Ahmedabad now has over 500 pickleball courts. India has roughly 2,500. The United States has north of 50,000. For Siddhant, that gap is not a sporting statistic. It is the entire business.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The sport that makes the economics work

Pickleball started in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington, invented by two friends with bored families and a backyard. For decades it was dismissed as a sport for older people. Then, sometime in the 2010s, it stopped being that.

It is played on a court the size of a badminton court. The paddle is flat and solid, slightly bigger than a table-tennis bat. The ball is plastic with holes, which limits bounce considerably compared to tennis. The serve must be underhand. Both sides must let the ball bounce before volleying in the opening exchange. A seven-foot “kitchen” zone near the net forces short, tactical play rather than power.

The things that make pickleball very age-agnostic and very easy to pick up are the two-bounce rule and the kitchen. Because of these, the sport becomes easy to play for anyone.

A 10-year-old and an 85-year-old can rally on the same court. Games take 45 minutes. You need four people. That accessibility is the commercial foundation of everything Siddhant is building.

The yield argument

The central insight Siddhant returns to is yield per square foot. A standard tennis court footprint can fit four pickleball courts. Four times the players, four times the bookings, on the same piece of land.

₹5–7L

Construction cost per court

₹9–10L

Gross monthly revenue, 4-court facility

8–10 months

Typical break-even period

All figures stated by Siddhant Jatia in the Founder Thesis podcast.

After rent, electricity, and manpower, a well-run four-court facility nets roughly ₹3 to ₹3.5 lakh a month. The total build is around ₹20 lakh. Divide one by the other and you have an 8-to-10-month payback. That is not a sports investment. It is a real estate monetisation strategy.

A lot of people look at this like a lottery ticket. But unless certain fundamentals are in place, the right location, the right income group nearby, the right construction standards, the end product isn’t great, and it takes a toll on the player experience.

The locations being converted are varied: hotel podiums, school grounds open for pay-and-play after hours, rooftops, and in one detail Siddhant mentions without much ceremony, legally disputed land parcels where owners can generate returns while proceedings continue. The infrastructure is modular. The payback does not wait.

When I suggested this sounded a lot like the co-working industry, Siddhant did not pause. “100%,” he said. “You take underutilised real estate, unitise it, earn more per square foot, and layer services on top.”

What Picklebay is actually building

Siddhant launched Picklebay in May 2025, bootstrapped from his own capital after seven months of development. The founding frustration was personal. He had become a regular player and found the entire ecosystem running on sprawling WhatsApp groups, unverified court listings, and events with no digital infrastructure.

The entire pickleball community was only on WhatsApp. People were finding courts, finding players. I saw a real business here. I wanted to go vertically down, not multi-sport, and create a tech stack that solves the pain points I personally faced as a player first.

Picklebay now lists 650 to 700 courts across seven cities. The platform physically verifies each facility, flagging courts that fall short of regulation dimensions. That verification is not a feature. It is the product. There is an infrastructure pipeline of 750 courts from operators seeking construction consultancy, and Siddhant says he is engaging at least 10,000 players across the company’s own WhatsApp communities.

On the software side, Picklebay has built a Tournament Management System (TMS) that digitises the entire event lifecycle, already deployed in the Picklebay India Tournament Series 2025. A Venue Management System (VMS) is in pilot ahead of a mid-2026 rollout, giving venue owners dynamic pricing tools and occupancy analytics. Siddhant describes the logic simply: “It’s like an airline managing inventory. You’re optimising yield end of the day.”

The missing layer he is building toward is larger. In hospitality, channel management software gives a hotel owner one interface to update rates across all booking platforms simultaneously. In sports, no such layer exists. Every aggregator, Huddle, District by Zomato, Playo, gives operators a separate backend. Siddhant wants to build the system above all of them.

The longer logic follows from there. Once the tech stack is proven for pickleball, you launch PaddleBay for padel, ShuttleBay for badminton. Vertical depth first, horizontal replication second.

Why this moment matters

In April 2025, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports officially recognised the Indian Pickleball Association as the sport’s National Sports Federation. The Delhi High Court upheld that status in February 2026. With NSF recognition, the IPA can now sanction leagues, standardise coaching certifications, and build toward Olympic inclusion, which the global pickleball community is targeting for 2032 or 2036. India has submitted a letter of intent to host the 2036 Summer Olympics in Ahmedabad. The alignment is not accidental.

Siddhant’s cultural argument for the sport is worth taking seriously.

Pickleball has the potential to become the new gully cricket of urban India. When we were growing up, you’d call your friends, play a quick game in the evening, spend an hour and a half. You didn’t need anything. That’s what gully cricket was. Pickleball is that, but organised and built for the city.

Gully cricket has largely disappeared from urban India. Space is gone, scheduling is hard, and you cannot get eleven people to commit. Pickleball needs four. It costs roughly ₹250 a head split across a booking. It requires no prior athletic ability and no serious fitness. Siddhant thinks it can become the second most-played sport in India by participation, not spectatorship, not leagues. Just by the number of people actually playing.

He has been building for a year. The sport is still in its early urban phase, still played primarily by upper-middle-class India. The infrastructure, the software, the governing body, the Olympic conversation, and the wellness shift among younger generations are all moving in the same direction. Siddhant’s bet is simply that he built the rails before the train arrived.

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Industry’s Original Sin, and the 85% Number Nobody Talks About

The story of Indian wealth management, as Manu tells it, is a story of structural conflict dressed up as service. In the decade from 2000 to 2010, foreign banks built the relationship manager model in India. High-trust, low-transparency, and enormously profitable. Then 2008 happened, and clients began discovering the gap between what they’d been promised and what they actually owned.

The damage that followed was concentrated in the 2012 to 2018 cycle, when real estate AIFs promising 17% to 20% returns proliferated. Almost two-thirds of them failed to perform anywhere close to those promises. Some didn’t return principal. Family offices were born not from aspiration but from broken trust.

But the flaw Manu spent 20 years watching accumulate goes deeper. Wealth distributors who want to scale inevitably pivot to manufacturing their own financial products. Once you manufacture the product, you can never objectively advise a client to exit an underperforming fund you created. The conflict is architectural, not accidental.

Centricity’s founding decision was to never manufacture. Manu built an open platform working with 80 to 85 alternate asset managers, eight to ten product options in every investment category, no proprietary product to protect.

That decision led directly to the number that defines his entire thesis.

Nearly 80 to 85% of PMSs and AIFs across genres actually underperform the index, over 15 years of data. Only the top 10 to 15% beat it. That’s the hard reality. One has to be very cautious.

The industry sells alpha, the promise of beating the market through superior fund manager skill. Manu’s platform has processed lakh-crore worth of transaction data, and the data contradicts that premise, consistently. His practical conclusion: a wealth manager’s job is not to find the next star fund. It is to build a portfolio that stays above the median and keep the client from panic-selling during a 30% correction.

Lazy investors actually make money. Every time you do a transaction, buy and sell and trade, how much money do you actually make? You don’t.

Two Platforms, One Bet

Centricity runs two platforms on 80% shared infrastructure.

One Digital is the B2B2C engine, built for India’s 17,000+ independent financial advisors and mutual fund distributors. These are micro-entrepreneurs with strong local client relationships in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, but historically limited to mutual fund distribution. Manu gives them institutional-grade access to PMS, AIFs, unlisted equities, bonds, and pre-IPO investments, along with CRM tools, portfolio reporting, and ongoing training. Training, he says, accounts for 40% of the platform’s proposition.

Full plug-and-play. Like a co-working space. You take your laptop, go and sit, everything is available.

Invictus is the B2C engine, targeting “First Families,” portfolios of Rs 100 Crore or more. Each private banker manages a maximum of 20 families, a hard cap, not a soft guideline. The reasoning is practical: if markets are down 2% and you have 40 clients to call before the session closes, you cannot do it well. Manu’s private banking team, 30 senior bankers hired in the second half of 2025, operates at that boutique ratio across Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru.

The metrics behind the business are worth pausing on. Centricity reached operational break-even in February 2024, just 11 months after commencing formal operations in April 2023. AUM has moved from approximately Rs 4,500 Crore in FY24 to approximately Rs 10,000 Crore ($1.2 billion) in FY25, with a target of Rs 18,000 to 20,000 Crore in FY26. Revenue went from Rs 20 Crore in FY24 to a projected Rs 60 to 100 Crore in FY25, targeting Rs 175 to 200 Crore in FY26. The monthly SIP and STP recurring book has crossed Rs 50 Crore per month, and 60% of total AUM is classified as Annual Recurring Revenue, the slow compounding kind that survives market downturns.

In September 2024, Lightspeed India Partners led a $20 million Seed round at a $125 million valuation, a sixfold jump from Centricity’s $20 million pre-seed valuation of 2022. Co-investors included the MS Dhoni Family Office, Burman Family Office, Paramark VC, NB Ventures, and MMG Group. Manu’s three-year targets: 50,000 to 60,000 distributors on One Digital, up from 17,000+ today, and 1,200 to 1,500 First Families on Invictus, up from 135 to 150 currently.

The Philosophy That Holds It Together

What distinguishes Manu from most founders building in financial services is where he places the emphasis. Not on growth, not on scale, but on what he can and cannot control.

Markets are not controllable. Geopolitical is not controllable. Asset allocation and risk, that I can control. If I’m not doing my basic core job of what is in my control, believe me, I’m just not doing the job.

This applies to hiring. Manu screens out high-revenue bankers with a transactional mindset and hires for longevity and client engagement. His CTO, Kamal Kishore, comes from Tata Digital’s AI engineering practice, brought in specifically to embed machine learning into portfolio risk visualization. His compliance head is expected to be “drop dead serious.” His finance head is expected to push back on every expense.

The bet Manu is placing is long-dated: that an industry built on opacity, product pushing, and one-time commissions will lose share over time to one built on ARR, transparency, and compounding client relationships. It does not pay off in a quarter. It pays off the way good portfolios do.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

Manu J. Nair, co-founder and CEO of the Ethereal Exploration Guild (EtherealX), has a precise word for that situation. He does not call it a monopoly.

What we have today is not market dominance. It is market dependence. That is not how we envision the future of space.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is not blocking anyone. It is simply too busy. With the Starlink constellation consuming much of its own launch cadence, every other satellite operator is essentially a guest on someone else’s vehicle, booking whatever slots remain, often designing their product around a bottleneck rather than solving it.

EtherealX, incorporated in May 2022, was built to remove that bottleneck. Their vehicle, the Razor Crest Mk-1, is a 71-meter fully reusable medium-lift rocket, roughly the height of a 20-story building, capable of carrying up to 24.8 tonnes to low Earth orbit in expendable configuration and 8 tonnes when both stages are recovered. No other company in the medium-lift category is attempting full, two-stage reusability.

The market appears to agree that this matters. Manu and the team closed a $20.5 million Series A in December 2025, co-led by TDK Ventures and BIG Capital with participation from Accel and Prosus, oversubscribed from an initial $15 million target. Post-money valuation: $80.5 million, a 5.5x jump. Total capital raised across four rounds stands at $26.3 million. More telling is the $130 million in signed launch contracts secured from six international customers, including Japan’s SpaceBD, Taiwan’s Space Agency, and SABR, a European government launch aggregator, all before the rocket has flown once.

Those customers are not buying a rocket. They are buying insurance against a world where one country controls access to orbit.

The Physics Trick at the Heart of the Business

The reason EtherealX’s economics can work where others have struggled comes down to one engineering decision: what to do with the upper stage.

On a standard Falcon 9 flight, the upper stage costs roughly $12.5 to $15 million to manufacture and is expended after delivering its payload, burning up in the atmosphere. That figure represents 30 to 35% of total vehicle cost per flight. Falcon 9’s partial reusability, where only the booster returns, set a new industry standard. But it did not solve the upper stage problem.

Every company building a reusable upper stage treats re-entry heat as the enemy, relying on heavy ablative shielding or fragile ceramic tiles to survive it. Manu’s team asked a different question entirely.

Why fight the re-entry heat when we can utilize it? The damage is also advantageous, until a point where it is not. Then you replace. It basically follows a bell curve, just like an afterburner on a jet.

The result is the Full Flow Segregated Cooling Cycle (FFSCC), a proprietary engine feed cycle that routes re-entry plasma heat through the system to drive the engine turbines, executing a propulsive braking burn on the way down. Every kilogram of heavy shielding eliminated becomes a kilogram of revenue-generating payload. Manu claims this is the first new rocket engine feed cycle developed in six decades of rocketry, a claim that is pending IP protection.

The only globally comparable effort is Stoke Space in the US, which recently crossed $1 billion in total funding and is working toward upper-stage recovery in the small-lift category. Manu is the only founder pursuing this in the medium-lift segment.

From a Dinner Table to 150 Acres in Andhra Pradesh

Manu’s path here was not a straight line. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he was one of 12 candidates selected globally for Project PoSSUM, a NASA-aided scientist-astronaut program. He went on to work at ISRO’s Human Spaceflight Centre, where he met co-founder Shubhayu Sardar, a 10-year ISRO veteran. At Manastu Space in Mumbai, he met co-founder Prashant Sharma, who led propulsion. The company started, as Manu tells it, over a dinner conversation and money borrowed from his father.

Three years on, the infrastructure is real. BASE-001 in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, is India’s highest pressure-rated privately built rocket engine test facility, constructed from scratch because no adequate public infrastructure existed. BASE-002, on a 150-acre parcel in Space City, Andhra Pradesh, acquired with state government support, will handle integrated manufacturing, assembly, and stage-level testing for the full vehicle, located within an hour of the launch pad.

The Technology Demonstrator Vehicle orbital launch is targeted for 2026 to 2027. Manu has been deliberate about skipping suborbital test flights: the FFSCC re-entry profile only produces meaningful data at actual orbital velocities, around 7.8 kilometers per second. Anything less does not replicate the thermal conditions the system is designed for.

The recognitions have followed the milestones. In 2025, Manu and Prashant were named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in the Industry, Manufacturing and Energy category. EtherealX received the Aegis Graham Bell Award from India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, was listed among Forbes India’s Select 200, and became the first startup outside the US and Europe invited to Beyond Gravity’s Launchpad Program.

On pricing, Manu’s target starts at $350 per kilogram, against an industry average of $5,000 to $6,000 today. A fleet of two to three vehicles, each targeting a 72 to 96-hour turnaround between flights, is how he plans to get there. His advice to the deep tech founders watching all of this is characteristically direct.

Not every great idea is a money-making idea. And not every money-making idea is a great idea. Building a launcher company is different from building a venture-backed, commercially scalable launcher company. People do not realize those are two different things.

The rocket does not exist yet. The land does. The contracts do. The test campaigns begin this year.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

India’s healthcare infrastructure has a design problem hiding inside a geography problem. While 70% of the population lives in rural areas, close to 65% of healthcare infrastructure is concentrated in cities. The government’s five-tier system was built to bridge this, but it runs without enough doctors, because, as Priyadarshi Mohapatra explains plainly, market forces are more powerful than policy mandates.

