500 employees across all locations," Jaswinder Chadha, President & CEO, Axtria said. "The current strength of the Bengaluru office is 200 who were hired during the pandemic. We are planning to expand the headcount in the Bangalore office to 1,500 by the end of the year. And 75% of employees are based in India."

He said the team in India does both product development and data analytics. India is one of the largest talent pools that is available and Chadha said this was the reason why Axtria was expanding its footprint in India. In terms of hiring talent, Chadha said that apart from attracting top talent from premier institutions, the company has also been proactive when it comes to perks.

"One of the things that we have seen, especially since May of 2021, is that because of the dislocation in the market in terms of demand and supply, the cost, the salaries have been shooting up with lateral talent," he said. "We have been very proactive in terms of adjusting our compensation with the people, providing people not just the cash, but also long term reward in terms of stocks in the company, which actually reward long term behaviour for attracting lateral talent."

Chadha said that with the new wave of innovation in biopharmaceutical products, there's a significant market developing in India which is traditionally dominated by generic products.

"If you look at the global share of branded products in India, it is growing very rapidly because there's more wealth creation that happens in India and affordability goes up," he said. "Unfortunately, India today lags behind some of the other markets like those in the Western world like the US, Western Europe, and even China. But the good news here is that India is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world from our addressable market perspective."

Chadha said that even with their solutions, Axtria works with a lot of companies in India, some of which are Indian companies and others that are global companies who operate in India, and that India is one of the top 10 markets for most of these biopharmaceutical companies and while it is relatively small today, it is fast growing.