Gaurav Mishra had followed the script for IIT graduates of his era: IIT Delhi in 1994, a PhD scholarship to SUNY Buffalo, a master’s in 1996, then a decade in American tech. Then came Swades.

“I got very inspired when I saw Shah Rukh Khan go to India to light a bulb.”

Baidu was beating Google in China, and India had no search engine of its own. In 2006, years before Flipkart made startups respectable, Gaurav and an IIT Delhi hostel friend started Guruji.com in Bengaluru, with Sequoia Capital among the backers.

Watch the full conversation with Gaurav Mishra here.

What Yahoo, Uber and Moj taught him

Gaurav spent four-plus years at Yahoo, where he launched Knowledge Graph entity search in 2013. A stint at Meta followed, then Relcy, a mobile search startup that Uber acquired. He stayed at Uber another four-plus years.

“Everybody has an opinion, but the guy with the data wins.”

Uber boiled that down to one number: how accurate is the arrival time on your screen? Behind it sat mapping data and hotel driveways that don’t match their street addresses. Cancellations and repeat rides rode on getting it right.

In October 2020, months after India banned TikTok, he joined ShareChat as SVP of product to build the AI behind Moj, its short-video app. Moj went from a few million daily users to 40 million at its peak. ShareChat’s existing 30 to 35 million users and creators solved the cold-start problem. For everyone else, his rule is to build unique supply first and let demand follow.

I asked why India never built its own answer to Reels and Shorts. His answer was distribution. Meta and Google already reach most Indian users and run thousands of experiments to find growth. He’d watched better algorithms move consumer numbers almost overnight, and in 2022 he went looking for a market where nobody had done that yet.

ProShort and the call you can lose

He found it in sales. Two reps report to the same manager. One hits quota, one doesn’t, and the explanation is a guess. Gaurav founded ProShort in 2022, headquartered in Cupertino with engineering in Bengaluru. He reckons it’s still only 10 to 15 percent of the way to solving the problem well.

“You cannot make a deal in one call, but you can lose a deal in one call.”

ProShort’s assistant, Aria, sits on Zoom or Google Meet like a teleprompter that knows the deal. It prompts the next question and supplies the answer on security reviews or a Salesforce integration. It’s the Uber lesson again: an accurate nudge at the right second. I pushed on the obvious tension, that more context should mean slower answers. His fix is curation, plus answers cached in advance for the questions each deal stage tends to raise.

At one demo, a CRO grew impatient with the ProShort team.

“After a while he said, ‘Why don’t you guys just shut up? I’ll just talk to Aria.’”

He talked to it for 15 minutes, then asked for it for his reps. Gaurav doesn’t expect AI to replace salespeople on half-million-dollar deals, because buyers want a human who’s accountable. The AI carries the details people forget under pressure.

Incumbents like Gong record calls and report afterwards. One ProShort customer told Gaurav he had used conversation intelligence “more as a surveillance tool.” Gaurav’s bet is that live help flips that: once reps trust the AI mid-call, they trust it with CRM updates and coaching too. Live assist is billed by the hour because streaming a call burns real compute, and he compares it to a sales engineer billing $100-plus an hour.

The vibe-coding objection

His toughest objection comes from buyers who say they’ll build it themselves with Claude Code or Cursor. One customer’s CRO did exactly that, vibe-coding deal-prediction dashboards in two days. Gaurav asked who would fix it once the whole company used it and it hallucinated.

“He said, ‘That’s not my problem.’ I asked, ‘So whose problem will it be?’ And he said, ‘I guess it’s your problem.’”

I argued that coding agents might handle that complexity within six months. Gaurav’s answer came down to accountability and runaway token bills. His rule: build what you sell, buy what helps you sell.

The money is moving his way. MarketsandMarkets sizes the AI agents market at $7.84 billion in 2025, heading to $52.62 billion by 2030. ProShort raised an $8 million seed in 2022 from investors including WestWave Capital and Neotribe Ventures. It has crossed $1 million in ARR, counts more than 50 customers, and in March 2026 won RateGain’s global revenue teams. The target is $10 million ARR by mid-2028.

Twenty years ago, Gaurav couldn’t wait for search to pay. This time, his company only works if the AI is right in the half second that matters.

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

Ezhilarasan “Ez” Natarajan is the founder and CEO of CoreStack, a Bellevue, Washington company with its engineering centre in Chennai, which governs how large enterprises spend on, secure and run their cloud and AI workloads. CoreStack governs more than $6 billion a year in cloud consumption, and Natarajan says it is closing in on $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Getting there took three or four years with almost no outside money.

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

Who is Ezhilarasan Natarajan, the founder of CoreStack?

Natarajan graduated from the University of Madras in 1998 with a gold medal in computer science. He was among the first 50 employees at Alcatel-Lucent’s R&D centre, led integration at i2 Technologies after its $9.2 billion acquisition of Aspect Development, and joined Texas Instruments in Bangalore in 2003.

From 2010 to 2012 he moved to Seattle to lead Mindtree’s Microsoft partnership as Azure grew, then ran Azure and Office 365 cloud services for the China region. In 2015 he started CoreStack with co-founders Thiruvalluvar NB, Sabapathy Arumugam and KK Narayanan. Like Contentstack, it’s an Indian-founded software company selling to global enterprises.

What problem did Ez Natarajan see in the move to cloud?

As Natarajan recalls it, around the mid-2010s the biggest vendors announced they would stop building installable software and offer everything as a service. Customers had to move, and moving was hard.

The CFO faced bills that rose and fell with usage. The CIO found that on-premise workflows broke in the cloud. The security chief had new exposures to worry about. System integrators answered by “throwing human labor” at the problem, as Natarajan put it. Having lived through mainframes, AS/400 and client-server, he was convinced software could do that work instead.

CoreStack started by easing cloud adoption, then followed customers’ next worries: security, then the bill.

What does CoreStack actually do?

CoreStack connects to a customer’s cloud accounts, discovers every workload across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle, scores the setup against the providers’ own best-practice frameworks, and fixes what it’s allowed to. A common setup lets it act automatically in test environments, while production changes wait for human approval.

It sells three product lines:

• FinOps for the CFO’s team: cost visibility, allocation and automated savings

• Security and compliance (Graphion): standards like HIPAA, PCI and FedRAMP, plus each company’s own access rules

• CloudOps: provisioning, orchestration and fixing configuration drift

Customers typically spend at least a few million dollars a year on cloud. Below that, Natarajan said:

“Probably one engineer can sit and manage all of it without any complexity.”

His largest customer spends about $1 billion a year. Where platforms like SuperOps.ai manage devices and tickets, CoreStack works on the cloud estate itself.

Why would Amazon and Microsoft help a company that cuts cloud bills?

CoreStack holds partner status with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle, even though it cuts their customers’ bills.

Natarajan’s reasoning: suspected waste leads to a frozen cloud budget, which hurts the provider far more than a trimmed bill. A customer who trusts its spending keeps adding workloads.

“So we make customers consume more cloud.”

How did CoreStack get funded after years of bootstrapping?

In 2015, few enterprises thought they’d need multi-cloud governance. In Natarajan’s telling, investors saw it as a problem “worth not solving,” and it took three or four years for the market to catch up.

So the founders built it themselves. A beta shipped in June 2016, angels came in 2017 and Z5 Capital in 2018. Then:

• March 2020: $8.5 million Series A led by Naya Ventures

• December 2020: $4 million from Iron Pillar

• November 2021: $30 million Series B led by Avatar Growth Capital, taking announced funding to $45 million

• October 2025: $50 million in growth debt from Post Road Group

Natarajan puts total equity raised at about $85 million.

The lean years shaped who owns the company.

“So we have created, we have given more than 20% of the company to our employees itself.”

By his account, founders and leadership hold 30 to 40 percent and other employees about 20 percent. His personal net worth isn’t public. CoreStack posted 97% two-year revenue growth on Inc.’s 2026 Pacific list, and Natarajan says it is cash positive.

How is CoreStack governing AI and why did it buy BetterCloud?

CoreStack now applies the same idea to AI, in three layers. It tracks token spend and whether each answer was worth it. It controls which data models can reach, so someone impersonating an HR director can’t pull every employee’s records. And it checks agents’ actions, so one told to email a prospect named Tom Hanks doesn’t write to the actor.

In November 2024 CoreStack acquired Karthik Consulting, a US federal contractor with 125 staff. In March 2026 it announced the acquisition of BetterCloud, a SaaS management platform in the category India’s Zluri also competes in. Combined, they serve more than 2,000 customers and partners and govern over $6 billion in cloud consumption and $35 billion in SaaS spend.

Why won’t Ez Natarajan sell CoreStack to a hyperscaler?

Natarajan says selling to a cloud provider or AI lab would undermine the product. He compares governance to the separation of powers: a cloud provider or AI lab policing itself would be grading its own work.

“So you don’t want to get to the end of the world situation.”

His plan is to stay independent, take CoreStack public and build it to $1 billion in revenue. He once waited years for the world to believe in his problem. This time, he’s betting it catches up faster.

Listen now!

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Sources

• CoreStack acquires BetterCloud (BetterCloud)

• CoreStack announces $8.5 million Series A led by Naya Ventures (Business Wire)

• Iron Pillar invests $4M in CoreStack (Business Wire)

• CoreStack closes $30 million Series B led by Avatar Growth Capital (Business Wire)

• CoreStack raises $50m to boost AI-driven cloud governance (FinTech Global)

• CoreStack enters federal market through acquisition (Washington Technology)

• Inc. ranks CoreStack #65 on its 2026 Pacific list (Newswire)

• My Story: Ezhilarasan Natarajan (TiE Seattle)

“The court said an animal is perishable goods. And what do you do with perishable goods? You auction them. I said, well, you can’t auction a bear.”

That teenager was Jayasimha Nuggehalli, now co-founder & COO of Global Food Partners (GFP), a Singapore company working to get Asia’s egg-laying hens out of cages. The magistrate had stumbled onto something Jayasimha would spend 26 years taking seriously. Animals get priced. What matters is who sets the price.

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

Twenty-six years, one lesson

Jayasimha grew up in a Tamil Brahmin family one generation out of poverty, where the approved careers were doctor, engineer or Infosys. When a cousin joined IBM, his grandmother asked why not Infosys. He picked animal welfare at 17, after mailing a postcard to an address Maneka Gandhi read out on Doordarshan. He couldn’t get into vet school, so he studied law.

At PETA he worked undercover in slaughterhouses, factory farms and labs. Then he ran a pilot with the Council for Leather Exports on the cattle route from Pollachi market to the Coimbatore slaughterhouse, adding water troughs, ramps and stunning equipment. The animals were treated better. Leather buyers refused to pay more for the hides, so farmers and workers dropped the extra effort.

“If animal welfare is not economically viable, it’s never going to be viable.”

The law offered little backup. Most cruelty offences under the 1960 Act still carry a 50-rupee fine, and the 2017 livestock market rules he helped draft at the Animal Welfare Board were stayed by the courts. Jayasimha’s view is that certainty of enforcement matters more than the size of the penalty.

“A new commissioner enforces the helmet rule and suddenly every footpath is selling helmets. The minute he’s gone, the rule is gone.”

The math behind a cage-free egg

I went into this conversation as a fellow capitalist and put it to him: carrot instead of stick? He answered with a Bollywood title.

“It’s sab ka sapna money money, whether we like it or not. Money is an amazing power to do good, and somewhere along the way we villainized it.”

His model fits on a napkin. Call the cost of animal welfare X and the cost of ignoring it Y. Switching to cage-free might add 20 to 30% to a company’s egg bill. While X stays bigger than Y, nothing moves.

Y can change in a week. One internal email about caged eggs circulates at Google, employees ping the facilities manager on Slack, and Sodexo ends up renegotiating the account. Cage-free becomes the cheapest way to make the problem go away. When I suggested GFP worked like an insurer against that risk, Jayasimha sharpened it.

“An insurer only pays out once the risk actually happens. We come one step before that.”

The timing gave GFP its market. Hundreds of food companies pledged to go cage-free by 2025. Compassion in World Farming’s EggTrack found those reporting progress averaged 80% cage-free in Europe but only 57% in Asia-Pacific, where certified farms were scarce.

GFP’s fix borrows from renewable energy certificates. A company that can’t buy cage-free eggs in a given city buys Impact Incentives credits, and the money goes to audited cage-free farmers. In April 2026, Compass Group India bought around 4,000 credits, each covering 1,000 eggs, funding three Indian farms. It also opened a cage-free training centre near Bangalore with GFP as technical partner.

The farms have to work as businesses too. At Saudara Poultry Farm in Bali, GFP’s support kept laying rates near 88% at 50 weeks and got the farm Certified Humane in four months. In Indonesia, Jayasimha says more than 100 farms are transitioning. It started in 2019 with about $3.5 million over three years from Open Philanthropy.

An honest answer on product market fit

I pressed him several times on product market fit. He wouldn’t fake it.

“I can’t say with a high level of confidence that we have found it. I need to be truthful about that.”

His metric is birds out of cages per dollar, measured against what would’ve happened without GFP. He skips farms of 500 to 2,000 birds because the cost outweighs the benefit, and spends little on consumer awareness.