Only 1% of people get through government college PG seats. The rest take on huge debt through private institutions. When a doctor is reeling under a debt trap, how do you expect them to extend empathy to others?

This structural diagnosis is what Priyadarshi built CureBay around. But the spark was more personal. During the COVID-19 lockdown, Priyadarshi, formerly Country General Manager at Microsoft and a Google Cloud executive, needed a teleconsultation for his wife. The private hospital asked for his Skype ID.

I used to head Microsoft’s consumer business. Skype was a product of mine. Who is using Skype in today’s day and age?

He started working on his thesis the next day. CureBay was founded in 2021.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The model, and the product nobody believed

CureBay operates 200+ eClinics across Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand, each running on a monthly opex of ₹35,000 to ₹55,000, covering rent and the salaries of two certified healthcare workers, a nurse-phlebotomist and a pharmacist. The patient experience is deliberately designed to feel like an urban polyclinic: vitals first, clinical note, then a doctor, who is remote 80% of the time. A digital stethoscope connects the nurse’s hands with the doctor’s eyes and ears on an integrated platform. Prescriptions are digital. Diagnostics follow a Pareto logic: a point-of-care machine handles the 20% of tests that cover 70% of rural requirements. For the rest, blood is drawn, centrifuged on-site, cold-chained to partner labs, and the report arrives on WhatsApp.

Above this sits a network of 1,500+ Swasthya Mitras, retired teachers and NGO workers who carry a gig app into village households, booking consultations and running AI-powered screenings before anyone walks into a clinic. For tertiary referrals, a CureBay concierge accompanies the patient to a partner hospital and handles the admission paperwork, solving the problem that causes most rural patients to give up after a first wasted trip.

Then there is Kavach. For ₹499, members receive unlimited GP consultations, limited specialist consults, ₹1,000 in Cure Coins redeemable against medicines and diagnostics, ₹500 per day hospitalization cash cover, and access to an interest-free emergency loan. Priyadarshi’s answer to the “this can’t work” question is the most revealing thing he says in the entire interview.

This is designed on the same principles as insurance. You take an assumption of utilization, build in checks so there is no misuse, and price it so you’re still in the money. A consultation is free, but you still need a doctor’s prescription to get the medicine. That’s the right thing in healthcare anyway.

The hospitalization cover is backed by a partner insurer. The interest-free emergency loan is subsidized using hospital referral fees. But the real insight Priyadarshi makes is simpler: the product only works because the clinic already exists. Insurance companies have more capital but cannot fulfill a rural healthcare promise at a patient’s doorstep. CureBay can.

110,000+

Active Kavach members

60%+

Kavach renewal rate (first cohort)

₹128.4 Cr

ARR, late 2024

18-20 mo

Clinic breakeven

First operational circles in Balasore and Puri (Odisha) are already profitable at the cluster level.

The business case, and what the money signals

CureBay has raised approximately $37 million across five rounds. The Series B in May 2025, $21 million led by Bertelsmann India Investments with British International Investment (a UK sovereign fund) and Elevar Equity, puts the post-raise valuation at roughly $75 million. There is no unicorn status to announce. What matters more is what the investor profile signals: a sovereign fund and a global institutional investor do not back rural India plays out of charity. They back them when the unit economics hold.

Priyadarshi’s answer when asked about the pitch is worth quoting directly.

There is no two different kinds of pitch. Rural India is a billion-people problem. We are solving it commercially. You need non-trivial money to solve non-trivial problems, and to get that money, you have to show people they will make money.

CureBay’s 1.4 million patient profiles, collected through 200 clinics staffed by trained workers rather than scraped synthetically, have also produced a second asset that Priyadarshi did not set out to build. Six to seven AI models trained on real clinical data, a dermatology screening tool, a dental screening app deployed through Swasthya Mitras who do not even know they are running an AI product, and a fully integrated care platform that simply did not exist before CureBay had to build one for itself. Inbound conversations are now happening around licensing that platform to other physical networks.

You should see some of my Swasthya Mitras. They don’t know it’s an AI product. They think they’re just taking images and uploading. It’s AI giving their neighbor a report instantly.

Asked what stops a well-funded competitor from copying the model, Priyadarshi says he would welcome them and share every lesson he has learned. There are 100 CureBays required to solve this for a billion people. The model he has built in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand is coming next to Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and eastern Uttar Pradesh. He will have scratched only the surface. The story of CureBay is, in that sense, not about one company. It is about whether India finally figures out how to move the doctor to the patient rather than the other way around. Priyadarshi’s bet is that a nurse, a screen, and a ₹499 membership card might be enough to start.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

Ten years later, 3one4 Capital has backed 5 of India’s 125 unicorns, seen its first fund return nearly 6x, and is deploying a fourth fund of $225 million. Pranav Pai, the firm’s founding partner, unpacks on what Indian venture capital gets wrong, and what comes next.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Bet Nobody Else Was Making

Pranav’s founding thesis in 2016 rested on three minority views. First, that UPI and Jio would enable technology to solve population-scale problems across India, not just for affluent urban users. Second, that Indian VC was drowning in “outside-in” investing, funding clones of American ideas: 160 Flipkart copies, 190 Swiggy/Zomato copies, 48 Ola copies. Third, that a fund run by operators, not finance professionals, would make better judgments about what India actually needed.

Our best investments are all two guys on a laptop when they come to us. That’s how early we go, and we hope we can stay invested all the way to IPO.

The firm has stayed deliberately sub-$250 million across all funds. The math is deliberate: of 200,000 startups registered in India over 15 years, only 56 have IPO’d. The number of VC firms with more than one winner from that pool is vanishingly small. A $500M fund needs $2B back. That requires 5-6 portfolio companies to IPO between $4B and $7B. The base rates, Pranav argues, do not support that at scale yet. So 3one4 targets $2B-$5B IPOs, the mid-to-large compounders, not the moonshots.

Two Unicorns From One Fund - Neither Looked Safe

Fund I produced Licious and Darwinbox. In 2016, buying meat in India meant a black plastic bag, no traceability, no cold chain. Vivek, one of Licious’s co-founders, had worked at another VC fund before starting the company. He knew every investor in the ecosystem. He still got rejected everywhere. 3one4 had done grassroots research on India’s grocery baskets. They understood the market and said yes.

What followed was not just a good investment thesis - it was a case study in founder execution. Licious ran a weekly lottery letting customers print their face on chicken boxes. Stigma became identity. Early-neighbourhood retention hit 93-94%, almost unheard of for a weekly perishable basket. India’s meat market has since grown from $20 billion in 2016 to over $55 billion today. Licious, now a unicorn, posted INR 795 crore in revenue in FY25, up 16%, with losses down 45%.

Imagine going from black-packet stigma to customers fighting a lottery to put their face on your box. That is a 180-degree inversion. That is how founders defy what the market thinks is possible.

Darwinbox was the enterprise version of the same contrarian logic. The pitch: displace Oracle, SAP and Workday for Asian enterprises. Pranav and co-founder Anurag had sold HR software to HP, EMC and VMware as operators. They had seen from the inside how broken the incumbents were: six months to go live, six months to decommission, no mobile experience. Darwinbox is now a unicorn, and in 2025 secured a fresh $40 million from Canada’s OTPP to fuel AI development and North American expansion.

Where Pranav Comes From - and Why It Matters

Pranav’s family traces its roots to Goa, through generations shaped by the Portuguese era. His grandfather was an orphan. His father was the first to earn steady money. The lesson absorbed was specific: nothing is guaranteed, and the cost of losing is not abstract. He grew up in Bangalore competing with what he calls the “shit generation” of 2000-2010, a cohort who faced reservation policy upheaval, the global financial crisis and 26/11. Most of the people he competed hardest against left India and never came back.

To compete with 25 million kids every year, through every exam and contest - everything is a hunger game. That is not a safe environment. And the strongest thing I’ve seen in a founder is the ability to harness that for the right outcome.

He stayed. He got into Stanford for electrical engineering (2011-2013), arrived just as the Facebook IPO happened, Peter Thiel was running his Zero to One course, and a16z was becoming a household name. He joined a Vertec SaaS startup in L&D as employee number three, saw it acquired at roughly 10x revenue, exercised his ESOPs and came back to Bangalore in early 2016. He decided not to become a founder (”a founder does anything but build”) and instead looked at the capital itself as the problem worth solving.

What the Next 10 Years Actually Look Like

The macro context matters here. In early 2026, what the industry is calling the “SaaSpocalypse” is playing out: agentic AI is compressing per-seat SaaS pricing, Indian IT stocks shed INR 2 lakh crore in weeks. Pranav’s thesis for the next decade is built around three pillars. First, what he frames as “Service as Software” - companies positioned as the destination, not just the tool. Not software that helps lawyers work faster, but a company that becomes a better law firm. 3one4 has backed Nyayanidhi, a Bengaluru startup building India’s litigation operating system, seeded at $2 million.

Second, manufacturing and deep tech. 3one4 has invested in Agnit Semiconductors, focused on gallium nitride technology, and is actively pursuing what Pranav calls the “fabless” model applied beyond chips - specialty chemicals, biomanufacturing, pharma - where Indian startups hold the IP and contract manufacturing to globally compliant plants. Third, technological sovereignty. Every country is now scrambling to reduce dependency on others; India is no exception, and the government is slowly getting out of the way.

If you work backwards from the question of what India’s technological sovereignty depends on, there are a lot of VC-fundable opportunities there. Some are just getting started. It is going to be a big theme for the next 10 years.

The Only Score That Matters

Near the end of the conversation, Pranav cuts through two hours of nuanced thinking with a single standard:

To judge me, you look at: has he made money? Has he scored the goals? Has he won the games? And we have.

The 3one4 Summit 2026 marks the firm’s 10-year milestone. For a fund built by an operator with no finance pedigree, betting on India before it was fashionable, that scoreboard is hard to argue with.

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

Simran Mulchandani stood at the front of that classroom in 2019, a man who had once traded European currencies before the Euro existed, and felt something shift. “I’m thinking to myself, damn, these kids are screwed by a birth lottery,” he told me on the Founder Thesis podcast. “This was literally the result of a birth lottery.”

That evening, he sat down with his colleague Karishma and made a list of everything they hated about the world. They had no idea what they would build. But they knew they had to build something.

Watch the full conversation with Simran Mulchandani here.

From Trading Floors to Nightclub Floors

To understand how Simran arrived at that classroom, you need to understand the two lives he lived before it.

After graduating from Brown University with a computer science degree, he joined J.P. Morgan in New York during the pre-Y2K, pre-Euro era when the European trading desk handled ten separate currencies. His boss sent him to Singapore right before the Asian currency crisis hit in 1997. “I’m sitting in New York watching volatility,” Simran recalled. “And that’s what you want as a trader, right? Volatility going through the roof in Singapore.” He was hooked. Three days after arriving, the global heads offered him a permanent role.

But something nagged at him. “Every year is a race,” he said. “It’s a race to bonuses.”

Then a childhood friend named Ashutosh Fatak showed up with an idea about changing Indian music. Independent artists and session musicians deserved a platform beyond Bollywood. Simran moved back to India with his wife and two children. They started Blue Frog.

Blue Frog became an icon. The entrance was designed like something from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a tiny door in a mill compound that opened into a cavernous, magical space. Forbes did a deep-dive on their fifth anniversary. Time Out Mumbai wrote that the city’s music scene now had two eras: before Blue Frog and after Blue Frog. The Independent UK named it one of the top ten music venues in the world, alongside the Sydney Opera House and Madison Square Garden.

We built an incredible brand, a brand that even 10 years after closing still has its cachet. From the outside, it must have looked amazing, but I can tell you it was really hard work.

Then came Delhi. And Pune. And Bangalore. They expanded too fast without understanding their new markets. “We went into Delhi to build for ourselves, unfortunately,” Simran admitted. The financial strain weighed down the entire company. In 2015, after ten years, he exited with his laptop, a pair of forgotten sneakers, and one person: Karishma, Blue Frog’s first employee, who would become his co-founder at Rangeet.

The Mountain and the Classroom

The next chapter began at 15,000 feet.

Simran and his family chose Mount Kinabalu in Borneo for his recovery. For most climbers, it’s manageable. For Simran, carrying ninety kilograms and the residue of running a nightclub for a decade, it was brutal. His daughter developed altitude sickness. His wife told him to keep going with their son Ishan. At 14,000 feet, under moonlight, Simran was stopping every twenty steps. He was ready to quit. Ishan, fifteen years old, refused to let him.

He said to me, ‘Come on, Dad, we’ve come this far. I’m not letting you give up.’ He was 15. He’s a cricket player. I support him. But he supported me that day, and I wouldn’t have made it to the top.

At the summit, Simran realized the peak wasn’t his destination. It was his launchpad.

After that classroom in Malad, he and Karishma began building workshops on confidence, creativity, communication. Three-hour sessions on gender, climate, mental health, societal inequity. Then they went to Bangladesh to meet BRAC, one of the largest NGOs in the world. BRAC took them to schools in rice fields and elite international schools in Dhaka. Then they delivered a verdict that changed everything.

“They told us one very simple thing that was blindingly obvious,” Simran recalled. “They said, ‘How important is this Rangeet thing to you? Because you will never scale as a three-hour workshop. Your schools don’t have time.’”

It was the Blue Frog lesson again. They had built for themselves, not for their customer. So they rebuilt. The SEEK curriculum, Social, Emotional, and Ecological Knowledge, emerged from that failure. And they made one decision that set them apart from every EdTech company of the previous decade: the app would be for teachers only. Children would never touch a screen.

No machine can ever teach you how to be a human being. So right from day one, Rangeet was built for teachers.

The Model That Shouldn’t Scale

Here is how a Rangeet classroom works.

The teacher has the app. It contains instructions, training videos, tutorials for every lesson. When the teacher needs to show something to students, they press a button. The content appears on the classroom’s smart TV. No WhatsApp notifications. No phone calls. Just the lesson. If there’s no smart TV, Rangeet prints resource books with only the child-facing content.

The unit economics are startling. Rangeet costs approximately ₹500 per child per year, just 1% of what India spends per child in the public school system. Training a teacher means reaching forty children. Training a master trainer means reaching hundreds of teachers. The entire model is built on the understanding that teachers are the multiplier, not the bottleneck.

The results speak in partnerships and numbers. Oxford University Press approached them to write “My Happiness and Me,” India’s first well-being workbook series for grades 1-8. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation adopted Rangeet across 250 schools. Pratham, one of India’s most respected education NGOs, now executes their programs. The UN recognized them as a best practice for SDGs 4 and 5. The Brookings Institution featured them in a 2022 policy report. In January 2025, Simran spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Rangeet has now reached over 500,000 children across India and Bangladesh on approximately $500,000 in annual revenue. In 2026, they’re expanding into four African countries.

The market tailwinds are real. India’s Social and Emotional Learning market is projected to reach $1.8 billion by 2033, growing at 17.5% annually. NEP 2020 mandated holistic student development. The post-COVID learning gap, where children returned to school having lost years of social-emotional development, created urgent demand for exactly what Rangeet offers.

If someone tells us, ‘We need some time to get back to you,’ I’m like, ‘Good job. Let’s do this slow.’ Because we’re seeing all of these events taking place because we are investing time.

The Long Game

Most EdTech companies of the 2015-2021 era believed scale came from removing humans from the equation. Gamified apps. Personalized AI tutors. One device per child. Rangeet bet the opposite. Scale comes from empowering the teacher.

Simran’s advisor Sean Bellamy, founder of the Sands School in the UK, put it starkly: “Is maths useful if there are no animals left to count? Is language useful if there are no forests left to describe?”

Anir Choudhary, the friend who gave them their first break in Bangladesh, has now joined Rangeet to lead growth. He built a community of 600,000 teachers in Bangladesh starting with 23. His challenge for the team: reach 100 million children.

They’re building AI features now, but with a clear constraint. AI will support teachers with better feedback and coaching. It will never replace them.

Life is so long. If we can just be committed to the things we love, be open, and not worry about time, everything works out.

For a man who traded currencies through the Asian financial crisis, who built and lost an iconic music venue, who nearly gave up on a mountain in Borneo, patience has become the strategy. The children losing birth lotteries every day now have 500,000 peers learning what no app can teach on its own: how to be human.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

This is not a future projection. It is already happening, at scale, inside the credit pipelines of India’s largest private banks.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The man who built this system is Prateep Basu, Co-founder and CEO of SatSure, a Bengaluru-based Earth intelligence company at the intersection of satellite imagery, artificial intelligence, and financial infrastructure. SatSure has raised approximately $27.7 million across 12 rounds, counts ICICI Bank, HDFC Ltd, and Kotak Mahindra Bank among its investors, and is currently valued at approximately Rs. 512 crore. Its flagship platform, SatSure Sage, has analyzed over 2.1 million farmer plots across 1.95 lakh villages in India.

The numbers matter. But the origin story matters more.

The Problem Nobody Had Framed Correctly

Before SatSure, getting a loan as a farmer required a physical visit to the land, third-party ownership verification, a manual crop assessment, and a credit officer with enough agricultural knowledge to decide. The process took 30 days. For urban borrowers, banks were competing to offer pre-approved loans by WhatsApp.

People like you and me get WhatsApp messages ten times a day from banks about loan eligibility. Why can’t that exist for farmers? That was the gap we were filling.

Prateep came to this problem from an unusual direction. He spent his early career as a propulsion systems engineer at ISRO, working on the GSLV MK-III. After a Master’s at the International Space University in Strasbourg, he joined Northern Sky Research, a Boston-based consultancy advising global aerospace investors. There, he identified what he calls the industry’s core problem.

The industry was supply-centric, not demand-centric. People were launching satellites without knowing precisely what problems they were solving, because whatever happened, defense would buy something out of it.

He returned to India in 2017 and co-founded SatSure with Abhishek Raju and Rashmit Singh Sukhmani. Their first pilot was in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, made possible by a letter of introduction from local MP Ram Mohan Naidu to the district collector. That letter came without money. It came with access, to farmers, agricultural scientists, and the texture of how rural credit actually worked. Naidu is today India’s Union Minister of Civil Aviation.

By late 2017, SatSure had won the AP AgTech Summit challenge, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and secured a Rs. 5 crore purchase order from the Andhra Pradesh government. Prateep and his co-founders then bootstrapped for four and a half years before raising their first institutional round.

What 40 Pixels Know That a Bank Manager Doesn’t

The technical question at the center of SatSure’s model is simple on its surface: can a satellite identify a specific crop on a one-acre plot?

The answer involves physics that goes well beyond what any human eye can detect. Each pixel in a multispectral satellite image carries 13 bands of spectral information, including near-infrared and short-wave infrared wavelengths that measure chlorophyll content, soil moisture, and crop stress. The same 40 pixels are re-imaged every five days, building a time series that reconstructs multiple growing seasons from a single screen.

Risk is all about history. You cannot send a drone back in time to collect data. That is the unique value of satellite imagery.

This time-machine effect is what makes the data genuinely useful for credit assessment. Prateep’s team combines crop identification with market pricing data, minimum support prices, and cost-of-cultivation benchmarks per crop per hectare to construct a season-by-season income estimate for each farmer. That feeds into an alternate credit score.

The result: a loan approval process cut from 30 days to 10 to 30 minutes, with auto-approval thresholds set by the banks themselves.

Getting to 90 to 95 percent crop identification accuracy in India required far more work than in markets like the US, where farms are large and uniform. Indian agriculture is fragmented, with adjacent plots often growing different crops. Prateep built SatSure’s training dataset through statistical field sampling and data-barter arrangements with early banking partners, accumulating approximately 300,000 ground-truth data points across major lending states.

With 40 pixels and 13 spectral bands per timestamp, re-imaged every five days, you end up with incredibly dense information. That is the secret sauce.

One Stack, Three Markets, and a Bet on Sovereignty

SatSure’s product architecture reflects a deliberate decision to maximize return on a single data infrastructure. The same satellite stack powering farm credit scoring also drives SatSure Skies, which helps the Airport Authority of India automate airspace cartography that previously took months, and SatSure Sparta, which helps FMCG companies and global banks prove their commodity supply chains are not sourced from recently deforested land, a compliance requirement under the EU Deforestation Regulation.

The product is everything that happens behind the client interface. The data models, the reusable infrastructure, the algorithms. The thin client layer for the end user? That is the consulting part.

The company’s most consequential move, however, is upstream. In 2022, Prateep launched KaleidEO, a subsidiary developing proprietary satellite payloads planned for Very Low Earth Orbit at approximately 380 km altitude. In 2025, SatSure joined the Allied Orbits consortium alongside Pixxel, Dhruva Space, and PierSight, winning an IN-SPACe contract to build India’s first privately led national Earth observation constellation, a 12-satellite system representing a Rs. 1,200 crore investment. The consortium declined up to Rs. 350 crore in government viability gap funding, choosing to self-fund in exchange for global commercialization rights.

The logic is direct. India currently spends approximately Rs. 800 crore annually buying satellite imagery from foreign companies. Prateep’s argument is that controlling the camera in orbit is the only way to control the economics and the continuity of the business underneath it.

In February 2026, Prateep was named one of the Top 10 Global Innovators at the India AI Impact Summit for SatSure’s work in satellite-based credit scoring, a recognition that places a quiet, technically grounded company at the center of a market the global satellite EO industry values at $13.2 billion today, growing to $19.6 billion by 2030.

Forty pixels. Five hundred kilometers up. Every five days. It turns out that is enough.

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As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

That gap is what Nalin Agrawal has spent eight years building toward. His company, Snapmint, now serves 7 million monthly active users across 23,000 pincodes, financing 1.5 million purchases every month. In October 2025, General Atlantic led a $125 million Series B. FY25 revenue grew 80% year-on-year to Rs 158.5 crore. The company posted its first net profit: Rs 15 crore. None of it was obvious when the idea began, and the whole thing nearly died before it found its footing.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights

The Anomaly That Started Everything

In 2016, Nalin and his two IIT Bombay co-founders, Anil Gelra and Abhineet Sawa, were running a programmatic advertising business. The three had previously built a patent analytics firm (acquired by Netscribes) and payment systems for Yes Bank. Data and transactions were their native language.

An e-commerce client asked them to run a campaign for a new credit card EMI feature at checkout. Other campaigns delivered 8-9% lift in consumers reaching the payment page. The EMI campaign, which used the word prominently in the creative, delivered a lift of 80 to 120%. Consumers were clicking through in large numbers. Almost none transacted.

The geo analytics explained why: respondents were overwhelmingly from tier-2 cities, and they did not have credit cards. Demand existed, at real scale. The product to serve it did not. That insight led directly to what Snapmint is today: an EMI payments platform requiring nothing more than a PAN number and a UPI mandate.

How Interest-Free Credit Works, and Why It’s Hard to Copy

The first question Snapmint always has to answer is the obvious one. If consumers pay 0% interest, 0% processing fees, and 0% late fees, who absorbs the cost?

The merchant does. When a consumer buys a Rs 20,000 television on 6-month EMI through Snapmint, the brand pays a commission of 3.5% to 10%, depending on category and tenure. For high-ticket items like furniture or premium electronics, conversion lifts of 20-40% make that commission a straightforward trade. Nalin often invokes Bajaj Finance here: it has used the same offline subsidy model for decades. Snapmint rebuilt it for the internet, with machine learning replacing the human agent in a store.

In one model, you rely on the consumer making mistakes, and that is what you earn from. We are working in exactly the opposite way. We don’t make money from their mistakes.

The margins are thin. A typical 6-month transaction at 7.5% commission leaves roughly 2.5% for credit losses, 3% for cost of capital, and operational costs on top. Net margin per transaction sits around 1.5%. What makes the business defensible is not the model itself, which others could replicate, but the precision of the underwriting behind it.

Snapmint’s credit loss rate is under 2.5%. The industry benchmark is 6-8%. The model evaluates each transaction against approximately 3,000 variables, with 180-200 data points available in real time, and delivers a decision in under one second. It has been trained on over 9 million loans, 8 million of which are now fully closed. The fraud engine runs parallel to underwriting, watching for pattern anomalies, three identical smartphones shipping to the same pincode inside 15 minutes, and responding in 5-10 minutes before losses compound. This is not the kind of thing a competitor can purchase or hire quickly. Nalin estimates it takes two to three years to build a comparable system, and that Snapmint keeps improving while anyone else is catching up.

For anyone to compete, they’d first have to beat our threshold of 70 to 80% approval rates while keeping credit losses below 2.5%. Marrying those two is the key to this business.

The Term Sheet That Disappeared, and the Investor Who Stayed

After getting its NBFC license in 2019, Snapmint had a Series A term sheet for $5 million signed on March 19, 2020. India locked down on March 24. The money evaporated. For a company that had just committed to building a lending book, the timing was near-fatal.

One investor held. Prashasta Seth, later Managing Partner of Prudent Investment Managers, had been watching the model closely. He came in with $1 million not because the market was good, but because he believed the model would survive.

I love your business model. If you can come out of this period and show me it works, I’ll be happy to double down.

Prashasta Seth to Nalin, March 2020

Snapmint came out of it. Credit losses on the COVID cohort settled at 4.8%, well below any comparable benchmark. Seth returned in 2021 with $10-12 million. Revenue at the time of that investment was approximately Rs 4 crore. By FY25 it was Rs 158.5 crore. Seth’s firm led the $18 million pre-Series B in December 2024, then participated again in the $125 million General Atlantic-led round in October 2025.

The Next Bet: EMI Without a Card, on Any QR Code

The company is now building credit on UPI: a consumer scans any merchant QR code, including a PhonePe code, and sees EMI as a payment option through a pre-approved credit line held with a partner bank. RBI restricts credit lines to banks rather than NBFCs, so Nalin’s structure is a fee-based partnership: the bank holds the exposure, Snapmint manages the underwriting and collection.

We believe India will leapfrog credit cards and go straight to EMI on UPI. We’ve enabled brands to increase sales by 10 to 20%. We want to bring this to more than 100 million consumers in the next few years.

The argument is structural. Credit card penetration in India serves the top 2-3% of consumers. UPI reaches almost everyone. With 10-15 million existing Snapmint users as a starting base and the General Atlantic capital behind it, Nalin’s three-year target is Rs 1,000 crore in revenue. There is no unicorn valuation to report yet; General Atlantic holds 18.8% after the Series B, and the company has not disclosed a number. The milestone Nalin points to instead is the Rs 15 crore net profit in FY25. The model works. Now it needs to scale.

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

For most founders, this would signal product-market fit. For Sreeraman Mohan Girija and his co-founders at ShopSense, it was a lesson about customer delight versus sustainable business.

We thought, from both a customer and brand perspective, is there something interesting with technology that we can do inside the store that will increase engagement time.

Twelve years later, his company Fynd powers 2,300+ brands across 20,000+ stores, does ₹300-350 crore in annual revenue, and employs 1,100 people. Yet most consumers have never heard of it.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Hardware Trap

The ShopSense Match product looked perfect. Fashion retailers paid ₹10,000 monthly per device. Customers loved it. But the economics were broken.

Each touchscreen cost ₹50,000 upfront. Stores needed rewiring. Pre-Jio internet was unreliable. The fatal flaw was attribution.

While we had data showing a 10-12% uplift, it was difficult to convince a brand because the transaction did not happen on the device. Transactions are happening on the point of sale system.

By 2015, ShopSense was doing roughly ₹1 crore in revenue after raising $1 million from Kae Capital and IIFL.

They pivoted to real-time inventory data they already had. What if Tier 2 cities could shop from Mumbai stores? They built a hyperlocal marketplace with 2-3 hour delivery and “Find a Fit” where customers ordered two sizes, tried both, and returned one.

In fashion, the biggest problem is fit.

By 2016-17, after raising $10 million from Google, the marketplace hit ₹5 crore in revenue. Then came the wall: customer acquisition costs, logistics, discounting wars.

Everyone loves a discount. That became the default expectation. That requires a lot more capital.

Meanwhile, the technology Fynd built (storefront builders, inventory systems, marketplace connectors) was valuable to brands wanting omnichannel. Reliance Brands Limited had started using Fynd’s tech.

When Reliance Industries invested in 2019, they weren’t buying a marketplace doing ₹5 crore. They were buying infrastructure powering their operations.

Reliance acquired 87% for ₹295 crore. Investors made 8x returns. The consumer marketplace shut down. Fynd became pure B2B infrastructure.

Scale as Strategy

The first year was rough.

You’re talking about one of the largest employers in the country. And here we are like a startup, move fast and break things. It took us a good year to culturally adapt both ways.

But once aligned, Fynd got scale impossible for an independent startup.

When we started working with Reliance, we understood there is this edge case, this use case, this format. How do you build a platform that serves all those purposes?

The product explosion was dramatic. Fynd built D2C websites, point-of-sale systems, endless aisle tablets, AR try-on, order and warehouse management, marketplace connectors (ranked #1 by Amazon), AI support (Kaily), AI photography (Pixelbin), and AI fashion design (Fynd Create).

Revenue grew from ₹5 crore to ₹300-350 crore. Small brands pay ₹10,000-20,000 monthly with transaction fees. Enterprise clients pay lakhs.

As they scale, we charge something on top of transactions, which they’re happy to spend.

Today, 80% revenue is enterprise. Out of 1,100 employees, 600-700 are engineers and designers.

The Designer’s Edge

Sreeraman has a Master’s in Interaction Design from IIT Bombay. This shapes everything.

When you are building a product, you only optimize for the end customer. Not your engineering team’s capabilities.

He leads a 100-person design organization. His hiring test is empathy. If candidates defer to managers or can’t articulate customer-first reasoning, it’s a red flag.

Sreeraman has strong views. CRED is “fantastic design but value has gone down.” Amazon is ugly but fast, making it great. Figma beat Sketch through distribution, not design.