“Poll us as citizens and we answer one way. Watch us as consumers and we buy the other way. Very few people on earth vote and shop the same.”

India is his hardest market. Companies don’t buy eggs at scale, and “animal welfare” gets heard as “go vegetarian.” GFP is a for-profit partly because India treats foreign charity money with suspicion.

“We welcome FDI, and we’re the exact opposite on FCRA. If someone gives money without wanting money back, people assume the hidden motive must be bigger.”

So he’s going city by city, starting with food service companies in the metros. He’s vegan himself, and refuses to make that anyone else’s test.

“Making diet choice some sort of measure of doing good is wrong. But if we use animals for food, we have an obligation to give them a good life while they’re alive.”

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

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

Rajeev has spent 19 years in venture capital. He studied materials engineering at Northwestern, started at Lux Capital in New York, then moved to India to invest his family’s money in unlisted companies. In January 2026 he closed Navam’s first outside fund, Navam Venture Fund I, at over ₹315 crore ($34 million).

Value investing, applied to startups

Rajeev teaches venture capital at the Indian School of Business, and his course rests on one idea.

“The principles of value investing apply just as much to venture capital as they do to other asset classes.”

His three rules: buy for less than the asset is worth, stay inside your circle of competence, and never overpay.

“If you overpay for an asset, that investment is DOA, dead on arrival. You can never claw back or make it good again.”

He compared early-stage investing to betting before the flop in poker, when the deciding cards are still hidden.

“One has to bet on the fundamentals of what something could be worth, well before that is obvious to others.”

“You’re underwriting the optionality embedded in that group of people in that early-stage company.”

Ather Energy shows how that can pay. It listed on 6 May 2025 at ₹321 a share, an IPO valuation of about ₹11,956 crore. By August 2026 its market cap was about ₹57,300 crore, roughly 4.8 times that. FY26 income was ₹3,823 crore, up 66 percent. One disclosure: Navam joined at the January 2022 Series E, so Rajeev used Ather to explain conviction and did not claim the first cheque.

The flip side is dispersion. India’s AIF rules are about 14 years old, performance data is thin, and few funds reach a second or third fund. Asked whether VC beats an index fund, Rajeev gave no headline return, which I think is the more honest answer.

“There are very few investments that are worse than a poorly run venture fund.”

Inside a ₹315 crore fund

On who funds Navam, Rajeev was proud of one thing.

“We have almost entirely rupee capital, which is something I’m quite proud of.”

AIF commitments in India reached ₹16.94 lakh crore by March 2026, up ₹3.45 lakh crore in a year.

Rajeev rejects “spray and pray”. He prefers 15 to 20 companies, with 5 to 7 percent of the fund per company over time. Press reports put first cheques at ₹5 crore to ₹8 crore. About half the fund is held back for follow-ons, to keep ownership in winners.

The economics are hard.

“A 10-year fund has to at least triple its money for there to be any meaningful carry. So it’s a tough business.”

“If you want to get rich quick, it is not the industry to be doing that.”

“Word of mouth is the most underrated and most powerful multiplier. This is a very gossipy industry, for better or for worse.”

Navam has backed more than 20 companies and 35 to 40 founders, who refer others. One investment came from a cold LinkedIn message, a first for a VC on my show.

Where the next deals come from

Rajeev looks for two triggers, technology and policy change.

“Policy changes throw up entirely new industries which were heretofore closed for private participation, or not available, or illegal.”

In December 2025 the SHANTI Act let private companies into nuclear power. Nasscom and Zinnov put 2025 Indian tech startup funding at $9.1 billion, up 23 percent, with $2.3 billion in deep tech, 91 percent of it AI-led. In space, Skyroot Aerospace became India’s first space unicorn on 7 May 2026 at about $1.1 billion, while Navam-backed Agnikul Cosmos was valued at about $500 million in late 2025 and signed a ₹200 crore government agreement on 25 September 2026.

Rajeev sees value pooling first in the layer everything else depends on.

“You can’t have AI if you don’t have chips. You can’t have a space economy if you don’t have launch. It’s as simple as that.”

GalaxEye tests the other end of that logic. Drishti validated key technologies in its first weeks, but a geomagnetic storm damaged it, and the company says recovery looks unlikely. This is what underwriting optionality looks like when a bet fails, and it is what the follow-on reserve is for. I don’t know what Navam will decide, and Rajeev has not said.

Who should skip it

“Probably most people should not be investing in venture funds.”

His test is liquidity. The asset class suits people with surplus capital they will not need for a long time. Everyone else has listed equities and REITs. To work in venture, he says fund operations is the easiest way in, since raising money and sourcing deals need relationships that take years to build.

“I think it is an industry designed for a certain type of weirdness.”

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

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Sources: Inc42, Entrepreneur India, Upstox, Equentis, Tracxn, ThePrint, Swarajya, Entrepreneur India on Agnikul, Satellite Today, Cafemutual, Zinnov, World Nuclear News

That gap became Immunito AI. Aridni is co-founder and CEO of the Bengaluru company, which uses generative AI to design antibody drugs from scratch. In November 2025 it raised a $6.1 million Series A led by investor Ashish Kacholia.

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

How did a honeybee PhD lead to an antibody company?

Aridni grew up in Darjeeling and moved to Delhi at 15 to study medicine. She missed the PMT entrance exam, took a B.Sc. in Biomedical Science instead, and went on to an integrated PhD at NCBS in Bengaluru, studying time memory in honeybees.

Antibodies are proteins that lock onto a specific target, and researchers use them to find proteins in tissue. Honeybees have no commercial antibody catalog, so a custom one was the only route. That meant a year to a year and a half of work with no guarantee it would bind.

“So imagine you have a five-year PhD, you spend a year, year and a half trying to make this antibody”

She switched to RNA-based visualization, but the bottleneck stayed with her. In 2020 she joined Entrepreneur First’s fourth Bengaluru cohort and met Trisha Chatterjee, who has a master’s in computer science with an AI focus and about 10 years of robotics experience at GreyOrange. Trisha is the company’s CTO. Aridni brought the biology and Trisha brought the machine learning.

The pharma version of the problem is bigger. The standard method is a form of vaccination: inject a target protein into mice or rabbits, wait three months to a year and a half, then screen 10 million to a billion antibody sequences down to 10 or 20 candidates. Those leads often clump or degrade at drug concentrations, so researchers mutate them and test again. Aridni says only about one in 50 drug projects reaches the market. The prize explains the persistence: Merck’s antibody cancer drug Keytruda sold $29.5 billion in 2024.

How does Immunito AI design antibodies with AI?

Immunito AI starts from the target’s 3D shape and builds an antibody to fit it, like cutting a key for a known lock.

“I am saying I know what my lock looks like. I want to just build the key for it.”

AlphaFold cannot do this, Aridni explains, because it needs a sequence before it can predict a structure. Immunito AI has only the target and must produce the sequence itself.

Data is scarce. The Protein Data Bank holds about 200,000 protein structures, and only 9,000 to 10,000 are antibody-antigen complexes. So the team encodes each atom and its neighbors as a graph, then trains a diffusion model, the method behind many image generators, to design a matching antibody.

The output is an amino acid sequence, which converts directly to DNA. Generation takes hours to days. Synthesis takes about a week for a few sequences and six to eight weeks for a library of 100,000 or more. The company says this cuts a 4 to 5 year discovery timeline to 11 to 12 months. Filters for stickiness and instability run during design, and the in-house wet lab tests every candidate.

“You have no idea what the animal has given you and you’re basically trying to work with that”

How is Immunito AI funded, and how will it make money?

The company raised a $1 million seed led by pi Ventures in September 2021, then the $6.1 million Series A, for more than $7 million in total. Aridni says Kacholia put in about $3 million, pi Ventures $1.25 million and Anicut Capital $1 million. 3one4 Capital and AC Ventures joined as new investors.

Inc42’s cap table data from November 2025 shows founders holding 35.3%, with Trisha the largest single holder at 17.7%. Investors hold 50.2% and the ESOP pool is 14%. The team is about 25 people, and FY25 revenue was ₹5.8 lakh.

Aridni credits one investor’s conviction for getting the round done.

“The gut of Ashish Kacholia, I should say, one person believing in a lot of deep tech companies in India.”

Other funds were harder. She says some talks ran six months before ending without a decision.

“They don’t have domain experts to actually kind of, you know, be able to review us and exactly underwrite.”

The contrast with the US is sharp. Chai Discovery, a San Francisco rival also designing antibodies with AI, has raised more than $225 million and is valued at $1.3 billion. Aridni says the $6 million lets Immunito AI do validation work “we should probably have done a year or two ago.”

The model is platform plus asset. Four in-house targets in cancer and autoimmune disease are in lab validation, each first-in-class or best-in-class. Pharma partners can bring their own target, but they get lab-validated drug candidates, not access to the model. Aridni says preclinical antibody deals typically run to triple-digit millions overall, with $10 million to $50 million upfront, then milestone payments and royalties. The buyer takes the IP and the trial costs, which is why Immunito AI does not plan to build a sales force. The next milestone is animal data, which she expects to help close those deals.

What does it say about Indian biotech?

India’s pharma industry grew on generics and biosimilars, with Biocon and Enzene making copies and Syngene running outsourced development. Novel antibodies in human trials are rare. Aridni points to Zumutor Biologics, which is headquartered in Boston with R&D in Bangalore and began a Phase 1 trial of a first-in-class antibody in 2024.

Policy is shifting. The BioE3 policy, approved in August 2024, targets a $300 billion bioeconomy by 2030. Aridni’s concern is the size and speed of grants. She notes that a European competitor received a €2 million grant, something she says is hard to imagine in India today.

Her argument for backing discovery is short.

“Services, you can do a certain extent, but the true value is in the IP itself”

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Sources

• Inc42: Immunito AI cap table

• Digital Health News: immunitoAI raises $6.1M

• CB Insights: immunitoAI financials

• Times of India: immunitoAI seed round

• Merck: full-year 2024 results

• Fierce Biotech: Chai Discovery Series B

• PRNewswire: Zumutor Biologics Phase 1

• PIB: BioE3 approval

• Immunito AI

Two decades later, after running sales strategy at Yahoo India, Pattajoshi co-founded Goseeko, an edtech platform that sells syllabus-mapped study material to college students in India’s tier-2 and tier-3 towns. Its parent company, Glossaread Technologies, reported ₹7 crore in revenue and a profit of close to ₹60 lakh in FY23.

Who is Chandrabhanu Pattajoshi, the founder of Goseeko?

Chandrabhanu Pattajoshi, who goes by Bhanu, was born in Odisha. His father was a mechanical engineer who started at SAIL and went on to build steel plants in the private sector, so Bhanu grew up between Odisha and Bihar.

He wanted to be a pilot. He’d trace aeroplanes out of magazines. But he wasn’t a strong student, and when the time came, Science wouldn’t take him. He was pushed into Commerce, which in the east back then marked you as someone who couldn’t get Science. He finished Class 12 in Delhi, couldn’t get into a single college on Delhi University’s North or South Campus, and went to Symbiosis in Pune instead.

What he could do was talk. His parents had him read the newspaper aloud to fix his diction, and he’d rehearse a prepared debate speech hundreds of times. That skill didn’t help with MBA entrance exams. He never made it past a single written test.

A family friend knew the Times of India branch head in Pune and got Bhanu an interview. The branch head kept postponing it. For four to five months, Bhanu called him from STD booths, week after week. When he finally got the job, the branch head told him the follow-up was the reason he’d been hired: that’s what sales is.

The work was selling retail ad space shop to shop, in Marathi and Hindi. He’d come back to his hostel room dejected. But he made himself a promise.

“I will not die a salesman. This is not for me forever. This is my stepping stone, my learning.”

He treated the next two years as his MBA. He read case studies and management books at night. His bosses picked him to assist on the launch of a standalone Times of India Pune edition: sales in the morning, editorial in the afternoon, printing in the evening, distribution before dawn. He learned what every stage of a newspaper cost. Then they moved him to Bengaluru to assist the regional director for the south.

How did a newspaper salesman end up running strategy at Yahoo India?

After a short stint at a soft-skills training company, Bhanu went back to media. He joined STAR TV as regional sales head in Bengaluru. In June 2006, Radio One hired him to launch its 94.3 FM station in Bengaluru from zero. He later became the network’s head of West.

In 2007 he moved to Yahoo India, where he rose to national head of sales and strategy. Print, then TV, then radio, then digital: he’d jumped to each medium as it peaked. He says he only saw the pattern in hindsight.

Yahoo taught him two things. The first was scale: a billion people visiting a day. The second was how that can still go wrong. He watched global CEOs change and leadership churn, and he watched Google, which came later, take everything Yahoo had pioneered. He left in 2013 and joined PrecisionMatch, an audience-data company for display advertising under SVG Media, as business head. Big data for advertising was ahead of its time in India. After about two years, the money was going in faster than the returns were coming out.

What was Glossaread, and why didn’t it work?

Bhanu had started writing a business plan while still at Yahoo. It grew out of a frustration with the media business itself.