Design is not beauty. Design is what works.

This shows in Fynd’s conversational commerce approach. Sreeraman believes shopping will shift to chat but is skeptical of simplistic visions.

Shopping behavior is going to change. As a brand, are you ready to provide that experience on your website?

Need-based shopping (groceries) works in chat. Want-based shopping (fashion) requires visual browsing. Fynd’s AI stack plugs into whatever interface wins.

Going Global & The 2030 Vision

By 2022, Fynd had saturated India. They chose Middle East first (MAF, Rivoli, FNAC), then Southeast Asia (Superindo). In 2024, Sreeraman walked over 100 UK stores.

When we started conversations with retailers, lot of people in tech had some Indian connection. They’d worked with Reliance.

International revenue is under 10%. Canada is in pipeline with shoppable TV.

Sreeraman is thinking about “AI-native unified commerce” by 2030. India’s e-commerce should hit $345 billion. AI in retail will grow 14x. ONDC threatens to drop marketplace commissions from 25-35% to 5-8%.

Fynd’s bet: brands need zero-touch operations, conversational discovery, open protocols, composable infrastructure. The platform processes transactions for 20 million+ customers at Reliance scale.

Why Infrastructure Wins

The irony of Fynd’s story is deliberate obscurity. While Flipkart and Amazon battle for mindshare, Fynd quietly powers thousands of brand experiences behind the scenes.

These ideas are really fragile when they start off. In a meeting, it’s very easy to rip apart an idea.

The same applies to infrastructure businesses. In a world obsessed with consumer metrics, choosing pipes over destinations requires conviction. Twelve years in, that conviction produced a ₹300 crore business, a strategic acquisition, and a platform touching millions of transactions daily.

Not bad for a designer who started with touchscreens in fashion stores.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

It was 1999, and Sreevathsa Prabhakar, a fresh engineering graduate working as a service technician for BPL, stood trapped in a 100-square-foot house in Mumbai’s Dharavi. The man who’d bought an expensive television set was furious it wouldn’t turn on. He wanted his money back, and he wanted the owner of BPL to come personally. Sreevathsa was just a junior engineer who barely spoke Hindi.

He was almost about to hit me.

After two hours of pleading, the customer finally let him examine the TV. The problem? A loose cable connection. When the screen flickered to life, everything changed.

He went from wanting to hit me to offering me a drink. He even offered me money. That day, I realized something powerful: if you solve a customer’s problem, they will go out of their way to reward you.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

Sreevathsa didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. While his engineering classmates landed coveted software jobs at Infosys and TCS, he spent the late 1990s fixing televisions and refrigerators in customers’ homes across Mumbai. His territory included Dharavi, Sion, and Matunga. Not exactly the glamorous career his family had envisioned.

But those years taught him what MBA programs don’t: the economics of after-sales service, the psychology of frustrated customers, and the operational nuances that separate good service from fraud. He learned that service was always treated as a cost center, an afterthought in product companies focused on distribution and sales.

In 2009, after his father’s death and a callous comment from his Nokia supervisor, Sreevathsa quit corporate life and founded The Service Solutions (TSS). The concept was simple but novel for India: bring McDonald’s-style standardization to device repair. Apple became his first major client, trusting this unknown Indian entrepreneur to launch the country’s first Apple Care Center.

Apple is Apple because they really believed in the dream that I sold, saying, I will bring the Apple Store experience to India.

TSS scaled to 385 locations across India and the Middle East, managing service for Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, and HP. Revenue hit ₹160 crores with strong margins, all bootstrapped. But the journey nearly broke him.

When German conglomerate B2X offered to acquire TSS in 2014, the acquisition should have been the happy ending. Instead, it became the origin story for something bigger.

Device Protection Reimagined

Inside B2X’s German bureaucracy, Sreevathsa pitched an idea: what if device protection could be reimagined as a white-label technology platform instead of traditional insurance? The corporate answer was no. So he bought back his shares and started Servify in 2015.

The problem was obvious to anyone who’d bought electronics in India. Extended warranties existed, sold by insurance companies through retailers, but customer experience was terrible. Claim rejection rates hovered around 70%. Repairs took weeks.

Servify’s model flipped the equation. Instead of selling “Servify Care,” the company would power “AppleCare,” “Samsung Care Plus,” and “HP Complete Care” as the invisible orchestration layer. The customer sees only the brand they trust. Behind the scenes, Servify handles everything: distribution (onboarding 150,000 retail outlets), underwriting (partnering with insurers like ICICI Lombard), decisioning (AI-powered claim approval in real-time), and fulfillment (routing repairs to OEM service centers).

The economics work because everyone wins. On a ₹10,000 device protection plan, retailers keep 40-45%, OEMs get 10-15% royalty, insurance partners receive 25-28%, and Servify retains 12-15%. At scale, it’s a 15-18% EBITDA business.

How? By running almost entirely on software.

Our entire ops team, which manages all these claims and dealer onboarding, is about 15-18 people on a ₹2,000 crore business. Because we automated almost everything.

The platform now manages 740 million devices across 120+ product categories, processes 3 million transactions monthly, and serves 30 million users in multiple countries. The shift to global markets has been dramatic. International business now generates 70% of revenue, up from just 25% two years ago. The U.S. has become Servify’s largest market, followed by Europe and the Middle East.

The technology advantage is real. Servify holds over 20 patents, including video-based diagnostics that can assess device damage remotely. The platform integrates with OEM serial number databases to prevent fraud (a customer can’t claim warranty on a broken device bought secondhand), optimizes parts inventory across service networks, and uses confidence scores to monitor service center performance.

The Path to Public Markets

The company expects to raise $250-300 million at a valuation between $1.5-2.3 billion. Ahead of the IPO, Servify is finalizing a $100 million pre-IPO round that will officially crown it a unicorn.

The company has raised $165 million to date from investors including Iron Pillar, Blume Ventures, and DMI Sparkle Fund. Much of that capital went toward geographic expansion, regulatory licensing (device protection is a regulated business in most markets), and building integration infrastructure. A single telco partnership like AT&T requires integrating 7-8 different systems. Every new country requires fresh licenses and local compliance frameworks.

The financials show the inflection point arriving. FY24 revenue reached ₹759 crores, up 24% year-over-year. Net losses dropped 59% to ₹94 crores as operating leverage kicked in. FY25 is expected to be Servify’s first profitable year, with net revenue hitting ₹900 crores and 2-3% margins.

But Sreevathsa is explicit about playing a longer game. AT&T’s device protection program just launched and will take three years to ramp fully. Samsung’s consumer electronics division just went live. HP is expanding across countries. Apple, a client since 2008, continues adding markets where Servify powers AppleCare in regions without direct Apple retail presence.

This ₹900 crore net revenue will be at least ₹4,000 crores in the next few years. What will that valuation be? That’s what matters. In our business, I can’t value based on what is today.

The discipline extends beyond financial projections. Despite raising over $165 million, Servify operates with bootstrap-era frugality. Sreevathsa still recalls an incident where an employee exploited approval limits to place a $2 million parts order. His response? Make her personally negotiate with the supplier for a free return or pay out of pocket.

The DNA is like no wastage. I am okay to spend on celebrations or people, salaries. But where there is no need, there is no need.

The example: if you solve 9 customer tickets in under 2 minutes but one takes 5 hours, your average looks fine. But 10% of customers received failed service. Averages lie. Every customer interaction matters.

When Sreevathsa visits Apple Park in Cupertino and sees a “Welcome Servify” banner, he doesn’t see validation of past success. He sees proof that solving customer problems, even unglamorous ones in after-sales service, can build businesses that power the world’s most valuable brands.

The IPO will bring scrutiny, public market discipline, and governance requirements. Sreevathsa welcomes it.

An IPO isn’t a funding event. It’s a maturity event.

For a company born from a locked room in Dharavi, that kind of maturity has been 25 years in the making.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

The physics PhD who had spent years studying “squishy molecules” at the University of Pennsylvania had just discovered India’s innovation problem wasn’t technical. It was cultural. The country had world-class scientists, state-of-the-art labs, and brilliant minds. What it lacked was anyone who cared about turning research into businesses.

Fast forward to January 2026. Ritu is managing ₹1,200 crore ($150 million) across three funds at Ankur Capital, the deep science and agritech-focused venture firm she co-founded in 2013 with Rema Subramanian, a cost accountant with 30 years of CXO experience. Her portfolio company Captain Fresh just withdrew its ₹1,700 crore IPO application, not because of weak fundamentals, but to complete an acquisition of Frime, a Spanish seafood company. When it refiles in 2026, it will mark Ankur’s first public exit at a valuation exceeding $1 billion.

The numbers tell the Captain Fresh story: ₹3,421 crore in revenue for FY25, up 145% year-over-year, and profitable with ₹42.4 crore in PAT. It’s a rare feat for new-age tech companies.

That research institute that kicked Ritu out? It’s now among the domestic entities filing patents at record rates. India logged 100,000 patent applications in 2024, with 50% filed domestically for the first time in history.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

From Lab Bench to ₹1,200 Crore

Ritu’s path to venture capital reads like an accident report. After her PhD, she spent a decade at Unilever and Philips bringing products to market globally, from soaps to televisions. But working inside mega-corporations taught her a frustrating lesson.

The risk appetite for innovation in such a mega company is limited. And I really should be in this more risky startup world.

When she returned to India in 2013, the venture ecosystem looked nothing like today. The word “family office” didn’t exist as a formal concept. Angel networks were nascent. And the idea of giving someone else your money to manage for seven to ten years?

I have been in people’s offices where you’d call it a family office today. And in those days, you just talked to the family or the proprietor. There was no family office person. It was just called, I’m a rich man, basically.

Fund I closed at ₹50 crore in 2016, scraped together from angels, friends, and family. The first check was $100,000. Ritu met a stranger in Colorado who wired $150,000 on the spot. That’s what it took.

By 2020, Fund II closed at ₹350 crore with institutional backing from CDC Group (now British International Investment), SIDBI, and the MacArthur Foundation. Fund III, currently raising with a ₹1,200 crore target, adds the U.S. Development Finance Corporation to the LP roster.

The Multiplication Insight

Most venture capitalists obsess over valuation. Ritu obsesses over multiplication.

Can I tell you my biggest learning? It’s multiplication. How much money we make in a company is multiplied not just by the valuation, but how many shares we hold, too. It sounds very silly, but it’s a reality.

This simple math drives Ankur’s entire strategy: Write the first institutional check. Take double-digit ownership. Follow aggressively through Series B to defend that stake. Target 4-6x returns with a net IRR of 30%+ over eight to ten years.

The insight shapes everything. Ankur doesn’t spray capital across 50 companies at low ownership. It concentrates on 15-20 bets where it can meaningfully influence outcomes and retain significant equity through multiple rounds.

Two Buckets, Two Playbooks

Ankur operates with two distinct investment theses, each requiring different underwriting skills.

Digital India: B2B platforms digitizing fragmented mass markets using India Stack infrastructure. The risk isn’t technical. It’s operational execution.

Captain Fresh and Vegrow, a B2B fruit marketplace that raised $40 million in January 2025, fall here. Vegrow posted $150 million in revenue for FY24, targets $500 million by FY26, and handles 300 tonnes of fruit daily across 30,000 connected farmers.

Saswat Finance, a rural fintech startup, uses milk yield data to provide loans to dairy farmers. It has disbursed ₹55 crore across 6,000+ customers and partners with Amul and Hatsun.

The thesis hinges on what Ritu calls “codification.” In unstructured markets, there’s no standard SKU for fish, fruit, or fabricated parts. Technology creates that standard language through computer vision and sensors. Once quality is codified, trust can be digitized.

Deep Science: Global IP plays in biology, chemistry, and physics. The science is validated pre-investment. The question is techno-commercial scale.

Offgrid Energy Labs raised $15 million in September 2025 for its ZincGel battery technology, a safer and cheaper alternative to lithium-ion. It’s establishing a 10 MWh demo plant in the UK, planning a GW-scale facility in India, and holds 25+ IP families with Archean Chemicals as a strategic investor.

String Bio converts methane into protein via its SIMP platform. It posted ₹16.5 crore in revenue for FY24, operates a commercial plant in Tumkur, and has partnerships with Woodside Energy and Skretting.

Vimano, Ankur Fund III’s first investment, manufactures membranes for flow batteries and green hydrogen electrolyzers. It raised ₹25 crore in April 2025.

These companies solve global problems from an Indian context, then scale worldwide.

The Operational Reality

Ritu describes the work as building a “village” around each startup. Ankur co-founded ThinkAg, an industry platform connecting agritech startups with corporates and policymakers, and hosts the annual Deep Science Forum (third edition: January 13, 2026 in Bangalore).

Once we’re invested, we have to do everything. You call me up and say you want to connect with somebody. I don’t know the person, but I need to hustle to go find someone who does.

The work splits into four categories: strategic guidance, tactical operations, fundraising support, and founder emotional support. Midnight calls are common.

You have not invested in a nine to five business.

Her advice to founders is blunt: Think like an investor, not just an operator.

You are putting capital into projects. Your assessment of why you’re putting these into things, there has to be some discipline to that piece. If you don’t think of yourself as the investor, you lose the plot.

And avoid mediocrity at all costs.

Mediocrity attracts mediocrity.

Hire either the absolute best or hungry hustlers who learn fast. Never the safe corporate middle ground.

The Tailwinds

The macro environment is shifting in deep science’s favor. India’s deep tech sector is projected to attract over $10 billion in funding by 2029. The National Deep Tech Startup Policy announced a ₹1 lakh crore corpus for R&D financing. States like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu released dedicated deep tech policies for 2025-2030.

Geopolitically, the “China Plus One” diversification is accelerating. The US Biosecure Act is redirecting global biotech supply chains. Indian talent, democratic stability, and cost advantages are pulling in global partnerships.

The domestic capital base is maturing too. Family offices are allocating meaningful capital to venture funds, reducing reliance on volatile foreign sources. The IPO market, while selective, is open to profitable growth stories like Captain Fresh.

Ritu’s journey from studying soft matter in a Pennsylvania basement to orchestrating ₹1,200 crore in capital deployment spans just 13 years. That same institute that showed her the door? Its researchers are now pitching her their patents.

The physicist has learned to love the mess. And she’s built the formula to profit from it.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

This is the kind of experience that mixed reality has been promising for a decade. The difference is that this one actually works, and a company called Flam AI figured out why the others didn’t.

Watch the full conversation with Amit Gaiki on the Founder Thesis podcast for the complete story of Flam AI’s pivot, their Samsung campaigns, and the distribution strategy fueling their growth.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

From Consumer Dream to Enterprise Reality

Amit Gaiki, co-founder and CTO of Flam AI, didn’t set out to build an advertising company. He and his co-founders, Shourya Agarwal and Malhar Patil, started in 2021 with a thesis about how humans consume content.

Content on internet has evolved since the past two decades. First it was all text content. Then we transitioned into images, Facebook, Instagram took over. Then it was all videos with TikTok and reels. So obviously it has to evolve into something better.

The “something better” they identified was interactive, three-dimensional content that exists in your physical space. Not virtual reality, which cuts you off from the world, but mixed reality, which layers digital objects onto the real environment around you.

They raised a $3.5 million seed round on this vision: build the next TikTok, but for mixed reality. They created a consumer app with avatar systems, motion capture technology, and the ability to make printed photos come alive when scanned. Users loved it. The product was sticky.

Then 2022 happened. The funding environment turned hostile to consumer moonshots without clear revenue paths. Amit and his team faced a calculation many founders avoid until it’s too late: roughly ten months of runway remaining.

Most founders in that position keep pitching investors. Amit’s team asked a more useful question: where is there a business hiding inside what we’ve built?

We realized we need to pivot this into a business-facing entity. Consumers will follow, but you have to build an ecosystem first. And the consumer is not the best place to do that.

The answer was advertising. Mixed reality advertising had existed for years but never scaled. Brands would run a flashy AR campaign, generate some press, then never do it again. It was a gimmick, not a business.

The diagnosis was straightforward. There were two ways to deliver an AR experience. Native apps offered great performance but zero accessibility, because no one downloads an app to watch an ad. Browser-based AR offered accessibility but terrible performance, working on perhaps 60% of Android devices in India with laggy, pixelated results.

Apps have very good performance but accessibility is very low. Browsers have high accessibility but performance is very low. We get the best of both worlds.

Flam AI built a native mixed reality bundle that installs in a single click without requiring an app store visit. Scan a QR code, and within one second, high-fidelity 3D content is playing through your camera. The company achieved 100% device compatibility on Android. The rendering is, in Amit’s words, “pixel perfect.”

The Business and the Numbers

With the friction problem solved, brands actually wanted what Flam AI was selling. The value proposition was clear: every touchpoint where a brand communicates with a consumer could become an interactive mixed reality experience.

The pricing model reflects how brand marketers think. Flam AI charges a fixed fee, typically around 20% of media buying spend, rather than per-impression rates that create unpredictable costs. The platform is self-serve and no-code. Brands create 3D assets using tools they already know, upload to Flam AI, and the system handles device optimization automatically.

What changed everything was repeatability.

There is a lot of repeatability, and there’s also a lot of confidence in launching flagship products with Flam AI. You want to cut out all the noise and be very exclusive, very premium.

Samsung used Flam AI for their Circle to Search launch, creating what Amit describes as the first interactive print ad in India. When Samsung launched voice search, they returned to build what the company claims is the first voice-interactive mixed reality ad anywhere. Google is rolling out Flam AI codes across all their Indian retail outlets. ICICI Bank used the platform to deliver mutual fund presentations through WhatsApp, with a fund manager appearing to stand in the user’s living room.

Flam AI has crossed $10 million in annual recurring revenue. The company raised a $14 million Series A led by RTP Global in May 2025, bringing total funding to approximately $22 million. Revenue is growing “in multiples, not in percentages,” according to Amit.

The majority comes from India, where digital advertising has become the largest ad medium at around ₹49,000 crore in FY24-25. Flam AI has also expanded to the Middle East, Japan, and the United States. The timing has helped: when Meta shut down Spark AR for third-party creators in January 2025, brands suddenly needed alternatives.

Flam AI’s distribution strategy centers on creative agencies rather than direct enterprise sales alone. Agencies can use the platform free with a watermark, build proof-of-concept campaigns, and pitch them to brand clients. When the brand wants to run without the watermark, they pay Flam AI. It’s product-led growth applied to enterprise sales.

The Glasses Question

Every conversation about mixed reality eventually arrives at the same place: what about glasses? Mark Zuckerberg has bet Meta’s future on mixed reality headsets. Apple’s Vision Pro represents a similar wager.

Amit’s perspective is more measured.

Headsets won’t replace phones for sure. Glasses might be the next interface, but only if convenience matches phones. We haven’t seen anything in market yet. You can’t predict it, it can only be experienced.

He points to a pattern anyone who owns a Meta Quest will recognize. Exciting for the first few weeks. Unused two months later. Phones are always with you, always charged, always ready. Until glasses match that, the transition won’t happen.

Flam AI’s bet is that phone cameras are the transitional interface. The company is building the ecosystem, the publishing tools, the brand relationships, on the platform that exists today. If glasses become dominant, Flam AI will already have the content pipeline in place.

The Underlying Bet

Amit and his team are wagering on something specific: that the shift from passive to interactive content is inevitable, and that the company controlling the low-friction distribution layer will capture disproportionate value. They’re not trying to own the creative tools or the media buying. They’re trying to own the moment when someone scans a code and content appears.

It’s a narrow wedge, but narrow wedges have a way of expanding. The advertising use case funds the infrastructure. The infrastructure enables new use cases. Amit started with a vision of billions of consumers experiencing interactive content. He might still get there, just through a door marked “enterprise” rather than “consumer.”

The full conversation with Amit covers the specific technical decisions behind Flam AI’s architecture, details of their Samsung voice campaign, and a deeper discussion of when glasses might actually replace phones. Watch the Founder Thesis episode for the complete story.

Amit Gaiki is co-founder and CTO of Flam AI. The company has raised $22 million and serves brands including Samsung, Google, ICICI Bank, and Dabur across India, the Middle East, Japan, and the United States.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

1,600 people applied. Three applied with the same resume, word for word, including grammatical mistakes. We called them over for an interview and realized obviously they were lying.

That moment crystallized a problem Ashok had been circling around: India’s digital economy was being built on a foundation of unverifiable claims. While the country was racing toward smartphone ubiquity and digital payments, the basic infrastructure of trust - knowing whether people are who they claim to be - remained analog, manual, and broken.

Fifteen years later, that insight has become IDfy, a company processing millions of verifications daily and posting ₹188.5 crore in revenue for FY25 while maintaining profitability. But the path from fraud detection to trust infrastructure wasn’t a straight line. It was a masterclass in what Ashok calls “incremental compounding” - surviving long enough for the market to catch up to your architecture.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Education of a Trust Architect

Ashok didn’t set out to build a business empire. Born into a Tamil Brahmin family where education was revered over wealth (”In our house, there’s only a Saraswati Puja. We don’t do Lakshmi Puja”), he spent his early career building high-speed network processors in the U.S. semiconductor industry before returning to India in 2003.

After an MBA at ISB and a brief stint in strategy at British Telecom (‘such a boring job’), he co-founded Gaboli in 2008, attempting to build India’s answer to Coursera. When that morphed into a services business he had no interest in running, he pivoted to what would become IDfy in 2011, focusing on background verification for the HR industry.

The early years tested his resolve. After raising ₹80 lakhs from Blume Ventures in 2012, the company’s first year revenue was just ₹3.5 lakhs. By late 2013, with only two months of runway remaining and a co-founder departing, Ashok gathered his 12-person team expecting resignations.

I told all of them, hey, we have two months of money left. If you guys want to leave, I completely understand. Those 12 guys got up and said, don’t pay us for whatever number of months until you get your next round of funding.

Four of those original twelve remain with the company. Ashok calls them “the 12 Apostles,” a founding myth that’s now embedded in IDfy’s cultural DNA.

For the next several years, revenue barely moved. Even after a $3.5 million Series A in 2015, IDfy plateaued around ₹11 crore annually. During this period, a prominent VC called Ashok in for what he thought would be a funding discussion. Instead, the investor tried recruiting him away from his own company: “He tells me, ‘What are you doing? Why are you running that stupid company? Background verification is such a shitty business.’”

But Ashok kept building. OCR engines. Face-matching algorithms. Low-bandwidth video systems. Technology for problems that didn’t yet exist at scale.

Three Crises, Three Inflection Points

Then the market arrived, in waves.

December 2015: The Uber rape case triggered regulatory mandates for driver verification. IDfy, which had already built mobile-based OCR technology for blue-collar workers, scaled from 150 verifications monthly to 4,000 daily. Revenue jumped from ₹1 crore to ₹3.5 crore within a year.

2018: The Supreme Court struck down third-party Aadhaar verification, killing startups that had built their entire stack around the e-KYC API. IDfy survived because its background verification legacy meant it could verify driving licenses, PAN cards, and voter IDs - capabilities others had ignored.

Guys who completely relied on the Aadhaar stack actually failed miserably. We kind of had a larger remit because of the BGV business.

March 2020: COVID-19 crashed IDfy’s revenue from ₹2 crore monthly to ₹30 lakhs. The entire team took massive pay cuts (leadership at 20% of salary). But when the RBI authorized Video KYC for remote customer onboarding, IDfy was ready with technology that worked at 60 kbps bandwidth - better than Zoom for India’s patchy network infrastructure.

The company now powers roughly 60% of all Video KYC transactions in India.

The results: From ₹20 crore in FY20, IDfy grew to ₹57 crore (FY22), ₹118 crore (FY23), ₹144 crore (FY24), and ₹188.5 crore (FY25), while returning to profitability with ₹7.8 crore in net profit.

Ashok keeps calling it luck. But the pattern is clear: build infrastructure before demand materializes, survive long enough for regulation to arrive, capture the market when competitors scramble.

You survive long enough, luck will happen at some point. The surface area is longer.

The Next Wave: Privacy as Infrastructure

Today, IDfy operates three integrated platforms. OnboardIQ handles identity verification. OneRisk, built on the acquisition of CrimeCheck’s 330 million court records database, detects fraud patterns traditional credit bureaus miss - including a registry of 150,000 companies that issue fake employment certificates complete with real salary credits and PF contributions.

And then there’s Privy, launched two years before India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act rules were finalized. With compliance becoming mandatory by May 2027, every company handling personal data in India will need systems for consent management and data governance. Once again, Ashok built the answer before the market asked the question.

The company now employs 800 people with a 15% ESOP pool (among the largest in Indian tech) and has expanded to the Philippines and Indonesia, where it’s already the number two player. International revenue, zero 18 months ago, now contributes 15% of the total.

At a Series E valuation of approximately $125 million and with profitability re-established, Ashok is eyeing an IPO in the 2026-2027 window, targeting ₹300-500 crore in revenue before listing.

We’ll do IPO at some point for sure, sooner than later. But the ultimate goal is bigger. I want to be at the center of every sensitive transaction in the country.

What makes IDfy unusual isn’t the technology or the timing. It’s the patience. In an ecosystem that celebrates blitzscaling, Ashok spent eight years building capabilities while revenue stayed flat, investing in AI models and data infrastructure when competition was still using Excel sheets.

The resume fraud that started it all? It’s now part of a proprietary database that helps banks spot synthetic identities before loans are disbursed. The infrastructure of trust, it turns out, is built slowly - tested through crisis, ready when the market finally arrives.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

If I had got that move wrong, that moment wrong, that was the end of Captain Fresh. We played it like a lion. It went after four or five tectonic moves which redefined the trajectory.

That 2024 acquisition now looks prescient. Captain Fresh is projecting ₹10,000 crore ($1.2 billion) in revenue for FY27, turned profitable in FY25 after years of losses, and is preparing for an IPO. Meanwhile, its well-funded competitors have either imploded under fraud allegations or quietly shut down.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Spreadsheet and the Pivot

Utham’s entry into seafood began with an Excel file, not a passion for the ocean. As an analyst at O3 Capital investment bank in 2015, he was hunting for the “next sunrise sector” using a ruthless framework: industry size above ₹25,000 crore, multiple companies exceeding ₹1,000 crore revenue, consistent profitability, and crucially, no smart capital deployed yet.

The way I got introduced to this category is possibly one of the most boring ways any entrepreneur would get into an industry.

Seafood topped his list, ahead of flavors and fragrances.

The numbers revealed a paradox. India produces 14.5 million tons of fish annually but exports only $8 billion. Norway, producing less than 2 million tons (one-seventh of India’s volume), exports $20 billion. The market cap gap was starker: all Indian seafood companies combined were worth under $2 billion, while Norwegian firms commanded $30-40 billion.

But Utham’s first attempt at Captain Fresh, launched in June 2020 as a domestic B2B marketplace, nearly killed the company. By early 2022, they’d scaled to $100 million in gross merchandise value across 20-25 Indian cities and raised $90 million over four months, hitting a $500 million valuation. Then Utham did something unusual: he admitted it wasn’t working.

The problem was India’s “Sunday non-veg syndrome.” About 70% of seafood consumption happens during roughly 200 hours per year, mostly weekends.

Those four hours in a Sunday, those 200 hours actually make up for 60-70-80% of the trade at the country level. If you build capacities to serve this demand, you will have such a significant portion of idle time.

The unit economics were brutal. Captain Fresh expected a 2% customer default rate. Reality delivered 7-9%. About 80% of India’s seafood is sold by hawkers who appear on weekends and vanish during the week, operators Utham describes as running “newspaper routes” with zero capital at stake. The company couldn’t compete with informal players who didn’t pay statutory dues.

Going Global Through Acquisition

Over 18 months, Captain Fresh executed what Utham calls “0 to 100 to 0,” shutting down domestic operations while pivoting entirely to export markets. But instead of building distribution from scratch in the US and Europe, he bought it.

The CenSea deal that nearly emptied the bank account was just the beginning. Between 2023 and 2025, Captain Fresh acquired 10 companies: Koral (Polish salmon processing with 26 production lines), Senecrus (French cooked shrimp for Carrefour), Ocean Garden (Mexican wild-caught shrimp brands), FishLog (Indonesian cold chain), Sekkingstad (100-year-old Norwegian salmon joint venture), and most recently, Frime, a Spanish tuna giant with €180 million in turnover.

The strategy wasn’t just buying companies, it was the deal structure. Captain Fresh uses equity swaps, convincing sellers to take stock rather than pure cash. Management teams stay on, incentivized by the eventual IPO upside.

It seems like I have gone around buying companies. But truth is, I have gone around selling Captain Fresh stock. That’s really where all my effort goes in.

The company spent roughly $120-130 million in equity value across all acquisitions, with 65-70% in cash (100% equity-financed, zero debt) and the rest in stock swaps. This approach avoids what Utham calls the three sins that kill M&A: overpaying in competitive auctions, using aggressive debt, and the “God complex” of changing management.

We only do deals where there is no competition. We have no debt. Zero management change.

Most deals take 18 months to close, in an industry where private equity and strategic buyers move slowly or don’t understand the opportunity.

The multi-geography, multi-species model became Captain Fresh’s moat when Trump-era tariffs hit. The US imposed anti-dumping duties on shrimp imports in 2024-25, with rates up to 25% for some Indian exporters. Single-origin competitors struggled. Captain Fresh thrived.

Because the company sources from India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Norway, Poland, Ecuador, and Mexico while distributing through owned US and European entities, it can reroute supply chains in weeks. In the first half of 2024, Asia supplied two-thirds of US-bound products. By 2025, that flipped: Latin America became two-thirds.

I thank Mr. Trump. Whatever he has done has brought out the beauty of our business model.