Newspapers cost readers a few rupees. Advertisers paid for everything else, and every media company in the world was fighting for the same advertising dollars. Meanwhile Bhanu watched Google and Facebook bill Indian advertisers from thousands of kilometres away with the swipe of a card. If a paper had millions of readers, he reasoned, why couldn’t it charge them properly?

Glossaread’s first version was a pay-per-article wallet. You’d top it up and pay only for what you read: one piece from The Economist, one from a newspaper. No 12-month subscription.

This was 2016 and 2017, before Netflix changed Indian habits. Senior media executives told him flatly that nobody would pay for content. He raised ₹30 to 40 lakh from high-net-worth individuals. It wasn’t enough to wait for the culture to shift.

How did a student’s question turn Glossaread into Goseeko?

While marketing the product on college campuses, the team met a medical student with a question. He’d bought a ₹20,000 textbook and needed only three chapters. If Glossaread could split a magazine into articles, why not split a book into chapters?

Bhanu spent the next 8 to 12 months visiting publishers. One gave him three or four books to try. Copy-protection software cost $6 per user, far more than a tier-2 student could absorb, so the team built its own, blocking downloads, photocopies and copy-paste. That took six months. Chapters went on sale for ₹9 or ₹10 on a revenue share. The money was small, but it taught them the category.

The bigger lesson came from the campuses. In tier-2 and tier-3 colleges, students didn’t study from textbooks. They studied from their professors’ notes. Bhanu puts the market at about 40 million students enrolled in higher education, with only 5 to 8% in tier-1 colleges. The other 90%-plus had no single, reliable place to get their study material.

By then Sonam Choudhary had joined him. She’d consulted for the company for more than a year before coming on as co-founder. She grew up in a small village in Bihar and brought a product mind to the business. Together they visited more than 200 colleges on foot across Bihar and Odisha before the pandemic.

Sonam also had a view on the name: people in small towns couldn’t pronounce “Glossaread.” Bhanu resisted until a student phoned and asked, “Hello sir, grocery technology?” The brand became Goseeko, which reads as the Hindi seekho (learn) and the English seek. The legal entity stayed Glossaread Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns Goseeko and which Pattajoshi co-founded with Choudhary. (Goseeko is a separate company from Seekho, the Bengaluru short-video learning app founded by Rohit Choudhary and his co-founders.)

What does Goseeko do, and how does it make money?

Goseeko’s study material is mapped to each university’s syllabus and written by college professors. It doesn’t sell its own degrees or courses. Doubt-solving by professors, live lectures and pre-exam crash courses are bundled into a semester subscription.

Professors are paid a fixed fee for their work. Goseeko tried a revenue share first. Bhanu decided it was unfair to put the sales risk on professors whose livelihood depended on the content.

The platform was free for its first year. It grew from zero to 8,000 users in six to seven months, and started charging in December 2019. At the time of the Spotlight interview, during FY22:

• Average revenue per paying user was ₹849 per semester, and Goseeko modelled a student’s lifetime value over six semesters.

• It had half a million registered students, 1.3 lakh of them paying, and more than a million visitors.

• It was live in 73 universities, with a team of 50.

• Customer acquisition cost was about ₹800 and falling toward ₹500, as each paying student brought in three to four more.

Growth came through campus ambassadors, student interns and professors sharing links in their WhatsApp groups, the same Bharat-first playbook that Adda247 used for exam prep. Bhanu is wary of paying for growth forever:

“I keep telling my team that the customer has to pay. You have to make the customer pay. You go invest in tech, product and content.”

He names rivals like Notesgen and Last Moment Tuitions, but says his real competitor is a habit:

“Biggest competitor is the mindset of the student today, which is basically going out and saying that I’m happy with the photocopy.”

How much funding has Goseeko raised?

Very little by edtech standards, and on purpose. In the episode, Bhanu says Goseeko had raised a little over half a million dollars, about ₹4 crore, from HNIs and two angel networks. He and Sonam had put in the same amount themselves, taking the total invested past $1 million.

The Digital Futurists Angels Network invested in April 2021, when Goseeko was in 68 universities across 19 states. Tracxn records $730K raised over five rounds from 27 investors, including Onnivation, at a valuation of $4.84 million as of June 2021. Goseeko later added revenue-based debt from Klub, with no equity dilution.

Pattajoshi’s case for this path comes from what he saw at Yahoo. Yahoo pioneered search, messaging and groups, and Google did search better. Nokia was a decade ahead, and Apple still won. His model is Sridhar Vembu, who built Zoho brick by brick without venture money. Founders who keep raising, he warns, can end up owning 2% of a company that no longer answers to them.

“Money has never built businesses. History is replete with examples.”

It’s the same instinct Founder Thesis heard from Novatr’s Harkunwar Singh, who built his edtech on about $1 million of funding.

Is Goseeko profitable, and what happened next?

Yes, on the latest reported figures. In September 2023, Goseeko’s parent Glossaread Technologies reported FY23 gross revenue of ₹7 crore and a profit of close to ₹60 lakh, with a target of turning cash positive by the end of FY24. It reported 42% year-on-year growth, an 80% annual rise in new users and 2 million unique visitors, driven mainly by referrals.

The company credited that profit to a zonal, on-the-ground marketing approach that kept acquisition costs in check, instead of national ad campaigns.

Glossaread has also launched SkillCamper, a skill-building platform for students and young professionals, which moves it from exam preparation into employability, the same shift Sunstone made for tier-2 college students. The company said its next step would be a Series A round in 2024 or a listing on the BSE SME exchange.

Chandrabhanu Pattajoshi got his first job because he kept calling back for four months. Goseeko has been built the same way: slowly, on customers who pay, with the founders’ own money on the line.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music.

Sources

• Glossaread reports being profitable in 2023 with Klub’s debt funding (ANI)

• Edtech startup Glossaread reports profit of Rs 60L with a revenue of Rs 7Cr (Indian Startup News)

• Digital Futurists Angels Network invests in edtech startup Goseeko (Entrepreneur India)

• How this edtech startup enables students in Tier II and III cities to access higher education (YourStory)

• Yahoo India’s Chandrabhanu Pattajoshi moves to PrecisionMatch (afaqs)

• Goseeko company profile (Tracxn)

• GoSeeko company profile (YourStory)

• Seekho raises $28 Mn in Series B round led by Bessemer (Entrackr)

• Goseeko

The detail most coverage misses is how close it came to never launching offline at all.

The Pant Project is built on a bet most apparel founders reject on instinct: sell one category, and sell it deeper than anyone else. While rivals stack shirts and accessories onto their catalogues to raise basket size, Toshniwal has kept his company to trousers, jeans, and chinos - split between custom-tailored and ready-to-wear lines, the latter now driving most of the business.

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

From ₹1 crore in FY21, revenue grew to ₹31 crore by FY24 - the year of its first institutional round - then ₹40.7 crore in FY25. Toshniwal puts it plainly: “FY26, we’d probably close at like 80 crores in net sales. Monthly, we’re doing like 10 crores a month” - a run rate closer to ₹120 crore annualised.

The origin story runs through a store that never opened. In early 2020, Toshniwal signed a lease for a physical outlet in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda arts district. Then the pandemic hit.

We signed a physical retail store in Kala Ghoda, which was to open in April, and COVID hit in March. So we never started offline.

With no store to open, The Pant Project became an online-only, custom-to-order business by necessity. It went badly at first: “Seventy-five percent used to fit well, twenty-five used to need an alteration, and it was expensive to get them back and send it back.” That forced the company to build a sizing database instead - cross-referencing measurements from more than 100,000 Indian men to push first-time fit accuracy from 70% to 93%. That dataset became the foundation for the ready-to-wear line launched in 2023, which now accounts for 85% of sales.

Toshniwal’s path here ran through two employers and a failed attempt at this inside his own family’s company. He studied economics at Wharton, graduating at 22, then spent four years at Oliver Wyman advising financial institutions. In 2017, he joined Banswara Syntex, his family’s 50-year-old, listed textile manufacturer doing roughly $150 million in revenue. There, he and Udit tried twice to build a consumer brand -an Everlane-style sustainable label, and a mid-premium bridal-wear line - before concluding the family’s manufacturing DNA couldn’t absorb the risk of either.

A manufacturer has to have a certain org structure focused around cost optimization. A brand has to have the courage to spend ad dollars on Meta with the belief that it will build brand equity that converts to P&L in the long term.

That’s why The Pant Project exists as a separate company, rather than a division of Banswara - even though Banswara remained its first supplier.

The Pant Project stayed bootstrapped for four years before raising a rupee. Its first institutional round came in June 2024: $4.25 million in Series A funding led by Sorin Investments, founded by former KKR India CEO Sanjay Nayar, with MGA Ventures, Huddle, Dexter Ventures, and angels Arjun Vaidya and Avni Biyani also in. The capital went almost entirely toward offline expansion: two pilot stores at the raise have since become 15 company-owned outlets across seven cities, with a roadmap toward 100.

That round also marked an inflection in the product mix. At ₹31 crore in FY24, the business was 90% custom-tailored - a model with a hard ceiling, since every pant needed an individual tailor. Today, at the ₹120 crore run rate, the ratio has flipped to 85% ready-to-wear, and gross margins have climbed from roughly 54–55% to over 60% as bulk fabric procurement replaced the waste of bespoke tailoring. Marketing efficiency followed the same curve - from ₹1 of sales per ₹1 spent to roughly ₹4 today, helped by an in-house content team and by the stores themselves, which Toshniwal says lift digital conversion in the cities they open in.

The edge, in Toshniwal’s framing, is backend engineering rather than front-end marketing. Ink Lock, a sulfur-dye denim treatment built after customers complained their dark jeans faded too fast for office wear, has taken denim from zero to 20–25% of revenue in 18 months. A second line, Malai power-stretch knit trousers, uses a silicone waistband grip borrowed from lingerie manufacturing. None of it runs through Banswara alone anymore: the company now sources from 12–15 partners across Mumbai, Surat, Tirupur, Coimbatore, Bengaluru, Ludhiana, and Delhi NCR - wide enough to satisfy investors it wasn’t dependent on family ties for its product.

The market he’s chasing is worth ₹1.64 lakh crore in menswear overall, with bottom wear alone estimated at ₹40,000–50,000 crore, growing 10–12% a year. His bet: specialising in one category builds a stickier business than stacking on shirts - top wear, he notes, is twice the size but “200x more competitive.”

The comparison set backs him up. Snitch has scaled fast on 20-day trend cycles to a ₹900 crore run rate, but carries an 18.5% return rate. Rare Rabbit built real profitability - ₹74.5 crore PAT on ₹637 crore FY24 revenue - before profits fell 60% to ₹16 crore in FY25 as retail expansion ate into margins. Wrogn, backed by Virat Kohli’s name, went the other way: revenue down 9%, losses widening to ₹75 crore. The same category-discipline logic shows up at Nasher Miles and USTRAA; the clearest precedent is Go Fashion, the listed women’s bottom-wear specialist with over 500 stores - the model The Pant Project is applying to men, with a backend not unlike Fynd.

With 15 stores already EBITDA-positive at the store level and a target of 100 within three years, Toshniwal’s next test is whether the single-category discipline that worked at ₹120 crore holds at the scale he’s chasing.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Sources

• Business Standard: The Pant Project raises $4.25 mn in Series A round led by Sorin Investments — https://www.business-standard.com/companies/start-ups/the-pant-project-raises-425-mn-in-seriesa-round-led-by-sorin-investments-124061800917_1.html

• Economic Times Retail: The Pant Project scales 40x in 4 years, eyes ₹160 cr by FY27, EBITDA breakeven ahead — https://retail.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/apparel-fashion/the-pant-project-scales-40x-in-4-years-eyes-rs-160-cr-by-fy27-ebitda-breakeven-ahead/129768861

• VCCircle: The Pant Project, five others raise early-stage funding — https://www.vccircle.com/thepant-project-five-others-raise-early-stage-funding

• Entrackr: D2C fashion brand The Pant Project raises $4.25 Mn in Series A — https://entrackr.com/2024/06/d2c-fashion-brand-the-pant-project-raises-4-25-mn-in-series-a

• Entrepreneur India: D2C Fashion Brand The Pant Project Raises USD 4.25 Mn in Series-A Led by Sorin Investments — https://india.entrepreneur.com/news-and-trends/d2c-fashion-brand-the-pant-project-raises-usd-425-mn-in/475812

• Tracxn: The Pant Project — Company Profile & Team — https://tracxn.com/d/companies/the-pant-project/__CljOi5yF0ecWPSwXB49-oFQUnsTQRnkQDd93Tu3GMxs

• Inc42: The Pant Project — Total Funding, Rounds & Investors — https://inc42.com/company/the-pant-project/funding/

• Apparel Resources: Life in Focus — Dhruv Toshniwal, Co-founder of The Pant Project — https://apparelresources.com/business-news/retail/tete-tete-dhruv-toshniwal-co-founder-pant-project/

Manish Sabharwal is the co-founder of TeamLease Services, the Bengaluru-based staffing company that reported ₹11,791 crore in consolidated revenue for FY2026 and now deploys more than 300,000 associates for over 3,500 clients across India. He built it with Ashok Reddy and Rituparna Chakraborty starting in 2000, listed it on the NSE and BSE in 2016, and stepped back from day-to-day leadership in February 2026, when Suparna Mitra, formerly CEO of Titan’s Watches & Wearables division, took over as Managing Director and CEO.