While Captain Fresh scaled, competitors collapsed. Indonesia’s eFishery, once valued at $1.4 billion and backed by Temasek and SoftBank, imploded in 2024 after investigations revealed it had inflated revenue by nearly $600 million. It claimed 400,000 smart feeders deployed; the actual number was closer to 24,000. UK-based Rooser, which raised $40 million from Index Ventures, entered liquidation in June 2025 after its pure marketplace model failed in a low-trust industry.

The Data Obsession

Utham’s edge comes from an unusual willingness to invest in research. Captain Fresh spent $5-6 million on market analysis as an early-stage startup, hiring McKinsey and Bain for top-down studies while Utham conducted fieldwork.

He visited 40 US cities over one month, two per day, examining 10-15 retail outlets in each, cataloguing fresh versus frozen ratios, country of origin, supplier names. The process repeated across five cities each in Spain, Italy, and France.

But the railway station method reveals his first-principles thinking. To understand India’s seafood supply chain, Utham sat in Bangalore and Chennai railway stations, observing thermocol boxes carrying fish. Each box displayed codes for destination, origin, and supplier. He mapped the entire network by hand, then deployed 20 people to replicate the exercise across India.

I don’t regret any of that [research spend] because the kind of clarity and speed that it has given us is the only reason why we are, in a span of four and a half years, the 20th largest player in the world when it comes to seafood.

This discipline extends to personal life. Utham has traveled 1.8 million kilometers over three years (three times the average Fortune 500 CEO) while transforming his health: from 94 kilograms at 40% body fat to 63 kilograms at 14.5% body fat, sleeping eight hours nightly with a resting heart rate of 47.

His frugality enabled the risk-taking.

If you give me ₹50,000 a month, I will survive. I don’t even own a car today. I can travel in bus, train, auto rickshaw. As a guy in the business of taking risks, if you are able to be a master Spartan, your ability to take risks compounds.

The Outcome

Captain Fresh’s financial transformation is stark. FY24 posted ₹1,395 crore revenue with a ₹229 crore loss. FY25 delivered ₹3,500 crore (151% growth) with ₹125 crore in EBITDA and ₹42 crore net profit. The company projects ₹5,000-5,500 crore for FY26 (EBITDA: ₹300-350 crore) and targets ₹10,000 crore for FY27 (EBITDA: ₹700-750 crore).

Return on capital employed, Utham’s preferred metric, jumped from negative to 8-9% in FY25, with targets of 20% this year and 27-28% by FY27. With 340-350 employees generating $640-650 million in revenue, Captain Fresh achieves roughly $2 million per employee.

The company filed IPO papers in August 2025, then withdrew them in December to complete the Frime acquisition without regulatory constraints on pre-IPO deal size. It plans to refile in early 2026.

For Utham, who left investment banking because it didn’t “compound” (you’re only as good as your last deal), Captain Fresh represents the opposite: a platform where every acquisition, every supply chain digitized, every relationship secured adds permanent value.

In investment banking, the only operating leverage you have is your time. Here, you have 100, 200, 500 people’s time operating on your vision. That compounding you have a share of.

The seafood industry remains a $600 billion market sitting on a $1 trillion balance sheet of fragmented assets. The largest player controls less than 1% market share. In most industries, that fragmentation would have already been consolidated. In seafood, the low-trust nature, perishability, and biological volatility kept it analog.

Until someone decided to treat it like a spreadsheet problem.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

“I think scaling laws have already stagnated,” Arjun told me during our recent conversation. “Even if you had a lot more data, I don’t think those scaling laws are holding, and it’s becoming asymptotic in terms of their performance.”

The numbers back him up. Doubling a model from 1 trillion to 2 trillion parameters now yields only 2-5% improvement, a dramatic slowdown from the exponential gains of the 2013-2020 era. This stagnation explains why AI engineers command salaries approaching $100 million. When you’re spending billions on compute clusters, the cost of a mistake dwarfs any individual salary.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Engineer Who Saw the Wall Coming

Arjun’s skepticism about brute-force scaling comes from lived experience across AI’s evolution. After leaving Yahoo in 2007 (”I think I’m a very lousy employee”), he pursued a PhD at Germany’s Max Planck Institute working on what we’d now call generative AI, a decade before ChatGPT. His viral “Movie Reshape” research, which made actors look taller or more muscular in video, caught Hollywood’s attention and led to six months at Weta Digital solving motion capture problems for Snowy the dog in Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin.”

Then came the AlexNet moment. As a postdoc at NYU (2013-2015) working under Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, Arjun witnessed the deep learning explosion firsthand. His labmates included Wojciech Zaremba, who went on to co-found OpenAI.

AlexNet trained a neural network on this ImageNet data on GPUs and it beat the older algorithms, which were more of these handcrafted algorithms, by a big margin. And this is when we knew that this is going to take over completely.

But before founding Fast Code AI, Arjun performed what might be the most relevant engineering feat for today’s cost-conscious AI landscape: at Mercedes-Benz, he compressed a 6-gigabyte neural network down to 300 kilobytes, a 20,000x reduction. The model had to run on a 2-watt FPGA chip embedded in a car’s rearview mirror, monitoring driver attention in real-time. This compression expertise, now deployed in production Mercedes vehicles, represents exactly what enterprises need as inference costs spiral.

We had to fit it into like a small two-watt Xilinx FPGA with 110 DSPs, and eventually we had like 300 kilobytes of weight.

This work taught him that intelligence isn’t about size but about efficiency.

Selling Digital Labor, Not Software Seats

Today, Fast Code AI’s 45-person team is attacking a problem most enterprise software vendors are afraid to confront: their business model is obsolete.

Traditional SaaS companies target the “Software TAM,” the 1-5% of enterprise revenue allocated to productivity tools. They charge per seat, per month. But AI agents are designed to reduce headcount. When an agent makes a team 50% more efficient, the client needs 50% fewer seats. The vendor cannibalizes its own revenue.

Fast Code AI targets something far larger: the “Salary TAM,” the 30-70% of enterprise revenue spent on human labor. They do this through outcome-based pricing, taking 5-10% of the value their AI agents create.

If we save X for you, give us 0.1X or even like 0.05X. So I think companies in their transformation journey, all they want to do is reach this ROI.

Consider their procurement agent. Large enterprises typically ignore contracts under $10,000 because the negotiation cost exceeds potential savings. Fast Code’s agent handles this “tail spend” automatically, reading RFPs, emailing vendors, comparing quotes, and negotiating terms based on historical data. If the agent saves a client $500,000 annually on previously ignored contracts, Fast Code takes $25,000 to $50,000. For the CFO, it’s found money.

The AI agents market is projected to grow from $7.63 billion in 2025 to $182.97 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate of 49.6%. Fast Code’s bet is that this growth will be captured not by selling software seats, but by selling digital labor.

The Self-Play Advantage

What separates Fast Code from competitors is their reinforcement learning pipeline. Rather than simply prompting GPT-4, they build simulation environments that mirror the client’s workflows. For a procurement use case, they create digital twins of vendors, departments, and the procurement software itself. The AI agent then engages in “self-play,” negotiating thousands of times against simulated vendors before ever sending a real email.

We create these different personas, these different vendors... And then these LLMs do something to the software, it goes and clicks a few buttons, and we essentially rig them up with prompts, with personas, where LLMs are essentially then replicating what humans would be doing.

The approach mirrors how AlphaGo mastered the game of Go, applied to enterprise workflows. Crucially, Fast Code uses small language models of 7 billion parameters, fine-tuned on client data rather than relying on massive foundation models. These SLMs run in the client’s private cloud, addressing data sovereignty concerns while dramatically reducing inference costs compared to calling OpenAI’s API millions of times.

The industry’s response to the scaling plateau has been “test-time compute,” making models think longer rather than bigger. This reasoning underlies OpenAI’s o1 model, which generates hidden chains of thought before answering. Fast Code applies this concept by allowing their agents to simulate outcomes in RL environments before taking action, turning test-time compute into a practical deployment strategy.

Building After the Plateau

When I asked Arjun about advice for founders navigating this landscape, his answer was characteristically grounded: start with empathy, identify friction in boring back-office processes where competition is light, and iterate fast.

No idea comes out fully formed. You will pivot many times and your idea will evolve and it’ll become kind of real after a while. Starting is the most important thing. Once you take the first four steps, you will get to see what is on the next four.

His former advisor Yann LeCun calls current LLMs “stochastic parrots,” sophisticated text predictors lacking true understanding of physics, causality, or the ability to learn from single examples the way humans do. Arjun agrees. True intelligence requires stateful memory and grounded understanding of physical reality. We’re not there yet, and we won’t brute-force our way there with bigger models.

As the AI industry grapples with the end of easy scaling, Fast Code AI represents a different path: smaller models, deeper domain expertise, and business models aligned with value creation rather than seat counts. While Silicon Valley chases AGI with ever-larger clusters, Arjun is building the digital workforce enterprises will actually pay for today.

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

I was a source of tremendous amusement for people that worked at Morgan Stanley. Everyone was like, regale us with stories of our own country, please.

That cultural dislocation, a Texas-born Harvard MBA touring poultry feed mills in rural Maharashtra instead of chasing banking bonuses, would become Mark’s defining edge. Today, as Managing Partner of Omnivore, he oversees a ₹1,800 crore fund ($215 million) that has systematically proven what India’s elite dismissed: rural India isn’t a charity case. It’s a sophisticated economy ripe for technological disruption.

The proof arrived in December 2025. After 17 years of patient capital deployment, Omnivore’s portfolio companies are crossing the finish line. Captain Fresh, the seafood B2B platform, confidentially filed for a $350-400 million IPO. DeHaat, India’s largest farmer platform managing 15,000+ micro-retailers, posted ₹3,000 crore in revenue for FY25 with a valuation near ₹5,690 crore. Arya.ag, the post-harvest fintech hybrid, delivered ₹32 crore in actual profit, a 70% jump year-over-year, on ₹5,738 crore in gross merchandise value.

These aren’t vanity metrics. They represent a structural shift Mark spotted before most investors knew “agritech” was a category.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Smallholder Thesis and The Great Sorting

Mark’s contrarian insight sounds simple: Indian farmers aren’t inefficient because they’re small. They’re efficient because they’re small. When I challenged him on whether large-scale farming, like in the US or Pakistan, wouldn’t be more productive, he flipped the question.

Is a Kirana shop unproductive? Think of when you think about a kirana shop and you’re like, this banya is on top of it every paisa. That’s the same with a smallholder farmer.

The data backs him up. Pakistan, with its zamindari system of large landholdings, produces less per hectare than India’s fragmented smallholder system. A 2-hectare farmer operates like a micro-entrepreneur with zero management overhead, living and dying by margins. Scale without skin in the game breeds inefficiency.

But the 2020-2022 funding bubble created carnage. Capital flooded into agritech, peaking in April 2022, then crashed. WayCool Foods, once a high-flying food distribution platform, imploded by 2025 with NCLT insolvency petitions and 200+ layoffs. Mark saw it coming.

There have been some pretty notable implosions, Waycool being probably the most prominent.

The correction separated winners from pretenders. The survivors share three traits: they focus on real profitability, they integrate financial services into their core model, and they avoid endless GMV growth funded by bridge rounds.

Arya.ag exemplifies this. The company doesn’t just move grain. It stores it in warehouses, provides loans against stored inventory, and helps farmers time their sales for better prices. This triad, storage plus credit plus commerce, generates actual profit. When HSBC and DFC extended $30 million in debt in early 2025, they were betting on a proven model.

Captain Fresh took a different path: it went global. With 98% of revenue from exports to the US and Europe, it sidestepped brutal domestic margins. The 145% revenue growth to ₹3,421 crore in FY25 and the IPO filing validate the export thesis for Indian agribusiness.

The Soviet System and the Biology Frontier

Mark doesn’t mince words about Indian agricultural policy. When I asked about reform, he delivered a diagnosis that would make bureaucrats wince.

In India, in agriculture, we subsidize inputs, chiefly fertilizer. We fix the price of outputs. The whole thing is positively Soviet. It doesn’t reflect the way we manage any other part of the economy. And it doesn’t reflect the fact that it’s fucking 2025, people.

His alternative: scrap fertilizer subsidies and the Food Corporation of India. Replace the entire apparatus with direct cash transfers of ₹1 lakh per farmer via the existing PM-KISAN infrastructure. India has Aadhaar, UPI, and Jan Dhan accounts. The pipes exist. The political will doesn’t.

The 2020-2021 farm law protests, which ended with dead farmers in Delhi and a government retreat, make any bold reform unlikely. Mark estimates the probability of his proposed overhaul at “nil, 0%.” But quieter reforms are working. AgriStack, India’s digital public infrastructure for agriculture, has generated 6.1 crore Farmer IDs linking Aadhaar to land records. This enables instant Kisan Credit Card approvals and targeted subsidies without leakage. It’s the reform politicians couldn’t pass, executed through technology.

Yet Mark’s most urgent thesis isn’t about farming. It’s about biology. He argues that India missed the software product wave, creating IT services but no Indian Google. In biotech, the pattern is starker.

Biotechnology, 2005, it was Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. Twenty years later, who’s there? It’s still Kiran. It should be a point of national shame and frustration.

The BioE3 Policy, approved in August 2024, targets a $300 billion bioeconomy by 2030, up from $165 billion in 2024. It establishes Bio-Enabler Hubs to commercialize lab research. Omnivore is backing this shift through BioWave, a partnership with Nucleate and IndieBio, and portfolio companies like AltM, which converts agricultural waste into specialty chemicals.

The urgency is geopolitical. The US and China are racing ahead in synthetic biology. India, with its fermentation capacity and scientific talent, should be the alternative to China. But it needs risk capital willing to fund 10-year timelines.

The Long Bet Paying Off

Mark moved to India in 2008, took a 50% pay cut to join Godrej Agrovet, and spent six years touring feed mills from Khanna in Punjab to Siliguri in West Bengal. He learned Hindi arguing with dealers in Bihar. That operational baptism, not boardroom strategy, built his conviction that India’s “other half” was about to modernize.

In 2011, he co-founded Omnivore with Jinesh Shah when “agritech” didn’t exist as an investable category. The name came from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the 2005 book that changed American consciousness about food systems. The joke: Mark (carnivore) plus Jinesh (orthodox Gujarati Jain) equals Omnivore.

Seventeen years later, the thesis is crystallizing. Fund III closed at ₹1,800 crore with backing from KfW, IFC, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and corporates like Louis Dreyfus and Yara. The portfolio spans digital platforms, climate hardware, space tech, and now biomanufacturing.

When the first Indian agritech unicorn is officially minted in 2026, likely Captain Fresh or DeHaat, it will vindicate a bet that began with a pale immigrant choosing Patna over Palo Alto. The transformation Mark witnessed in Vellore and Krishnagiri over two decades, the blurring of urban and rural, is now replicating across Bharat. And this time, the capital is ready.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

Not just any stones. Specific red stones from Karoli, Rajasthan, which would then be sent to Jodhpur to be carved into grinding wheels, before being shipped to Unjha, Gujarat, where they would cold-grind spices at industrial scale. This wasn’t the kind of problem most IIM Ahmedabad graduates with BCG and Reliance Retail on their resumes typically solve. Most founders in 2017 were figuring out how to go asset-light. Prithwi was buying medieval grinding equipment.

You would be surprised to know that in India, whatever stone chakis are there, they are not made from original stones. They are made of artificial stones, which is called emery stones, made of cement. We were shocked. We found out the right stone for spices is red stone coming from Karoli.

The stone saga is vintage Prithwi. Where most entrepreneurs see a commodity market ripe for branding, he saw a supply chain riddled with adulteration. Where others saw efficiency in outsourcing, he saw the need to own every step from farm to package. Where the playbook said “asset-light,” he built four manufacturing plants.

Today, Khetika, the clean label food brand he co-founded, posted ₹247 crore in revenue for FY25, growing at over 50% year-on-year. In July 2025, the company raised $18 million in Series B funding led by the Narotam Sekhsaria Family Office, bringing total capital raised to approximately $25 million. The company is targeting ₹2,000 crore by FY28.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Adulteration Crisis and the SuperZop Origin

Prithwi’s entry into food wasn’t accidental. With a degree in Veterinary Medicine from Bikaner and 15 years in retail and agri-business, he understood the science of what happens to food between harvest and consumption.

Today if you see in the food supply chain, there are huge adulterations. One is poor quality raw material, ingredients which are fungal infested. Second is adulteration to make it look good or reduce cost: white marble powder mixed in cumin, different colors and dyes in chilies, polishing in mustard. Third is high temperature processing, because of commercial level production, nutrients are burnt. And fourth is preservatives to increase shelf life.

The numbers tell the story. Brand penetration in India’s staples segment hovers at just 10-15% overall. Spices have achieved 45-50% penetration, but batters sit at a mere 4-5%. More telling: clean label brands represent less than 2% of the entire market. In 2024, Singapore and Hong Kong banned MDH and Everest spice products after detecting Ethylene Oxide, a carcinogenic pesticide.

Prithwi saw the opening and made a contrarian bet: own the entire supply chain.

The story begins in 2016-17 with SuperZop, a B2B agri-commerce platform he founded to connect farmers with kirana stores. “Initially we started distributing to kirana stores in Mumbai,” Prithwi recalls. “It was more of selling commodities, loose kind of, 25 kg and more.”

But as SuperZop scaled, he noticed something. The quality he was sourcing directly from farmers was exceptional. Everything that happened afterward degraded it. “We realized that to get particular quality, it is not possible if you buy from somewhere in middle. You need to go to the source location.”

So in 2021, Khetika was born, not as a replacement for SuperZop, but as its consumer-facing brand. SuperZop still serves 15,000+ kirana stores and contributes 70-75% of revenue. But Khetika represents the future: a zero-preservative, stone-ground, single-origin staples brand.

The product portfolio spans four categories:

• Spices (35-40% of revenue): Whole, powdered, and soon blended varieties

• Dry fruits (25%): Makhana, nuts, seeds

• Staples (15-20%): Rice, pulses, millets

• Fresh (10%): Idli/dosa batters and chutneys, limited to 4 cities due to 10-day shelf life

Farmer Knowledge Centers: The 12-Month Cycle

Here’s where Prithwi’s veterinary background becomes relevant. He understands agroclimatic conditions and knows that the best turmeric comes from Sangli because of specific growing conditions you can’t replicate in Punjab. He knows cumin from Western Rajasthan tastes different from cumin grown elsewhere.

But knowing where to source is only half the battle. You also have to convince farmers to change centuries-old practices.

When you go to farmers and tell them make good quality product, farmers are ready to do that. However, the market does not give remuneration commensurate to the good quality. The biggest problem is non-standardization. So we have our internal quality norms. We tell farmers these are the best practices, these are the quality norms. If you fulfill those quality norms, we will buy.

Khetika’s solution: Farmer Knowledge Centers, starting in Jaisalmer and Barmer districts of Western Rajasthan. The company teaches farmers Integrated Pesticide Management (IPM), methods to grow crops without harmful pesticides. They set quality standards, test for toxins, and guarantee purchase of produce that meets specifications.

In areas where Khetika first established centers, IPM adoption has grown from 5% to 20%. The company now sources from approximately 25,000 farmers across 15 states.

But there’s a catch. Agriculture operates on 12-month cycles. “If you make one change this year, it takes 12 months to learn from those things and repeat it again,” Prithwi notes. “Gestation period in agriculture is very high.”

This is anti-Silicon Valley. No growth hacking. No viral loops. Just patient capital and patient execution.

Why Own Manufacturing? The Innovation Argument

Prithwi’s decision to own manufacturing facilities contradicts every venture capital playbook written in the last decade. But he wasn’t building from a playbook.

We don’t find any playbook for manufacturing this. For example, when we started batters, we were getting complaints that the product is not having shelf life initially. So we did innovation. We are first in the country, rather only in the country today, who are not only using RO water, but pasteurized RO water for grinding.

The innovation list is extensive:

• Cold stone grinding: Processing at 4°C to prevent protein sourness in sprouted moong batter

• Pasteurized water: Killing bacteria at source rather than adding preservatives

• Nozzle-based packaging: For batters, solving the “messy zip pouch” problem

Khetika operates four manufacturing plants for fresh products (Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad) to serve the 10-day shelf life constraint. They have specialized centers for makhana in Bihar and spices in Unjha.

The stone research went deep. “We found out for the spices the right stone is red stone coming from Karoli. It goes to Jodhpur for making those machinery and then it comes to Unjha.”

The margin profile justifies the complexity. Blended spices, which require the most processing, command approximately 50% margins. The key insight: more value addition equals higher margins.

Three Trends, One Brand

Prithwi’s thesis rests on three consumer shifts happening simultaneously:

Health Consciousness: “Post-COVID this trend has become stronger. Consumers want health.” Khetika’s zero-preservative positioning hits this directly. Their specialty range, Ragi batter and sprouted moong cheela, is growing faster than base products. “We have seen people replacing ketchups and sauces with chutneys, not only with dosa, with other products also.”

Convenience Revolution: Quick commerce is rewriting FMCG rules in India. Khetika’s revenue from platforms like Blinkit and Zepto now represents 15-25% of sales and is the fastest-growing channel. “The batter category is exploding because it’s difficult for people to buy rice and urad dal and make batter and then make dosa.”

The batter category itself is instructive. Only two national brands exist: ID Fresh (market leader) and Khetika (number two). Scaling fresh products with 10-day shelf life requires manufacturing footprint most startups can’t afford.

Return to Indian Palate: “Indian taste is coming back. Consumer wants the taste their forefathers ate. Indians are not shying away, not only in food, even you see clothing, tourism.” He frames it simply: “From pasta to dosa.”

These are three mega trends emerging. And Khetika is sitting in center of these three mega trends.

This trend favors Khetika’s single-origin sourcing. Consumers don’t just want turmeric, they want Rajapuri Haldi from Sangli. They want cumin from Western Rajasthan, coriander from Ramganj.

The Distribution Strategy and What’s Next

Khetika’s omnichannel approach leverages different consumer behaviors:

Traditional Trade serves monthly shoppers through SuperZop. Quick Commerce captures convenience-seekers with smaller SKUs optimized for frequent delivery. Modern Trade and E-commerce build national presence selectively. Export markets in MENA and Europe are launching post-Series B.

“Why is Amul the largest brand today?” Prithwi asks. “Because you use milk every day. The more frequently used any brand, the stronger brand happens and the lesser marketing cost it needs.”

Batters (high-frequency) build brand trust that transfers to spices and dry fruits (lower-frequency). It’s a flywheel, not a funnel.

The company is near break-even in FY25, having significantly narrowed losses. The path to ₹2,000 crore by FY28 rests on three levers: product expansion (launching blended spices, value-added makhana), channel expansion (export markets, D2C website launching soon), and targeted digital marketing focused on point-of-purchase activation.

Notably, Khetika isn’t planning ATL advertising or celebrity endorsements yet. The focus is reach before resonance.

The Hard Parts and the Funding Shift

I pressed Prithwi on what’s uniquely difficult about scaling in agriculture versus other sectors.

“One is sourcing. If you can’t source good quality, you are not true to your brand. Sourcing is very fragmented because farmers’ land holding is small.” Then there’s the storage challenge. Harvest happens once a year, consumption is year-round. Certain chilies require cold chain storage to maintain color. Forecasting becomes critical.

But he also points to advantages. “Western Rajasthan produces around 30% of cumin for the entire world. Once you solve that supply chain, whether you are solving for 100 tons or 10,000 tons, mostly the mechanism is similar.”

An interesting shift happened in how investors categorize Khetika. Early on, VCs compared the company against agri-tech players like Ninjacart and DeHaat. Now, comparisons are to food brands like ID Fresh and Slurrp Farm.

“We are not compared with agritech players because their revenue comes from what they sell to farmers. Our business comes from what we sell to consumers,” Prithwi explains.

The distinction matters for valuation and growth trajectory. Agri-tech platforms face marketplace economics. Food brands build pricing power through differentiation.

His advice to founders: “Focus and solve the consumer’s problem. Once you solve consumer problem, build the business in a profitable manner because ultimately it’s a business. Vanity metrics won’t do much now. If you are building real business, I don’t see funding as a challenge.”

Process as Product

In an era obsessed with capital efficiency and asset-light models, Prithwi chose to own the entire value chain. His bet: in food, you cannot outsource trust.

We started from demand side, understanding consumer problems. We realized to get particular quality, you can’t buy from somewhere in middle. You need to go to source locations. Our vision was to deliver food in its purest form from farm to consumer. Now we are doubling down on farmer sourcing network and building knowledge centers.

The timing aligns with macro shifts. FSSAI is tightening food safety regulations post-MDH scandal. PLI schemes incentivize domestic food processing. Quick commerce platforms need differentiated brands. India is positioning itself as a food export hub in a “China+1” world.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Prithwi’s story is what he didn’t do. He didn’t build an app to disrupt intermediaries. He didn’t create a marketplace. Instead, he bought stones. He taught farmers about pesticides. He built factories. He ground spices at 4°C.

₹247 crore in revenue, 50%+ growth, Series B closed. Not bad for a veterinarian who got obsessed with stones.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

Something just snapped inside me. I was literally in tears. Because I realized how fortunate I was to be handing the food out and not receiving it.

The statistic that haunted him: if you have a roof over your head, internet access, a college degree, and can afford three meals daily, you’re in the top 7% globally. Madhav, a computer engineer with a Columbia AI degree who’d spent seven years at US startups like Jetsetter, had won what Warren Buffett calls the “Ovarian Lottery.” He decided to use technology to break it.

A decade later, his company Vahan places over 40,000 blue-collar workers into jobs every month with a team of just 150 people, making it India’s highest-volume recruiter. The journey there required unlearning everything Silicon Valley taught him.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

The Three Pivots That Led to Product-Market Fit

Madhav’s first attempt was Lakshmi, a voice-based English teacher that workers could call to practice conversation. The engagement was extraordinary. One user, Santoshi from Karnataka, spent six hours straight repeating the same 10 questions. But vocational training institutes wouldn’t pay for it. They were incentivized by placement numbers, not learning outcomes.

Next came corporate training. Uber paid ₹10 lakh to train 10,000 drivers through WhatsApp. This was 2017, before WhatsApp had an official business API. Vahan built automation scripts that would “open up a WhatsApp instance on an Android emulator, type in the message, click the button, and send it.” Revenue scaled to ₹50 lakh annually, but long-term contracts remained elusive.

The breakthrough came from Dunzo in 2018. The delivery startup asked if Vahan’s WhatsApp bot could filter candidate leads. A simple text-based qualification bot cut Dunzo’s hiring costs by 30%. Swiggy called. Then Zomato. Inbound inquiries flooded in.

Training ultimately is really nice to have. It’s a vitamin in a way, whereas the real painkiller for these companies was to hire people.

Why Half a Million Users Were Almost Worthless

By late 2018, Vahan’s referral program went viral.

We were getting over a lakh users every 10 minutes.

Servers crashed. At peak, they had half a million monthly active users.

And it was almost worthless.

The example Madhav cites: WhatsApp. Despite 80% of Indian smartphone users opening it daily, nobody paid the ₹50 annual fee. Meta’s average revenue per user in India is one-hundredth of what it earns in the US.

More critically, blue-collar workers don’t trust purely digital job searches. Cars are still bought in showrooms. Equity trades happen through brokers. E-commerce only took off after Flipkart introduced cash-on-delivery.

In a country like India, engagement doesn’t always translate into a business. The Valley playbook is, build engagement, then that will translate into revenue. That doesn’t work in India.

Madhav made a contrarian decision: don’t eliminate the middleman. Digitize him.

The Agency Model: Weaponizing Local Trust at Scale

India has hundreds of thousands of small recruitment agencies controlling 60-70% of blue-collar hiring. Vahan built a two-sided marketplace. Large employers like Zomato and Swiggy give Vahan high-volume hiring mandates. Vahan distributes these to its network of 2,000+ local agencies via a mobile app with CRM tools, AI screening, and real-time tracking.

The economics are outcome-based. Qualifying a lead pays ₹5-10. A successful placement with retention milestones pays ₹1,500-3,000 for gig roles and ₹5,000-6,000 for manufacturing. Vahan only earns when someone gets hired and stays. Nobody in India operates at this scale - TeamLease, a traditional staffing giant, does 15,000 monthly placements compared to Vahan’s 40,000.

The timing was perfect. India’s quick commerce war in 2024-2025 created a “rider crunch.” Platforms like Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart faced 30% vacancy rates and 35-40% monthly attrition. Average delivery earnings jumped from ₹21,000 in FY21 to ₹28,000 in FY25. Vahan currently captures 95% of its volume from delivery roles.

Voice AI: Coming Full Circle with Better Technology

In 2024, Vahan integrated voice AI - returning to the 2016 Lakshmi concept, except the technology finally worked. The stack uses Deepgram and OpenAI’s Whisper for speech recognition, GPT-4o for conversation intelligence, and ElevenLabs for natural text-to-speech in Hindi and regional languages.

The AI recruiter costs ₹2 per connected minute versus ₹3-4 for humans and tripled recruiter productivity. The proprietary advantage: hundreds of thousands of hours of call recordings between human recruiters and candidates, used to fine-tune models for Indian accents, dialects, and code-switching.

The system even predicts retention with 70% accuracy.

Based on the signals we capture on the call itself, we’re able to predict whether the person will take up the job and stay.

The model might be reading emotional cues from speech patterns, though it’s a black box.

Madhav’s design principle for the bot: “When you meet a stranger in India, you ask where they’re from. You find common ground. The bot needs to do that—establish credibility through social proof.”

The Path to Profitability and Regional Expansion

Having raised approximately $33 million (including Series B funding from Khosla Ventures in September 2024), Vahan is expanding horizontally into manufacturing and retail, and geographically into Southeast Asia and MENA. The company projects EBITDA profitability at 3X current scale, likely within the next year.