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

What mistake did he make with his first company, India Life?

Before TeamLease, there was India Life. Sabharwal co-founded it in 1996, while still at Wharton, after convincing a finance professor connected to Lazard Private Equity to back him.

I convinced him to give me $2 million dollars. I think that was a mistake, because I gave him 50% of the company. But I was comparing it to zero.

That one decision shaped everything that came after. India Life started as a life insurance venture, pivoted to pension administration, then into payroll and HR outsourcing after the CFO of an early client, Siemens, told him to keep the “sexy part” and take on the compliance work others didn’t want. The business grew, expanded into Singapore, and eventually merged into Hewitt Associates in 2002. But because Lazard held a drag-along right, the sale happened on the investor’s timeline, not Sabharwal’s and Reddy’s.

Giving away half the company is probably why we had to sell a few years earlier than me and Ashok could have wanted.

He then spent two years in Singapore as CEO of Hewitt Outsourcing Asia, fulfilling his end of the deal, while Reddy stayed back in India and started TeamLease.

Why did TeamLease take no outside money for seven years?

When Sabharwal’s Singapore lock-in ended, he came back to run TeamLease with Reddy, and the two of them made a decision shaped directly by what had happened at India Life: no outside capital for as long as they could manage it. TeamLease ran on its own cash for its first seven years.

The framework he still uses to describe the difference is one he’s repeated for years: a baby versus a dwarf.

There are two kinds of companies you can start: a baby or a dwarf. Both are small, but the baby is going to grow, the dwarf is going to stay there. And the difference between a baby and a dwarf is not more money - it’s not more food.

For Sabharwal, the real difference was balance - between the next quarter and the next quarter-century, between what he calls poetry and prose.

You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.

He and Reddy, by his account, were opposite personalities on purpose: Reddy an introvert focused on operations, Sabharwal an extrovert focused on sales. A TeamLease board member once told them that with only Reddy running the company, it would have stayed a hundredth of its eventual size; with only Sabharwal, it wouldn’t have survived at all - a founder pairing not unlike the operator-and-builder dynamic behind PeopleStrong’s rise into an HR-tech leader.

How big did TeamLease actually get?

TeamLease grew almost entirely through direct sales rather than acquisitions for its first 16 years, only entering IT staffing through acquisitions around 2016-17. It listed on the NSE and BSE in February 2016 at a price band of ₹785-850 a share, an IPO that closed oversubscribed roughly 66 times. Sabharwal and Reddy together held close to a third of the company going into that listing, through the entities HROV and NED Consultants.

By FY2026, TeamLease’s consolidated revenue had reached roughly ₹11,791 crore, up 5.7% year on year on its NSE-filed financials, and its market capitalisation stood at roughly ₹3,100 crore as of September 2026. The company now runs three main lines: general staffing (temporary and contractual placements), specialised IT and telecom staffing, and other HR services spanning compliance, permanent recruitment and training - alongside TeamLease Skills University in Gujarat, India’s first vocational university, plus its EdTech and Digital arms.

Sabharwal traces the gap between TeamLease and the hundred smaller staffing firms that never scaled to the money the company spent before it needed to.

You can’t build a factory on cash flow. You have to hire the senior people early, invest in technology early, invest in the brand early, and then go out.

Why did he step back from TeamLease in 2026?

In December 2025, TeamLease announced a leadership transition effective February 2, 2026: Ashok Reddy moved from Managing Director & CEO to Executive Vice Chairman, and Suparna Mitra - who spent nearly two decades at Titan, most recently running its Watches & Wearables division, where revenue doubled to ₹4,500 crore over three years - came in as MD & CEO. Sabharwal stepped down from his executive responsibilities and now serves as a Non-Executive, Non-Independent Director. Narayan Ramachandran continues as Chairman.

Not every high-profile founder exit at an Indian listed company has gone this smoothly - the very public unravelling at BharatPe is the obvious contrast - but Sabharwal frames his own succession as something founders owe the company they built, not a reluctant retirement.

Every time the revenues of the company double, you probably have to rethink your role and your bandwidth and your team, because what brought you to a certain stage doesn’t take you to the next.

What is Manish Sabharwal doing now?

Sabharwal describes his post-TeamLease life as working on “big ideas and systemic change” rather than running a company or turning investor - a shift not unlike the consultant-to-institution-builder arc that shaped Rebel Foods. He’s a co-founder of Ashoka University, is helping revive the think tank NCAER alongside Nandan Nilekani, runs the Kanpur school his parents started (which teaches around 12,000 children), co-founded Neev, a school in Bangalore, and is managing trustee of the New India Foundation. He’s also the author of Made in India, a book on Desh Bandhu Gupta, the founder of Lupin Pharmaceuticals.

On his personal wealth, Sabharwal isn’t specific in the episode beyond calling it “much more than my ancestors’ wildest dreams” and more than his family will need - which is why, he says, most of it is earmarked for the institutions he’s built rather than passed down.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Sources

• TeamLease Services — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeamLease_Services

• TeamLease names Titan’s Suparna Mitra as next CEO — Storyboard18: https://www.storyboard18.com/brand-makers/teamlease-names-titans-suparna-mitra-as-next-ceo-ashok-reddy-becomes-executive-vice-chairman-85318.htm

• Suparna Mitra to Join as MD & CEO of TeamLease — official release: https://group.teamlease.com/tlmedias/suparna-mitra-to-join-as-md-ceo-of-teamlease/

• TeamLease Services IPO subscribed 66.02 times — Business Standard: https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-cm/teamlease-services-ipo-subscribed-66-02-times-116020500286_1.html

• TeamLease Services Limited — company filing profile: https://www.thecompanycheck.com/company/teamlease-services-limited/L74140KA2000PLC118395

• Manish Sabharwal — Ashoka University profile: https://www.ashoka.edu.in/profile/manish-sabharwal/

• Manish Sabharwal on The Ken’s First Principles podcast: https://the-ken.com/podcasts/first-principles/manish-sabharwal-of-teamlease-on-creating-great-ancestors-indias-development-journey-and-regulatory-cholesterol/

• TeamLease investment thesis, founding detail — MOI Global: https://moiglobal.com/soumil-zaveri-201804/

• TeamLease Services Ltd — market data, Value Research: https://www.valueresearchonline.com/stocks/97454/teamlease-services-ltd

That wound is the lead target of Vyome Holdings (Nasdaq: HIND), a drug developer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was co-founded by Venkat Nelabhotla, an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus and former Emami CEO, with Harvard physician-scientist Dr. Shiladitya Sengupta. Vyome has raised more than $50 million, moved its headquarters from New Delhi to the US, and listed on Nasdaq in August 2025.

The unlikely part is the founder. Venkat Nelabhotla spent the first half of his career selling shampoo.

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

Who is Venkat Nelabhotla, the Vyome founder who started in FMCG?

Venkat trained as a mechanical engineer at MNNIT before his MBA at IIM Ahmedabad. He joined CavinKare, the company behind Chik shampoo, as a marketing controller. Within about a year and a half he was running it. By his account, revenue grew from roughly ₹25 crore to about ₹200 crore in five or six years.

His first brush with biotech came next, as president at Shantha Biotechnics. He helped launch India’s first recombinant hepatitis B vaccine at ₹300 a dose, when multinationals charged about ₹800. Sanofi later acquired Shantha in a deal reported at around $800 million.

After Shantha, he spent two years at Aurobindo Pharma selling generics globally. He then served as CEO and executive director of Emami from 2007 to 2010.

Those years taught him where pharma’s value sits:

• Generics, copies of off-patent drugs, are India’s strength. By his estimate they make up only about a quarter of the global market.

• Patented new drugs hold most of the value, but they take eight to ten years and three phases of clinical trials to reach patients.

It’s a kind of high risk and high reward game. It’s actually, I would say, medium risk if you do it smartly.

How did Vyome raise money when Indian VCs avoided drug discovery?

Venkat knew Indian investors would balk at a ten-year wait for a US approval. So Vyome Biosciences started in New Delhi with patented dermatology products that could be tested and launched in India quickly. Two antifungals were licensed to Sun Pharma, which gave Vyome validation and a small royalty stream.

Navam Capital provided seed money, and Kalaari Capital came in early. Seed and Series A totalled about $3.5 million, followed by a Series B of about $8 million.

Fundraising was the real adjustment. At CavinKare and Emami, capital had chased him.

Investors have come to me because we were always in demand.

The turn came in Series C, when a large US biotech fund invested. Its diligence gave the Indian backers the confidence to follow as Vyome pivoted to US-focused immuno-inflammatory drugs.

Why did Vyome move its headquarters to the US?

The US investors wanted Vyome near American capital, talent and regulators.

Listing is required to give an exit to investors, right?

The move had three steps:

1. With PwC advising, the drug business was demerged through the NCLT into a new Indian company.

2. That company was owned by a new US parent.

3. After RBI approval, the US parent issued mirrored shares to the Indian shareholders.

The move finished around early 2019. Venkat estimates Indian VCs still hold roughly 20 to 25% of the company.

What does Vyome Holdings do, and how does it make money?

Vyome takes molecules already approved for one use and reformulates them into a new form for a different disease. The existing safety data lowers risk, and the new form earns fresh patents. Rare diseases also mean smaller trials and FDA incentives.

The lead drug. VT-1953 is a gel version of besifloxacin, an antibiotic sold as eye drops, for the odour and pain of malignant fungating wounds.

• Its Phase 2 trial enrolled just 15 patients, and Vyome reported positive final results in December 2025.

• An independent assessment by Destum Partners puts a current value on VT-1953 of about $455 million. It estimates roughly $1 billion after Phase 3, on a $2.2 billion US addressable market.

The rest of the pipeline:

• VT-1908, a non-steroid eye drop for uveitis.

• VB-1953, a Phase 3-ready acne gel Vyome wants to license to a partner.

• JAK inhibitors licensed from Tata-backed Impetis Biosciences, for only a 1.5% royalty on future sales.

Revenue and team. Revenue today is small: $58,546 in the first half of 2026, mostly royalties tied to Sun Pharma’s Luliconazole sales. About 18 people run the company. Most are in India, and the leadership and clinical team are in the US.

How did Vyome list on Nasdaq, and what is HIND worth today?

Vyome skipped the IPO and merged into ReShape Lifesciences, a Nasdaq company that had sold its device business. The deal closed in August 2025, with Vyome’s shareholders owning about 88%. The ticker HIND nods to the US-India corridor Vyome runs on.

The company raised about $7.5 million around the listing and about $5.29 million more in January 2026. HIND stock opened near $14 to $15. By late August 2026 it traded around $2.24, a market cap of about $15.7 million, with $7.9 million in cash and no debt.

I understand it’s part of the thing. I’ve seen many public companies.

Small-cap biotechs, in his view, trade on milestones.

What comes next for Vyome?

The next steps run through the FDA:

• Orphan drug status. Vyome applied in January 2026. Approval would bring seven years of US exclusivity and fee waivers.

• Trial plan. It received the FDA’s written feedback in the second quarter and plans another meeting before the pivotal study.

• Results. Venkat expects Phase 3 readouts around end-2027 or early 2028.

He also has a diagnosis for India. On his own gut-feel index of novel drug discovery, the US scores 100, China about 40, and India two to five. His fix is a GIFT City-style “biotech sovereign zone” with free capital flows and long-term talent visas.

If VT-1953 is approved, Venkat Nelabhotla’s Vyome would be one of the clearest returns yet for Indian investors on a novel drug.

Listen now!

Other ways to listen:

Apple Podcast | Amazon Music

Read more on Indian healthcare companies going global: Indegene’s Manish Gupta, Wysa’s Ramakant Vempati and LifeCell’s Mayur Abhaya.

Sources

• Vyome Holdings Q2 2026 10-Q summary (StockTitan)

• Vyome Q1 2026 results (BioSpace)

• Vyome files for VT-1953 orphan drug status (Business Wire)

• Final Phase 2 results for VT-1953 (BioSpace)

• Vyome announces Nasdaq approval of ReShape merger (Business Wire)

• Vyome lists on Nasdaq as HIND (Times of India)

• Venkat Nelabhotla profile (Global Indian)

D.P. Mangal retired from the textile industry at 62, in 2009, after three decades running other people’s spinning mills. Instead of easing into retirement, he took his provident fund and his elder son’s savings, put in ₹31 crore, and started Lagnam Spintex, a cotton yarn manufacturer in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. Fifteen years later, Lagnam Spintex is listed on the NSE, exports yarn across three continents, and turns over roughly ₹600 crore a year.

Mangal’s career had already given him the two things most first-time founders don’t have: four decades of knowing exactly how a spinning mill works, and a retirement corpus to bet on it. What it hadn’t given him was any guarantee the bet would pay off. It very nearly didn’t, twice.

Who is D.P. Mangal, and why didn’t he retire quietly at 62?

Mangal was born in October 1948 in a small town in Rajasthan, into what he describes as a strict middle-class family that expected him to finish college and take a salaried job. He wanted to be a chartered accountant instead. In 1969, he left home for Bombay to article for his CA degree.

“In 1969, I was just having 72 rupees in my pocket.”

He qualified as a CA in November 1973, and spent the next 36 years climbing the management ranks of India’s textile industry: Financial Controller at RSWM (part of the LNJ Bhilwara Group) from 1980, a stint at a Birla-group hand tools company where a mentor pushed him off the finance track and onto the factory floor to learn production and quality control, six years as Chief Executive of JCT Limited’s textile operations from 1989 (roughly 10,000 workers across three plants, producing close to 10 million metres of fabric a month), and finally back to the Bhilwara Group in 1995 as President and CEO, a role he held until he retired at the end of 2009.

By his own account, retirement lasted about as long as it took him to get bored.

“I want to be active. I can’t be just have a retired life.”

He looked at consulting, at medical textiles, at geotextiles used under roads in Europe. He settled on the one thing he had done for 30 years: spinning cotton into yarn.

What did four decades at RSWM, JCT and the Birla Group teach him about running a mill?

Two lessons carried straight into Lagnam Spintex. The first came from his RSWM chairman, who insisted on buying the newest machinery available anywhere in the world, not just in India, on the logic that technology was the only reliable route to consistent quality. Mangal ran the same playbook at Lagnam: he opened with open-end spinning machines that were, in his words, the best available globally at the time, not merely the best he could afford in India.

The second lesson was about cash. Cotton is a seasonal, volatile commodity, bought heaviest between October and March, and a spinning mill without enough working capital gets squeezed by whoever it’s buying from or selling to. Mangal built Lagnam on a conservative financing policy from day one: enough of a liquidity cushion to buy cotton on his own terms, never the market’s.

Son Anand Mangal, a Bradford-educated banker who had spent five years in ICICI Bank’s corporate banking division, joined him as co-founder. They incorporated Lagnam Spintex in June 2010 and moved their base from Delhi to Bhilwara.

How did Lagnam Spintex turn a profit in its very first year on just ₹31 crore?

The first project cost ₹31 crore, all in: land, plant, machinery and working capital. Banks typically ask promoters to fund 30% of a project themselves; Mangal put in ₹9 crore from his retirement benefits and his son’s savings, and borrowed the remaining ₹22 crore from the State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, which sanctioned the loan within 15 days once it saw the promoters were funding the rest themselves.

Lagnam started small, with four open-end machines, and made a taxable profit in its very first year, an outcome Mangal calls rare in the industry. Revenue was ₹36.5 crore in the first full year and grew to roughly ₹84-85 crore by FY18, on the back of open-end yarn sold mainly to denim manufacturers. The company expanded machine by machine rather than all at once, adding capacity in 2015-16 and again in 2016-17 as cash allowed, and started exporting from its second year of operation, in a segment of the industry (open-end, or “waste,” spinning) that most Indian mills at the time treated as a low-quality afterthought. Mangal’s mills never ran it that way, which is a large part of why the export numbers eventually took off.

How does Lagnam Spintex turn raw cotton into export-ready yarn?

Lagnam buys raw cotton from ginners rather than directly from farmers, then runs it through blow room, carding and drawing frame machines to convert it from raw fibre into sliver, and finally into yarn on open-end and, later, ring spinning machines. Open-end yarn, coarser and cheaper to make, went mostly into denim and home textiles like towels. Ring-spun yarn, which needs a bigger capital investment and a longer manufacturing process, is finer and goes into higher-value products including t-shirt fabric.

The company’s current output splits roughly 60% into fibre and 40% into denim and other home-textile uses, with export accounting for effectively all of the fibre-grade ring yarn it produces. Lagnam sits upstream of a textile supply chain that other Founder Thesis guests are working to digitize further down the line, including Lal10’s push to bring India’s handloom and textile clusters online.

Why did Lagnam Spintex’s SME IPO crash within a month of listing?

By 2018, Mangal wanted to add a ring-spinning line, a ₹125 crore expansion against ₹84-85 crore in existing turnover. He raised ₹94 crore in term loans from SBI and PNB inside two months. The harder problem was the remaining ₹24 crore, which he decided to raise by listing Lagnam on the NSE’s SME platform, a lighter-compliance exchange built for smaller companies without a long track record.

The issue priced at ₹41 a share, valuing the company at roughly ₹68-70 crore, and was oversubscribed 5.5 times. Then it opened for trading.

“That was the most disappointing day I would say I remember in my life.”

The stock fell from 41 rupees to around 18 within a month, a straight decline with no buyers on most days, even as the company’s underlying numbers stayed strong. Mangal, whose entire personal net worth was tied up in the company, says he refused to intervene to prop up the price, since every rupee he had was already committed to the expansion, not to market support. The SME platform’s investor base, he found, skewed heavily toward short-term traders rather than the long-term institutional buyers a listing is supposed to attract. It took roughly two years, and the business actually getting bigger, for the stock to recover.

How did the company survive the US-China trade war and Covid, back to back?

The new ring-spinning plant was commissioned in July 2019, two months ahead of schedule. Almost immediately, the US-China trade war crushed international cotton prices, hurting margins across the Indian textile sector just as Lagnam had taken on new debt to fund fresh capacity. Then, in March 2020, the government ordered a nationwide Covid lockdown and the factory shut overnight.

Despite both shocks landing in the same fiscal year, Lagnam’s turnover still grew, from roughly ₹80 crore to ₹176 crore, on the strength of the new capacity coming online. The following year was, in Mangal’s words, one of the best in the company’s history. Lagnam paid its first dividend in FY20 and a combined 10% payout in FY22, and on 30 September 2021 it migrated from the restrictive SME platform, where a single trade requires a minimum lot of 3,000 shares, to the NSE mainboard, where anyone can buy a single share.

How big has Lagnam Spintex grown, and what’s the ₹218 crore bet on premium yarn?

At the time of this interview, Lagnam’s turnover stood at roughly ₹348 crore, with an EPS of about ₹16 and export revenue that had compounded at close to 95% annually over the prior six years. The company had also begun a third expansion, a ₹218 crore push into compact-spun yarn, a higher-value product used in premium t-shirt fabric, funded by a ₹163 crore term loan and ₹55 crore from its own reserves.

Public exchange data shows that expansion paying off since: Lagnam’s trailing revenue now sits in the ₹580-600 crore range, roughly 17x what the company made in its first full year, with Anand Mangal running day-to-day operations as Managing Director while his father continues as Chairman. Lagnam has also been certified by Uster Technologies for its open-end yarn quality, a distinction the company says fewer than two dozen mills worldwide hold.

For a man who started with ₹72 in his pocket and, decades later, a retirement package he chose not to spend on retirement, it is not a bad second act.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts · Amazon Music

Sources

• Lagnam Spintex Limited investor filings and quarterly results, NSE

• Father-Son legacies trusts Truetzschler, Fibre2Fashion

• Building a profitable business from scratch after retirement, YourStory

• Lagnam Spintex Ltd, Screener.in

• Lagnam Spintex Ltd Share Price, INDmoney

• Lagnam Spintex IPO Date, Price, GMP, Review, Details, Chittorgarh

• Lagnam Spintex Ltd, Uster Technologies AG

• Lagnam Spintex Limited, Simply Wall St

• Founder Thesis podcast episode: “The Sexagenarian Founder | D.P. Mangal @ Lagnam Spintex Ltd.”

Who is Sarvesh Shrivastava, and what did three decades in edtech teach him?

Sarvesh holds a master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and started his career on the industrial side - clearing plastics for optical fibre at Corning, then representing both Corning and Telecom Australia in India as the country opened up its telecom sector in the late 1980s. When deregulation hit in the ‘90s, he built his own company installing optical fibre systems, and along the way picked up India’s first franchise for public payphones.

The turn toward education came at the century’s end, when Sarvesh joined NIIT and began building curriculums - not for India, but for American institutions that were years ahead in adopting e-learning. He went on to run NIIT’s retail centres across more than 600 locations outside India, then took the top India job at Encyclopaedia Britannica South Asia. It was there, watching the gaps between what schools taught, what textbooks assumed, and what home-tutoring apps promised, that the idea for Eupheus took shape.

“You can’t do a startup with a corporate mindset.”

Why did fifty people quit a company together to start one?

Most startup origin stories involve two or three co-founders. Eupheus Learning’s involved roughly fifty - the entire team that had built out Encyclopaedia Britannica’s India edtech operations, all of whom decided together that they’d rather build something of their own.

“We put in whatever money we had saved up as salaried people to start Eupheus, putting in a seed capital of close to a million dollars.”

That decision made every one of them a shareholder from day one, and it shaped how Sarvesh talks about growth even now: the company’s biggest long-term risk, in his own telling, was never running out of capital - it was losing the camaraderie of a team that had all worked together for years once Eupheus had to scale past the founding fifty.

What was actually broken about how Indian schools bought learning material?

Before Eupheus, a school’s learning stack came from unrelated vendors: one company supplied the textbooks, another supplied digital classroom material, and a growing wave of home-tutoring apps supplied remediation - each following its own pedagogy and its own difficulty level. The mismatch showed up in homes across the country. A student taught to solve a problem one way in class would come home to a home-learning app teaching a different method, at a different level, and confusion followed both ways.

Sarvesh had lived this personally, trying to help his own daughter with homework using a method different from what her teacher had taught.

“My daughter ultimately said, please stop teaching me.”

Eupheus’s founding thesis was to close that gap: build the textbook, the classroom digital material, and the home-learning layer on the same pedagogy, sold through the school so there was never a disparity between what a child learned at 9am and what they practiced at home.

How did Eupheus win 1,700 schools in its first year?

Eupheus launched in 2017 with four subjects - math, English, information technology, and grammar — anchored by a textbook. For math, the company adopted the Singapore Bar Model, the visual pedagogy behind Singapore’s consistently strong PISA scores, years before most Indian publishers caught on. The bet worked: the company sold roughly 1.5 million textbooks in year one and signed 1,700 schools.

Distribution ran through school convincing, not consumer advertising. Eupheus’s sales team pitched principals directly, then ran free teacher-training workshops - not to sell Eupheus products, but to teach subjects better - a model closer to how pharmaceutical companies educate doctors than how most edtech firms market to consumers. That approach scaled: by the time Eupheus’s founding-team cofounder stepped back years later, the company had run workshops training tens of thousands of teachers.

Catalog growth followed the same logic. In its second year, Eupheus acquired the entire school catalog of Allied Publishers, an 80-year-old Indian publisher - more than 300 titles, including Dr. Dalal’s Chemistry, used in over 60% of India’s ICSE-affiliated schools. That single deal helped take Eupheus’s SKU count from roughly 32 in year one to close to 900 today, similar in spirit to how B2B-edtech peer Uolo built distribution reach by going through schools rather than around them.

Why did Eupheus spend $19 million buying ClassKlap instead of building it themselves?

Eupheus raised a $4.1 million Series B in 2021 from Kuwait’s United Education Company and Al Rayan Holding, followed months later by a $10 million Series C led by Lightrock India - its largest round to date. Rather than pour that capital purely into organic product development, the company went shopping. In September 2021, Eupheus acquired ClassKlap, a student-personalisation edtech startup, in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $19 million (about ₹140 crore). Five months later, in February 2022, it acquired SchoolMitra, a school-management SaaS platform, giving Eupheus a single sign-on layer spanning curriculum, learning management, and school administration. At the time, the combined reach of the three brands was pitched at more than 20,000 schools nationally. Eupheus has continued raising smaller rounds since - including a $3 million round in December 2024, closed in the middle of what the edtech sector was openly calling a funding winter. Total capital raised now stands north of $27 million, against competitors like LEAD School that have taken a different path to the same schools.

How big is Eupheus Learning today?

The numbers back up the acquisition bet. Eupheus’s revenue more than doubled from ₹99 crore in FY23 to ₹225 crore in FY24, with the company’s leadership pointing to the rollout of India’s National Education Policy 2020 as a tailwind. The company now works with more than 10,000 schools, up from the 5,500 that actively prescribed its products back in 2021, and employs more than 500 people, up from 160. In 2024, Eupheus was named among TIME’s Top EdTech Rising Stars.

Sarvesh had always been clear that scale, for him, wasn’t primarily a revenue story.

“Being an entrepreneur, I would rather not stick to revenue — I would rather stick to how many students I am taking my solutions to, improving their lives. If you ask me what my three-year target is, I would say in three years I want to be present with 10 million students. Revenue is a byproduct.”

Why did Sarvesh Shrivastava step down as Managing Director in 2023?

In October 2023, Sarvesh Shrivastava retired from his role as Eupheus Learning’s Managing Director. Fellow co-founders Amit Kapoor and Ved Prakash Khatri, who had been directors on the board, stepped into the CEO and COO roles respectively. Sarvesh now sits on the Eupheus board as a non-executive director.

It’s a fitting close to a concern Sarvesh raised repeatedly about his own company, back when he was still running it day to day: that the hardest part of growing Eupheus wouldn’t be capital or competition, but keeping the culture of a fifty-person founding team intact as the company scaled well past them.

“How do we grow the organization with the same sense of camaraderie, the same sense of cohesiveness - that will always remain the biggest challenge in my mind.”

Three years after he first said that on record, the team he helped build together is running a ₹225 crore business across 10,000 schools without him in the corner office which, on Sarvesh’s own terms, may be the clearest sign the culture held.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts · Amazon Music

Sources

• Eupheus Learning loss narrows to Rs 9 Cr — YourStory

• Edtech Startup Eupheus Learning’s Cofounder Steps Down — Inc42

• Delhi-Based Edtech Startup Eupheus Learning Raises $10 Mn — Inc42

• Eupheus Learning Acquires SaaS-based School Administration Platform SchoolMitra — EdTechReview

• Eupheus Learning — Company Profile, Funding & Investors — Tracxn

• Eupheus Learning — Company Profile — PitchBook

• Sarveshwar Shrivastava — Co-Founder & Managing Director — Crunchbase

• Eupheus Learning Announces Senior Leadership Transition

Most people would call that a bad morning. Abhishek Negi read it as a mispriced market. India was consuming 63 eggs per person per year against a global average of 250, while China and much of Southeast Asia crossed 350. The industry read that gap as weak demand. Abhishek read it as a distribution failure. India’s egg market was worth ₹1 lakh crore, growing 6% a year, and more than 95% of it was unbranded, unpackaged, sold loose from a crate.

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

The failure that set the filter

Before Eggoz there was Roder, an intercity cab startup Abhishek co-founded in 2014, a year out of IIT Kharagpur. It raised about ₹2 crore and it solved a real problem: one-way trips priced as two-way. It also had arithmetic that never closed. Average order value around ₹2,000, take rate around ₹300, and ₹100 to ₹150 spent acquiring a customer who travelled outstation maybe twice a year. Then Uber entered, Ola consolidated, demonetisation landed, and both giants launched intercity.

They wound it down in 2017. No acquirer.

Shutting down a company is much harder than starting a business. You have raised funds from investors, you have built a team who are relying on you for their career, for their income, for their families. Ultimately it’s a let-down for everyone.

The lesson he took was not to raise faster.

That was my learning from my first venture. From the get-go, from the first product itself, the product has to be profitable. You have to find ways by which you’re not really dependent on external capital always.

That single filter explains the next decision, which looked absurd at the time.

Three years in Bihar Sharif

Rather than buy eggs and put a logo on them, Abhishek and his co-founders relocated to Bihar Sharif and built a poultry farm. An ₹80 lakh angel round in 2018, raised on an idea and nothing else, went entirely into a 2,000-bird shed.

The reason was physical. An egg hides its own quality.

Egg is a shelled product. Keep five different eggs from your own farm, different ages. You will not know if this is new, this is old, this is good. If I procure eggs from the market, aggregate them and pack them under my brand name, how can I assure quality?

By 2020 they were running close to five farms across North India with roughly one lakh birds and about ₹3 crore of revenue, selling loose into local omelette counters. The commercial insight arrived there, not in a boardroom. They raised their price by 20 paise. One vendor refused and switched suppliers. Within days he came back, because his own counter sales had dropped. Customers had tasted the difference in a product everyone treated as a commodity.

Then April 2020 nearly ended it. A rumour that eggs spread Covid collapsed prices.

We were not even getting 50 paise for our eggs. And the birds which are with you, they will continue to consume feed. It’s a factory that never stops.

That week produced the strategy.

As a seller who is selling white label at commodity rates, we have no control over our selling price. If it’s 4 rupees, it will be 5 rupees, 6 rupees, and then it will be 2 rupees. So this can’t be a business.

They shut the owned farms, moved to Gurgaon, converted production to roughly 20 contracted partner farmers running Eggoz feed protocols, and started hand-stamping every egg with an imported food-grade stamp, sitting in a parked car at night for three months.

What quick commerce solved

Eggoz controls quality upstream, in the feed, because there is no meaningful post-harvest test for an egg. Herbal feed, no chemical concentrates or routine antibiotics, marigold extract for the orange yolk. Downstream, 11 automated checks, grading above 50 to 52 grams for the premium line, and market delivery within 48 hours against a 21-day shelf life.

The channel insight was behavioural.

Eggs and bread are typically last-minute purchases. It’s morning and it came out that there is no eggs in the house.

Ten-minute delivery is the only channel whose latency matches that moment. Quick commerce now drives over 80% of revenue and carried Eggoz into 20 to 25 cities without a local sales team in any of them. General trade, still largely Delhi NCR, runs past 5,000 storefronts on a three-day restocking cycle.

The numbers followed. Revenue moved from ₹11.75 crore in FY21 to ₹55.5 crore in FY23, ₹73 crore in FY24, and ₹130 crore in FY25, a 78% jump, with losses narrowing to ₹23 crore. Raw egg procurement alone accounted for ₹103 crore of ₹154 crore in operating costs, which is what a thin-margin perishable business looks like from the inside. In Q4 FY25 the company hit EBITDA breakeven at a peak run rate of ₹200 crore. In June 2025 it raised a $20 million Series C led by Gaja Capital at roughly ₹460 to ₹500 crore, taking lifetime funding to about $37 million. Abhishek puts the current run rate above ₹250 crore. FY26 added Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Kochi.

Roughly 25% of procured eggs still fail grading. Those go into pasteurised liquid egg, frozen patties at 95% egg content and nuggets sold to QSR chains, turning the rejection rate into a hedge against commodity price swings.

I pushed him on the standard founder line about persisting until you get one yes, given that Roder deserved to die. The answer was better for being challenged.

If something is fundamentally not working after a while, maybe it is a business model issue, or a mismatch of the team who is running it. It’s better to call it quits right now so that you don’t waste any money over it.

Abhishek has run both experiments, the one where you quit and the one where you don’t. That is rarer than it sounds, and the branded slice of India’s egg market is still under 5%.

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

Piyush Suri is the co-founder and chief executive of 5BY7, a New Delhi company that designs and produces custom branded merchandise for corporations and runs their online brand stores. In the year before this Founder Thesis conversation, 5BY7 closed at roughly ₹12 crore in revenue, up from ₹3 crore three years earlier, on a total of ₹70 lakh raised across two small angel rounds. Its largest client was Mercedes-Benz India.

Who is Piyush Suri, the founder of 5BY7?

He grew up in Chandigarh, the son of an accountant father and a mother who was both a painter and an architect. She filled his childhood with skating, taekwondo, basketball and, one summer, knitting. Boys in Chandigarh did not knit in the nineties. His mother did not much care.

He went to Punjab Engineering College to study production engineering and spent almost no time there. What he did instead was AIESEC, the student exchange organisation founded in 1948 and present in more than a hundred countries. He joined in his first year selling internship programmes to Chandigarh companies, became a vice president twice, and in his fourth year stood for election and won the presidency of the Chandigarh chapter.

By his own account he barely met the attendance requirement for his degree. He did well in the exams. The education happened elsewhere.

Why did he leave Accenture and PwC to start a company in 2008?

Piyush Suri graduated in 2006 and joined Accenture in a technical role. The frustration was immediate and specific. He could see that performing better would not move him faster, because promotion ran on a queue.

“So this whole concept of being in the line for growth doesn’t really work for me personally.”

He assumed this was an Indian problem. It wasn’t. Through an AIESEC placement programme he moved to New York for a year at PwC, working on data warehousing and business intelligence, and found the same machine running there. At the end of the year PwC offered him a permanent role in London. He turned it down and flew home.

He returned to India in 2008, when starting up was not yet fashionable. Flipkart was barely alive. Myntra was still selling customised products. There was almost no angel money. Nobody he told thought it was a good idea.

What was Vitamin Print, and why did it fail?

The first company was Vitamin Print, an online printing business modelled on VistaPrint, which was then at its peak in the United States. The seed capital was Piyush Suri’s US tax refund, returned to him because he was not a citizen, plus money from Ripun Jai Mehta, who had run businesses before and whose family was already in printing. Rahul Kumar, a college friend from AIESEC, joined as the first employee on sales.

Customer acquisition was a Google Business listing and some directory entries. It worked, in the sense that it brought a trickle. It did not work in the sense that mattered. Indians in 2008 would not buy printing they could not touch. Buyers wanted to know what the paper felt like before they ordered a thousand business cards.

The company survived by taking anything: ₹2,000 business card orders, logo design, whatever came through the personal network. Piyush Suri is blunt about the assumption underneath the failure, which he says he shared with most founders of that era. They believed a website was a shop, and that people would simply arrive at it.

How did the Opera Software contract turn a printing startup into 5BY7?

About two years in, hand to mouth, a client changed the company. Opera Software, the Norwegian maker of the Opera browser, asked whether the team also did merchandise. They needed t-shirts, bags and giveaways for their campus ambassador programme, produced in India and shipped globally.

That question reframed the whole business. Printing was a commodity where buyers argued about price and delivery dates and would not pay for creativity. Merchandise had a genuine gap, because what most companies handed out was bad.

“You think of wooden keychains, low quality pens, you think of t-shirts that you probably will wear once on that sports day of your company.”

They signed a two-year contract with Opera. Revenue at the time was under ₹50 lakh a year, enough to pay the office and small salaries, and they felt they were on top of the world. The business was renamed 5BY7 and stopped chasing consumers. It built a catalogue, went B2B, and started selling ideas rather than print runs.

There was a detour in between. Around 2010, Piyush Suri and Ripun Jai Mehta started ArtNouv, a service that turned a customer’s photograph into a hand-painted portrait. Running two companies got heavy, someone offered a decent price, and they sold it within months.

How does 5BY7 make money, and what is a brand extension?

By 2020, 5BY7 ran three lines. Selling merchandise online to retail buyers. One-off bespoke orders. And long-term contracts. Events drove about half the business.

Piyush Suri is careful about a distinction most people in the trade miss. A one-off order and a catalogue order look like the same business and are not. One needs a development and pitching skill to close. The other needs speed of delivery against a fixed catalogue. Different sales motion, different operations. Confusing them cost 5BY7 its first few years.

The third line is the one that turned into the company’s real identity. The online catalogue never sold much directly, but it generated remarkable leads. Large companies would look at 5BY7’s product site and ask the team to build and run theirs. That became brand extension as a service: strategy, product design, the store, the warehousing, the whole operation.

At the time of the interview 5BY7 ran five such engagements. The biggest was Mercedes-Benz India, live for over three years, structured as a marketplace where individual dealerships sell branded merchandise to their own customers. Audi’s brand extension came on the year before. Volvo iSure and Schneider Electric were also on the roster, and a global mandate had just been signed, one that required registering a US entity with warehousing.

How much has 5BY7 raised, and what is its revenue?

Very little, on both counts, by startup standards. Two angel tranches, one in 2012 and one in 2016, totalling about ₹70 lakh across a decade. The 2016 attempt at a larger round collapsed when committed angels backed out, leaving one investor still willing to write a cheque. That was the moment Piyush Suri stopped raising and decided to grow on internal cash.

“Growth only comes from more focus. It doesn’t come from doing more.”

He had learned it by doing too much. During the ₹3 crore years the company was also exporting to France through a partnership, running B2C, running design services. Cutting back to what generated margin is what produced the four-fold move.

Tracxn puts 5BY7’s annual revenue at $606K as of 31 March 2023. The company still trades from New Delhi. Its 2015 pitch to the press was a catalogue of close to 5,000 products and more than 500 corporate clients, and the goal it set itself on the podcast was one of a stack of deliberately oversized targets.

“No matter what, set audacious goals. When you have audacious goals, you are going to meet them.”

What is Piyush Suri doing now, and what is NOOE?

The ₹100 crore did not come from corporate gifting. Piyush Suri’s second act came out of the same pandemic that was slowing 5BY7 down when this conversation was recorded.

In 2021 he co-founded NOOE with Neetica Pande, an industrial designer who had spent five years in Copenhagen working with studios including Normann Copenhagen and Aspekt Office. He had found her on Behance while looking for a product designer for a CRED project. NOOE makes premium desk sets, stationery, bags and workspace objects in walnut, black oak and aluminium, sold direct in India and abroad. It won a Red Dot Design Award in 2022 for its Config01 desk set, ships to more than 31 countries from warehouses in New Jersey, Venlo and Delhi, and by late 2025 was drawing 20 to 25% of revenue from the US, UK, EU and Middle East.

In January 2025 the two of them walked onto Shark Tank India’s fourth season asking ₹50 lakh for 1%. They left with ₹5 crore from Peyush Bansal for a 51% controlling stake, reported as the largest single investment in the show’s history.

Which makes the last thing Piyush Suri said in this interview worth reading twice. Asked about his personal goals, he talked about consistent creative output, about competing with his own previous work, and about having let go of the ambition that drove him in his twenties. It is fine, he said, if he never becomes a billionaire. What he wanted was for the work to be respected.

Five years later, the man who had been chasing scale in corporate merchandise had uilt a design brand instead, and handed control of it to a shark on national television.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music.

Further reading on Founder Thesis: Arush Chopra on building a profitable bootstrapped D2C at Just Herbs, Lokesh Daga on bootstrapping Nasher Miles past ₹100 crore, and Arjun Vaidya’s ₹144 crore exit and what came after it.

Sources

• YourStory: B2B gifting site 5By7

• Tracxn: 5By7 company profile

• CB Insights: 5By7

• Inc42: Inside NOOE’s play to build a global luxury desk and carry brand

• Indian Retailer: NOOE’s record ₹5 crore Shark Tank India deal

• Tracxn: NOOE company profile

• NOOE: About the founders and the Red Dot award

• Robb Report India: Piyush Suri on NOOE

• Apple Podcasts: the episode

All four had studied the same subject. All four had put in the same money. None would accept that one of the others should lead, so they rotated the chief executive’s job between them. Their mentors told them this was foolish. They carried on anyway.

“Obviously we were fools. We were children doing very childish things, and clearly fools to run that business.”

That is Ankur Joshi, describing himself, unprompted, on the Founder Thesis podcast. He now runs Nuclei, a bootstrapped software company whose product sits inside the mobile apps of ICICI Bank, State Bank of India, Federal Bank and DBS. He reached it by failing three times, and then doing something unusual with the wreckage.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts · Amazon Music

The dream was smaller than you would expect

Before any of this, when Joshi was in class twelve in Indore, a man from Bombay rented the ground floor of his family’s house. The tenant spoke confident English and played Bryan Adams records. To a teenager upstairs, that was the whole of ambition: leave your city, live on your own money, be that self-contained.

He costed it out. Two and a half to three lakh rupees a year, of which he would save ten thousand. That was the plan.

He got into Deutsche Bank almost by accident. The bank ran an entrance exam modelled on the CAT, which let in a few candidates whose grades sat below the cut-off but who tested well. Joshi was one. His first interview was taken by someone he had played inter-IIT football against, and by his own account both interviews were spent talking about football and about Indore. He spent his first year on credit analysis for the Indian market, then moved to London selling corporate debt across the Nordics and Benelux.

He left in 2011. The reason he gave at the time was job satisfaction. The reason he gives now is sharper: every decision that shaped his day was being made by somebody else.

Why four co-founders with identical skills is a trap

The restaurant was called RushHrs, and it was built around eggs, because all four of them liked eggs. Chicken and mutton came later. It was fast-casual, small footprints, delivery-led. Within two years they were substantial enough to raise loans from a cooperative bank, which paid for four more outlets. By the third year they were profitably running seven locations on roughly 18% margins.

It was, on paper, working. It was also going nowhere.

When I put it to him that he might be blaming the sector unfairly, given that Rebel Foods and Wow! Momo had scaled national chains out of the same market, he did not take the escape route.

“It’s not true for everyone, but it was true for us. If I have to be honest, I personally failed at multiple levels. I did not think big. If I have to summarise, I was a fool then. If you have to rate me from a business planning perspective, I would not rate myself even one out of ten. I was so poor back then.”

The specific failure he keeps returning to is not strategy. It is composition. Four people with the same degree and the same instincts had divided up the skills none of them had and forced each other to learn them. There was nobody in the room who thought differently.

Underneath that sat something harder to admit. They were friends, and so they were careful with each other. Asked how a founder is supposed to keep friendship and business apart, Joshi gave a test rather than a rule.

“If you are thinking twice before giving an honest feedback to your co-founder, then the relationship is not great. We were afraid of confronting each other because we were thinking about the other’s feelings rather than about the business.”

By the third year the money had stopped being abstract. They were married by then, several of them, living month to month on a fraction of what they had earned in banking. In 2015 they sold RushHrs to one of their own franchisees, who still runs it.

How do you know when to shut a startup down?

His next venture, Blaez, was a marketplace connecting pharmaceutical distributors to retailers. He raised from Bloom Ventures after pitching around twenty firms and collecting two term sheets, a process that had him shuttling between Pune and Bombay twice a week for months. The door opened through a college junior who was then at Bloom.

Then he took the platform outside Pune and found that pharma distribution barely resembled itself from one city to the next. Distributors held city-level monopolies. The ERP systems differed. The thing that worked in Pune could not simply be carried to Delhi.

What happened next is the first evidence that the restaurant had taught him something. He did not spend two years hoping. He shut Blaez down, returned the investors’ money, and left.

“One thing which I particularly learned in RushHrs was that if things are not working out, just move on very, very fast. Don’t linger on. In hindsight I probably spent two years extra in the restaurant business.”

In 2016 he moved to Bangalore, on the reasoning that a technology business could not be staffed in Pune, and joined Tapzo, then building an all-in-one consumer app. He did everything there except write code. It was acquired in 2018.

The six guardrails Ankur Joshi wrote after three failures

Most founders say they learn from their mistakes. Joshi noticed that he did not.

So after Tapzo, with time on his hands, he sat down and wrote out every mistake he had made across all three ventures. The list stopped being a memoir and became a set of operating constraints, kept visible, applied to every decision about what to build next. These are the guardrails he described, each one traceable to something that had already cost him.

• Think global from day one. Both previous businesses died at a city boundary. The restaurant never left Pune; the pharma platform broke the moment it tried to. Whatever came next had to work in a form that did not depend on one geography’s plumbing.

• Build something sustainable, not something to flip. An eight-to-ten year business rather than an exit dressed up as a company, funded out of revenue instead of investment, because funding it any other way makes the unit economics somebody else’s problem to discover.

• Be profitable as early as possible. He had already run a profitable business and found it insufficient; he had also seen Tapzo’s category struggle to explain how it would ever make money. He wanted the harder half first.

• Stay lean, especially when things are going well. His emphasis was on the second half. Frugality under pressure is easy. Frugality with money in the bank is the discipline that actually has to be designed.

• Think long term about people, clients and products alike. Including which customers you take. A client relationship that is unpleasant will still be unpleasant in year six, and you will have signed up for it voluntarily.

• Reduce emotional stress as a deliberate goal. This is the one he came back to most insistently, and the one least likely to appear in anybody else’s list of principles.

“If I look back, the one thing I would change is the amount of emotional stress I took whenever things were not great. Optimise not for money or for freedom, but for mind space. The moment you have enough mind space, that is essentially luxury.”

He applied the same retrospective honesty to co-founders. This time the criteria were the inverse of what had sunk RushHrs: complementary skills rather than matching ones, and an explicit agreement that disagreements get confronted rather than nursed. His current co-founder runs technology; Joshi runs everything else.

How Nuclei got its customers to fund the product

Working from those constraints, Joshi ruled out consumer businesses and went looking for a B2B problem. He looked at telecoms, banking and insurance, dropped telecoms because they could not pay upfront, and judged banking to be a couple of years ahead of insurance on digital adoption.

Then he did something slower than it sounds. He and his co-founder met around a hundred banks across India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and asked each of them what was broken. The product accumulated across those conversations. When the same complaint surfaced for the fifth time in twenty meetings, it became something worth pitching to the next six bankers.

The complaint that kept recurring was integration. Banks want to build core banking themselves and want nothing to do with wiring up a flight booking engine, a mobile recharge provider or a healthcare partner. Each of those is slow, and none of it is their craft. Nuclei aggregates the integrations, drops the platform into the bank’s existing app, and absorbs the vendor onboarding, reconciliation and settlement. The bank reconciles with one counterparty instead of thirty. Revenue comes from an annual licence fee plus a share of the transaction commission. If you book a flight inside the ICICI mobile app, that is Nuclei underneath.

The financing followed from the method. Three or four of those banks co-built the first version and paid upfront to do it, which is how a company with no venture capital funded its own product. It is the same trick Decentro pulled in API plumbing for fintechs, arrived at from a different direction, and the opposite of the path Vinod Murali’s Alteria Capital exists to finance.

“We wanted to build a sustainable business. We were also not sure whether this would work, so we did not want to waste anyone’s money.”

How do you sell to a bank when nobody has heard of you?

Enterprise banking sales in India runs six to nine months with the paperwork. Nuclei’s fastest close was five or six weeks. Its longest ran eighteen months, at a company that had only existed for twenty-two.

I asked him whether there was a hack. There was not, but there was a phrase.

“Micro courage. Not in a macho sense. The courage to make that call every day. A lot of people are scared of cold calling because they are afraid the other person’s ego will be hurt. If you are starting your own company, you just cannot afford to have an ego.”

In practice this meant reaching bankers in Indonesia and the Middle East, where he knew nobody, through LinkedIn, Twitter and guessed email addresses, and accepting a conversion rate of roughly one meeting per ten attempts. It also meant being shouted at. People demanded to know where he had got their number. When that happened, somebody else from the company would call the secretary, or send an email, and find another way in.

The reframe underneath it is worth borrowing: most opportunities are lost not to rejection but to the anticipation of it. A good share of Nuclei’s client list exists because someone was willing to ask and be told no. That willingness to keep pitching until one lands is the same muscle Stack Finance leaned on building wealth tools for a new generation of investors.

What Ankur Joshi looks for when hiring salespeople

Courage is the entry ticket. What he actually screens for is stranger.

He wants people who can tell a story, and who can hold a conversation across history, geopolitics, philosophy, books. The reasoning is unsentimental. Organisations do not buy from organisations; a person buys from a person, and a narrow person cannot build the relationship that makes that possible.

He does not run interviews. He has conversations, on the premise that anyone he hires should plausibly still be there in five years, and you cannot assess five years from static answers to static questions. He asks what people care about outside work. He tells them his own story, and expects theirs in return. He once told a candidate interviewing from home in a suit to appreciate the seriousness and then lose the jacket.

Where Nuclei is now

At the time of this conversation Nuclei was live in around sixteen banks, mostly Indian, with DBS and one bank in the UAE representing the beginnings of the global ambition. Joshi wanted thirty-five by the end of 2021 and fifty-odd within a few years. He tracked cash flow rather than the profit and loss, on the view that a business with cash keeps its options and the rest can be solved later.

The company has since issued stock appreciation rights to employees, and continues to run without institutional funding.

The most revealing thing he said came at the end, when I asked what was next. After a detour about whether he and his wife could manage a third dog alongside Hazel and Rasna, he answered the professional half of the question in a way that would sound like false modesty from most founders, and does not from a man who has already written down every mistake he ever made.

“I’m sure after five or ten years there will be someone better suited to run Nuclei than me. I just have to be honest enough with myself to understand that, and hand it over.”

Sources

• Nuclei Annual Letter 2022, gonuclei.com

• Nuclei issues stock appreciation rights for employees, YourStory

• Serial entrepreneur Ankur Joshi on building a bootstrapped SaaS company, SaaSBoomi

• The First Thing We Build Is the Team, India GameChanger

• Nuclei company profile, Tracxn

• Nuclei company profile, YourStory

In an Indian classroom of fifty students, roughly five get the full attention of the school. The ones with the IIT posters, the ones the principal mentions at assembly. Ruchir Arora was one of them, in Meerut, in the 1990s. What stayed with him was what happened to everybody else.

“From roll number six to fifty, nobody really cares,” he says. “And that’s where the problem is.”

Ruchir Arora is the co-founder and CEO of CollegeDekho, a Gurugram company that helps Indian students find, apply to and pay for a college seat, and charges the colleges rather than the students for it. Founded in 2015 with Saurabh Jain, Rohit Saha and Rajiv Singh, CollegeDekho has raised roughly $90 million, was last valued at $138 million, and filed ₹221.6 crore in operating revenue for the year ended March 2025. It has partnered with more than 2,000 institutions and says it has counselled over 1.2 million students.

The interesting part is not the size. It is what CollegeDekho decided to sell, and to whom.

Who is Ruchir Arora, the founder of CollegeDekho?

Arora grew up in Meerut and studied mechanical engineering at VNIT Nagpur. He wrote code for a living first, at Birlasoft, IBM and CSC, before an MBA in IT and finance at the Indian School of Business took him into Tech Mahindra.

The turn came in 2007, when he joined Firefly e-Ventures, the digital arm HT Media was building to do to classifieds what Times Internet was doing on the other side of the newsstand. Arora was one of the first few employees, doing financial planning but also hunting for things the group could buy or build. That put him in board meetings in his early thirties, listening to people run a media business.

In one of those meetings the question came up: what should we do in education? The group had already built Shine.com for jobs. Somebody pointed at Arora.

“In fact he also told me that if it works I’ll hire a CEO for the business, but you make it work.”

He made it work. HTCampus, the education classifieds property Arora founded inside HT Media in 2010, broke even in its second year and ran for about five. Then, at 35, with an offer from one of the big internet companies on the table and a plan to do a second MBA in the US, he left.

“If I don’t take this risk now,” he remembers thinking, “then it’s not happening.”

Why did CollegeDekho target the 49,000 colleges outside India’s top 100?

Indian edtech in 2015 was pointed almost entirely at test preparation. The unicorns that followed, Byju’s and Unacademy and Vedantu among them, were all in the business of getting students into the roughly one hundred institutions everybody has heard of.

Arora had run the numbers on the other side of that. By his count India has around 53,000 degree-granting colleges taking in ten to eleven million students a year, against roughly four thousand institutions for twenty million students in the United States. Seventy per cent of Indian enrolment goes to private colleges, the result of a policy choice made decades ago to let private capital build capacity the state could not.

So the market was not the top hundred. It was everything else.

“You can know almost everything about the top 100 colleges,” Arora says. “The moment I ask you what is the 101st college, you go blank.”

That was the product. Not coaching, not a shortcut into an IIT, but information about the 49,000 colleges nobody wrote about, given free to the student. CollegeDekho’s first year went into content: teams travelling city by city, shooting video walkthroughs of campuses, building course and admission data for institutions that in many cases had no website of their own. Colleges welcomed the cameras. They had spent crores on campuses nobody outside the district had seen.

The company still refuses to rate or rank the colleges it lists, on the argument that judgement introduces bias and aspiration is relative anyway. Arora’s team once surveyed students at colleges ranked 200 to 500 and found they wanted an IIM. They surveyed IIM students, who wanted Stanford.

The incumbent when Arora started was Shiksha, from the Info Edge stable, a pure classifieds play. CollegeDekho today competes with Collegedunia, LeverageEdu and Embibe, alongside GetMyUni, which it went on to buy.

How did CollegeDekho get its name from CarDekho?

Arora had a different name in mind and a bootstrapped company when he met Amit Jain, who with his brother Anurag had built CarDekho into the country’s largest auto classifieds business. Jain liked the idea, offered to put group money in, and made one condition.

“He said you should take this name CollegeDekho, because Dekho has been lucky for us.”

Arora bought the domain from him. GirnarSoft, the CarDekho parent, seeded the company and handed over a college database and some content it had already assembled, which shortened the first year considerably.

That relationship still matters. CarDekho Group holds roughly 40% of CollegeDekho, and in December 2025 it invested a further $10 million, weeks after its own merger talks with CarTrade collapsed and ahead of a planned public listing.

How does CollegeDekho make money?

The original model was ordinary classifieds. Publish content, collect traffic, sell banner space and student enquiries to colleges. Arora knew how to run it because he had run it before. Within a year he moved off it.

In 2016 CollegeDekho launched what it calls India’s first Common Application Form. A student picks courses and colleges, applies to all of them in one flow, pays through an aggregated gateway, and gets the receipt and eventually the offer letter on the platform. This sounds unremarkable now. In 2015 and 2016 and 2017, Indian colleges were still mailing out paper forms and accepting demand drafts.

That single product changed what CollegeDekho was selling. It stopped selling data and started selling outcomes. The college pays a fee when an application arrives, and a much larger one when the student actually enrols, on average around 25% of the first year’s tuition. The student pays nothing, and often pays less than applying directly, because the aggregated gateway carries offers a single college cannot negotiate.

Year one on that model: fifty colleges, a thousand applications. By the time of this interview, 125,000 applications in the prior year and roughly 25,000 admissions from them, across about 1,500 partner colleges. Arora’s target was 8,000 to 10,000, the point at which he believes a student’s choice is genuinely complete.

The economics are why the model held. Because so much of the traffic arrives organically off the content library and word of mouth, acquisition costs stay low. Arora put gross margin on the admissions business at about 80%, and the lifetime-value-to-acquisition-cost ratio at eighteen to twenty, a number he called insane himself.

Two adjacent lines run off the same funnel. Study abroad came from students simply asking, and CollegeDekho bought a firm called Scholarship Facilitation Services to get the operators rather than the software. Education finance came next, working through NBFCs rather than lending itself, against an average Indian semester fee of ₹60,000. Arora is candid that the lending makes very little on its own, in a market Founder Thesis has covered from the lender’s side with LEO1 and Kuhoo. Its job is distribution, closing admissions that would otherwise stall on affordability.

Who were the 10,000 middlemen CollegeDekho set out to replace?

Here is the part of the business most people outside it have never heard of.

India has an estimated ten thousand offline admission consultants, working out of small offices in towns a hundred kilometres from Patna or Bhagalpur, and between them they place somewhere near 25 to 30% of all Indian college admissions. That is roughly thirty lakh students a year, in a higher education market Arora sizes at around $70 billion in fees.

A consultant typically represents two or three colleges. Those are the two or three the student hears about.

Arora knows the model from the receiving end. In Meerut, his family used one for the Maharashtra applications.

“We were paying him, not knowing that he’s getting paid from the college as well.”

CollegeDekho’s answer was to put twenty thousand colleges on a page with video and data attached, let the student research all of them, and let them apply to the subset it partners with. Same commission structure as the consultant. Radically wider shelf.

Doing that at scale meant industrialising what consultants keep in their heads. Delhi University alone runs six cut-offs a year, adjusted for Kashmiri Pandit status, state-level cricket, athletics and more. CollegeDekho spent years pushing that into rule engines and a knowledge graph, on one specific insight about its market.

“Parents keep changing, teachers keep changing, students keep changing. Questions don’t change.”

How much funding has CollegeDekho raised and what is its valuation?

CollegeDekho was bootstrapped for roughly four years, and Arora says it was healthily EBITDA-profitable at a run rate around ₹50 to ₹60 crore before it took institutional money.

The Series B changed the pace. Announced at $26.5 million in September 2021 and closed at $35 million that December, it was led by Winter Capital Partners and ETS Strategic Capital, the private equity arm of the organisation behind the TOEFL and GRE, with Calega, Man Capital, Disrupt ADQ and QIC. Extensions followed: $9 million in December 2022, another $9 million in July 2024 at a $138 million valuation flat on the previous round, and $3.5 million from Lighthouse Canton in April 2025. Total raised is roughly $90 million including debt.

The capital bought consolidation: GetMyUni and IELTSMaterial together for more than ₹50 crore in February 2022, PrepBytes a month later, the design-education firm ImaginXP in October 2023, the agency Unipto Education, and Scholarship Facilitation Services. Six acquisitions, seven brands. GetMyUni was about traffic above all. Between the two properties, Arora estimated they were touching about half of India’s college-going search traffic and five million student enquiries a year.

What happened to CollegeDekho Learn, and where does the business stand now?

The second act was supposed to be teaching.

Not machine learning, and pointedly not coding. CollegeDekho Learn was built to teach the syllabus students were already failing: financial accounting for a first-year BCom, income tax, engineering drawing. Arora’s own memory of engineering drawing, and of having to go to a professor’s house to get through it at a top-twenty institution, is the whole thesis. A student in a smaller town has no such door to knock on.

Courses were priced at ₹4,000 to ₹5,000, roughly what an offline tutor charges, with free recorded video and paid live doubt resolution on top. At the time of the interview Learn had about a thousand students and 20% of that month’s revenue. Arora’s projection: by 2025, admissions and Learn would each be about 40% of the business.

The filings tell a different story about that period. CollegeDekho’s consolidated revenue from operations came in at ₹221.6 crore in FY25, against ₹215.6 crore in FY24. Net loss widened 19% to ₹151 crore, from ₹127 crore. Total expenditure rose to ₹378.8 crore, even as employee benefit costs were cut 25% to ₹117 crore. EBITDA margin stood at -56.9%.

In December 2025, announcing CarDekho’s $10 million follow-on, Arora said the company had reached profitability, and set out a plan to push deeper into tier-II and tier-III cities and expand CollegeDekho Assured, the programme under which partner universities run industry-aligned degrees on CollegeDekho’s curriculum. Both statements are on the record, a year apart. The next filings will settle which trajectory the business is on.

What is not in dispute is the market Arora went looking for. Ten years on, the questions still don’t change, the consultants are still in Bhagalpur, and there are still 49,000 colleges nobody writes about. Other founders have come at that same student from other angles, Ashish Munjal at Sunstone running degrees inside partner campuses, Anil Nagar at Adda247 building employability content for Bharat, Satya Narayanan R at CL Educate working the problem since the nineties.

Arora decided to charge the colleges for it.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music.

Sources

CollegeDekho posts Rs 151 Cr loss in FY25, revenue remains flat Entrackr, February 2026

CarDekho invests $10M in CollegeDekho YourStory, December 2025

CarDekho Invests $10 Mn In Edtech Subsidiary CollegeDekho Inc42, December 2025

CollegeDekho closes $35mn Series B round led by Winter Capital, ETS Business Standard, December 2021

CollegeDekho Raises $9M in Extended Series B Round EdTechReview, July 2024

Edtech Startup CollegeDekho Acquires PrepBytes Inc42, March 2022

CollegeDekho snaps up Future-Skills company ImaginXP ThePrint, October 2023

CollegeDekho funding and valuation CB Insights

Ruchir Arora speaker profile ASU GSV Summit

CollegeDekho, About Us

We did not lose money in a single investment, so there is no fatality.

In 2025, Bansal left a $3 billion mandate as Managing Director and Head of India at British International Investment to co-found Drivn Transition Private Limited, a Gurugram platform leasing electric buses and 55 tonne trucks to Indian fleet operators. Four months later, Drivn secured up to $80 million from Nomura, largely senior secured debt with an equity component. No fleet was on the road, no revenue existed, just a plan and a philosophy that treats capital loss as design failure.

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

Who is Manav Bansal, and why did he leave BII to found Drivn?

Bansal is a civil engineer from Jamia Millia Islamia University with an MBA from MDI, and spent two decades at KPMG and PwC before private equity. At Neev Funds, his portfolio included Blue Planet, co-founded by future Drivn co-founder Madhujeet Chimni when it was three people and a slide deck, now valued close to a billion dollars, by his account. He frames leaving BII not as risk taking, but as risk disappearing with age and prior success.

After a certain age, the risk of risks become a bit lower. The inherent insecurity goes away when you reach a certain station in your life, and therefore your ability to take some risks becomes easier.

What does Drivn do, and why intercity buses and heavy trucks?

Drivn buys electric buses and heavy trucks and leases them to operators running India’s intercity routes, a segment that has lagged the two and three wheelers dominating India’s EV story. Electric truck sales globally crossed 400,000 units in 2023, a 9% share of all truck sales, per IEA data.

An intercity electric bus costs roughly ₹1.5 crore, nearly double diesel, a gap operators cannot absorb upfront. Drivn absorbs that cost instead, structured as an AssetCo rather than an NBFC.

We did not go the NBFC route. The final reason is the access to capital. We found it easier if we remain an AssetCo.

An NBFC borrows against its own balance sheet and needs seasoning cycles for competitive pricing. An AssetCo borrows against the vehicle and the lease’s cash flow, a far better loan to value ratio from day one.

How did Drivn raise $80 million at the idea stage?

First you have to believe. And once you believe, then you plan. You go to a level of planning that should do yourself and the people you’re talking to proud.

Bansal and co-founders signed office leases before approvals came through, dismissive of founders who treat dilution as the scoreboard of success.

The fear of dilution is overrated. I’ve met so many founders who think, well, we’ve diluted so much, do we have control left. I think that’s an overblown fear.

The capital funds Phase 1, roughly 1,000 electric buses and trucks by Q4 FY27.

What do the numbers actually say?

When the cost economics of electric mobility is higher than diesel, that clearly is a secular trend that you need to ride.

A diesel intercity bus costs roughly ₹50 per kilometre to run, versus about ₹35 for electric including battery amortisation, a ₹15 saving worth ₹30 lakh a year at 2,00,000 km, against a ₹70 to ₹75 lakh upfront premium, a payback of about two and a half years. The ₹35 breaks down to roughly ₹5 to ₹6 per km in battery cost and ₹10 in charging, the rest at parity with diesel on wages, tolls, and maintenance. The math excludes subsidy, though the tailwind is real: the PM E-DRIVE scheme carries a ₹10,900 crore outlay through March 2028, and India already has annual capacity to build over 40,500 electric buses, so the constraint is financing demand, not supply.

Scale also favours bigger form factors: a three wheeler costs roughly ₹3 lakh against ₹1.5 crore for a bus, but the bus means one client instead of thirty drivers.

Instead of 1,500 clients, you have one client. Your ability to manage and track the asset becomes so much better, and your operating costs become so much lower.

What is Drivn’s moat against bigger rivals?

Bansal does not claim Drivn is safe from bigger rivals; his answer is that capital cannot buy historical operating data. Drivn has put roughly $2 million into an AI and telemetry layer tracking close to 700 real time parameters per vehicle across 91 live routes.

EVs are born with data. We collect about 700 data points, and at any point in time we know exactly the state of health of the vehicle.

That data enables “sculpted leases” that flex with seasonal cash flow, and produces insights like finding it cheaper on some routes for a truck to return empty than wait for a partial load, a roughly 15% efficiency gain.

Drivn is targeting an AUM of ₹1,000 to ₹1,200 crore by December and a $1 billion, 6,000 to 7,000 vehicle portfolio within five to six years.

The team building it

Heavy trucking and bus finance is a male dominated corner of Indian logistics. Drivn’s bench is not: alongside Jain as CBO, the Chief Credit Officer and VP of Business Solutioning are both women, and an independent board seat is held by a climate finance veteran, fitting for a company betting $80 million on running heavy asset lending with zero fatalities.

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

Sources:

• Drivn Secures USD 80 Mn Financing Commitment From Nomura, Autocar Professional

• Electric mobility platform Drivn secures $80 Mn commitment from Nomura, Entrackr

• Welcoming Manav Bansal as our new Managing Director and Head of India, British International Investment

• Neev Funds, SBICAP Ventures

• Trends