The recent acquisition of L.earn, an upskilling platform from the defunct Temasek-backed GoodWorker, adds a training layer. As India’s gig workforce grows from 7.7 million (2020-21) to a projected 23.5 million by 2029-30, regulatory tailwinds like the Code on Social Security, 2020 are forcing formalization. Platforms must now contribute 1-2% of turnover to a Social Security Fund. Vahan’s digital record-keeping positions it as essential compliance infrastructure.

We’ve done our books. Like Amazon and Flipkart, the first category they cracked was books. For us, that was delivery. Now we’re adding other categories.

Madhav didn’t try to change Indian behavior. He optimized for it. In a low-trust market, technology doesn’t replace relationships - it scales them. That’s how you build an operating system for opportunity.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

For the first time in 19 years, the cold chain manufacturing factory he ran with his father sat idle. India was locked down. Orders had stopped. The 44-year-old entrepreneur found himself at home with an unusual amount of free time and an old friend named Rajnish.

They started drinking. They started talking. And somewhere around hour four of that evening, they stopped complaining about the lockdown and started sketching a company.

By hour six, they had a name, a business model, and a logo designed on Canva that remains unchanged today. The company they sketched that night, Celcius Logistics Solutions Pvt Ltd, is now approaching INR 500 crore in annual revenue, operates in over 600 Indian cities, and has raised INR 390 crore from investors including French private equity firm Eurazeo.

The company is a COVID baby. Started at the end of 2020, but I’ve been in cold chains for almost 20 years now. So the journey of Celcius started 20 years back when I got into cold chain.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights

The Problem and the Bet

To understand why Celcius exists, you need to understand what happens to a mango between the time it leaves a farm in Maharashtra and the time it reaches a refrigerator in Delhi. The answer, more often than not, is that it rots.

India wastes INR 92,000 crore worth of food every year. About 23% of all perishables spoil before reaching consumers. The country needs 250,000 refrigerated vehicles to move its food, dairy, and pharmaceuticals. It has roughly 80,000.

The cold chain logistics market in India is valued at $40-50 billion. And 75-80% of it operates informally, through phone calls, WhatsApp messages, and personal relationships.

85% is still small guys. Tier two. Tier three. Tier four guys. It’s a very fragmented, unorganised market where 85 to 90% of the entire asset class lies with the unorganised segment.

Swarup had watched this system fail for nearly two decades. His manufacturing business, Reefer India, built the physical infrastructure of cold chain: insulated panels, refrigerated containers, cold storage units. He knew where temperatures deviated, where trucks broke down, where products spoiled because someone left a door open too long.

It is a terrifying sector. Your AC unit shuts down, your products are screwed. Your vehicle breaks down, your products are ruined. Your temperature is not maintained even by plus or minus three, four degrees, your products start rotting.

The investment required to enter cold chain logistics is 2.5 times higher than dry logistics. The failure cost is also 2.5 times higher. Most entrepreneurs looked at those numbers and built warehouses for tires and batteries instead.

When Swarup and Rajnish launched Celcius in August 2020, they made a decision that seemed reckless. They would own nothing. No trucks. No warehouses. Not even, as Swarup puts it, “a cycle.”

Instead, they would build software: a transport management system, a warehouse management system, and an inventory management system, all developed in-house by a 45-person tech team. They would aggregate existing capacity, thousands of small transporters and cold storage operators scattered across India, and stitch them together with IoT devices, protocols, and real-time monitoring.

The tagline they chose was deliberately provocative: “The True Unbroken Cold Chain.”

This tagline was very, very provocative. Very bold. And it was not really something acceptable by the market that you claim to be the true unbroken chain. And obviously we were not at that time, but the vision was always simple.

Today, Celcius manages over 4,000 temperature-controlled vehicles, 150 cold storage facilities, and 250 hyperlocal riders. Every touchpoint uses Celcius apps and devices. The company tracks temperature, humidity, location, and door status in real time across its entire network.

The results: industry transit wastage averages 8%. Celcius maintains 0.4%.

Building the Machine

The challenge with an asset-light model is that you depend on thousands of independent operators who have no particular reason to be loyal to you. Swarup solved this with a program called Vahan Vikas Yojana, a name deliberately chosen to echo government welfare schemes for instant trust in smaller towns.

The program helps small transporters procure refrigerated vehicles and secure commercial loans. In exchange for exclusivity, Celcius guarantees minimum monthly income. The transporters do not worry about finding loads, negotiating rates, or chasing payments.

The economics are compelling. A transporter who puts down INR 5 lakh can expect returns of INR 25 lakh after five years, a 35% annual ROI. The program now has 500 vehicles enrolled with a three-month waiting list. Celcius has never missed a payment.

You give us a product, we make sure the product actually goes in that same shape, size and colour right up to your doorstep. That’s our responsibility.

The other half of the loyalty equation is simpler: Celcius pays on time. The company uses venture capital to fund working capital, ensuring transporters receive payment within 30 days whether or not enterprise clients have paid. In an industry where delayed payments are standard, this reliability functions as a competitive moat.

Celcius’s first month of operations generated INR 8 lakh in revenue from small agents and brokers.

My first month’s turnover was eight lakh rupees. So that also came from maybe 100 orders.

Five years later, the client roster includes Blinkit, Zepto, Zomato, Flipkart, Domino’s, Baskin Robbins, and Doctor Reddy’s. The company handles everything from quick commerce dark store fulfillment to pharmaceutical logistics requiring temperatures down to -80°C for biologics.

For two years, Celcius powered Zomato’s Legends program, shipping Hyderabad biryani to Delhi overnight via air cargo and temperature-controlled bags. When Zomato cancelled the program, Swarup pivoted rather than shut down. The same infrastructure now serves cloud kitchens, cafes, and specialty food manufacturers who want national distribution without physical presence in every city.

Transport accounts for 60% of current revenue, warehousing for 20%, new services like hyperlocal and air cargo for 15%, and pharmaceutical logistics for 5%. Pharma, just five months old as a vertical, is expected to grow fastest.

The Path Forward

The early fundraising was not glamorous.

We begged, borrowed, and we stole. Begged to get money. Borrowed from all the friends. And stole all the savings that we had in our own accounts.

Before institutional investors came calling, Swarup raised from 85 high-net-worth individuals writing checks between INR 1 lakh and INR 10 lakh. He describes those early days as “frozen callings,” spending 12 hours a day pitching anyone who would listen.

We partied hardest when we landed our first one crore check. Landing a 200 crore check, the party was smaller.

In May 2025, during one of the toughest fundraising environments for Indian startups, Celcius raised an oversubscribed INR 250 crore Series B, split between equity and debt. The equity was co-led by Eurazeo, making only their second India investment, and Omnivore, an impact fund focused on food safety. Total capital raised to date: INR 390 crore.

Swarup is explicit about what comes next: an IPO within three years. The company has built what he calls a “future-proof team” of 400 staff and 1,500 on-ground personnel, capable of handling significantly higher volumes. Expansion from 600 to over 1,000 cities is planned by early 2026.

CB Insights recently named Celcius a “Challenger” in global cold chain shipping networks, placing it alongside UPS, Maersk, and FedEx.

What I’m doing monthly here now was my yearly.

Near the end of our conversation, Swarup made a distinction worth noting. He was talking about the difference between entrepreneurs who build businesses and founders who build categories.

Ambition, everyone has. Every office-going person is ambitious enough to create their own company. But are they imaginative enough to imagine that company before it is created?

The cold chain in India was not a market waiting to be disrupted. It was a system waiting to be built. Swarup spent 19 years constructing refrigerated containers before he realized the containers were not the point. The point was what moved through them, and whether it arrived intact.

For the complete conversation, including how Celcius’s algorithms route vehicles to strawberry farms before the season begins, watch the full podcast episode.

Listen now!

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Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

“Our ceiling has fallen,” said the voice on the other end. Not a metaphorical ceiling. An actual cafeteria ceiling at Poonam Chambers in Worli. Fifty employees needed lunch, and Sodexo had its first client.

Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.

That moment in 1997 captures a pattern that defines Ravi’s career: finding opportunity in broken systems. Today, as Wonderchef prepares for its IPO, the company represents something rare in India’s startup ecosystem - a capital-efficient, profitable consumer brand built without the cash burn that has become synonymous with scaling.

The Education of an Entrepreneur

Ravi’s instincts were forged early. When his father died in 1986, he was barely 17, freshly admitted to Delhi College of Engineering. His sister was 11. With college fees at just ₹10 per month, education remained possible, but the emotional burden was crushing.

I realized I have to learn the ways of the world. That somehow forged me. It made me take responsibility in every situation and find a solution.

After IIM Ahmedabad, he joined Blow Plast (parent company of VIP Luggage) in 1993 as brand manager for Skybags. The soft luggage brand was stuck at ₹10 crore revenue. Customer research across 25 branches revealed why: in a country where 99% of people traveled by train, soft bags were impractical - easily slashed, water-absorbent, vulnerable.

Ravi’s solution was surgical. He targeted the emerging 1% who flew on new private airlines like Jet Airways and ModiLuft, offering free branded ticket jackets to airlines. Then came his masterstroke. Observing travelers at Mumbai’s international airport, he noticed wheeled cabin bags that didn’t exist in India. He bought one from the grey market (Heera Panna), reverse-engineered it, and created the “VIP Strolley” - a name so successful it became the generic term for wheeled luggage across India.

Building a Market That Shouldn’t Exist

In 1995, Ravi returned from Paris to launch Sodexo’s meal voucher business in India. He faced an impossible problem: the economic model didn’t work. In Europe, meal vouchers save companies up to 50% on social security charges. In India, those charges don’t exist. Companies would actually lose money by paying Sodexo a commission instead of giving cash allowances directly.

His first year wasn’t spent selling - it was spent lobbying. Armed with an overhead projector and a register, the 25-year-old visited bureaucrats in Delhi’s North and South Block until the government approved ₹35 per day as a tax-free meal allowance.

But changing the law wasn’t enough. He still had to convince companies to buy vouchers and restaurants to accept them - a classic chicken-and-egg problem. His breakthrough was psychological rather than economic. He repositioned meal vouchers from a finance decision to an HR badge of honor.

We managed to position that if you are giving Sodexo coupons for meals, that means you are taking care of your employees. You are a good HR manager.

Sodexo sponsored HR forums and awards across metros, investing in ₹300-400 trophies while competitors spent lakhs on logo placements. But Ravi’s team did the real work: managing registrations, hosting events, creating visibility. HR managers began championing Sodexo internally as a signal of a modern, employee-centric workplace.

By 2006, when Ravi left after building five businesses for Sodexo (meal vouchers, gift vouchers, facilities management, food services, and smart cards), the company had 20,000 corporate clients and employed 25,000 people. Today, that number exceeds 125,000 employees. Global headquarters still marvels: “Ravi, why do people buy meal coupons in India?”

The answer: sometimes markets aren’t about rational economics. They’re about status and signaling.

Wonderchef: Premium Products, Frugal Growth

At age 40, after a stint building hospitality ventures for Dubai’s Landmark Group (including the Yellow Chili restaurant chain with Chef Sanjeev Kapoor), Ravi launched Wonderchef in 2009 with ₹1 crore. He partnered with Sanjeev as co-founder, not merely endorser - a distinction that proved critical for credibility.

His product philosophy crystallized into three letters: HTC (Health, Taste, Convenience). He identified two consumer pain points: non-stick coating that peeled within six months (raising health concerns about chemicals in food) and opaque steel mixer jars that required physically holding the lid while blending.

His solution combined material science with aesthetics. Wonderchef imported Italian cookware, priced at 3X the market average but backed by 2-year warranties versus the industry standard six months. Replacement rates remained below 0.5%. Then came the color revolution - inspired by a Hermes CEO’s observation that “India is a land of colors,” Ravi launched vibrant cookware that customers began matching to their kitchen laminates.

The breakthrough was NutriBlend - a compact blender using polycarbonate jars (technology borrowed from premium luggage) with a screw-top design that eliminated the lid-holding ritual. It became the single largest-selling SKU in India’s mixer category and today accounts for 25% of Wonderchef’s ₹500 crore revenue.

But here’s what separates Ravi from most consumer brand founders: capital discipline. Wonderchef has raised approximately $20 million over its lifetime but burned less than $6 million. The remaining capital sits in working capital - inventory and receivables. The company is EBITDA positive and has grown 15-20% year-over-year for 17 consecutive quarters.

I see companies which have become ₹500 crore in consumer brands and still losing ₹100 crores, ₹200 crores every year.

At one point during Wonderchef’s early days, Ravi’s personal wealth dropped to ₹2 lakhs (excluding his home). He gave personal guarantees to banks - effectively mortgaging his house without telling his wife. The memory still makes him shiver.

Distribution as Competitive Moat

Wonderchef survived the COVID-19 retail collapse because Ravi had built four equal revenue pillars at roughly 25% each: modern trade, general trade, e-commerce, and alternate channels. When physical retail died, digital and direct channels surged.

The alternate channel includes a women entrepreneur network - 85,000 members across 1,000 towns conducting cooking demonstrations in homes. This channel operates on negative working capital (entrepreneurs pay upfront for inventory) and now contributes about 5% of revenue but remains “closest to our hearts” for brand building.

On digital, the numbers are striking: 6.5 million Instagram followers and 1.5 million Facebook followers - roughly 10X larger than Prestige, despite Prestige being four times Wonderchef’s size in revenue. Wonderchef was the first brand in its industry to launch its own website and partnered with DTDC for cash-on-delivery before Amazon normalized the practice.

What Comes After ₹500 Crore

As Wonderchef approaches its IPO, Ravi is betting on kitchen automation. The recently launched Chai Maker (₹4,999) automates the notoriously finicky process of making Indian masala tea - releasing milk precisely when the brew reaches optimal temperature. The Chef Magic (₹30,000) is a robotic cooker that chops, grinds, cooks, and cleans.

Ravi believes these products will follow the Air Fryer trajectory - Wonderchef launched air fryers seven years ago to initial silence, but in the past two years, the category has exploded. Sometimes markets need time to mature, and the patient builder has the advantage.

People often ask me: you were not necessarily the smartest guy in the class, so how did you build all these businesses? I said probably I had one thing that a lot of very smart people don’t have, which is patience.

That patience, learned at 16 when his father’s death forced him to become the family’s anchor, remains his defining trait. Wonderchef is now India’s fastest-growing brand in its category, reaching ₹500 crore faster than any competitor - a journey that took legacy brands 30 to 70 years.

His definition of success hasn’t changed.

Our aim is not to beat Prestige in size. Our goal is to be India’s most loved kitchen brand.

The 6.5 million Instagram followers suggest he’s already there.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Your Feedback matters

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Whether it’s about this episode or ideas you’ve been playing around with, shoot me an email at ad@thepodium.in. Your feedback keeps these conversations going, and I’m always up for chatting about your startup ideas too.

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt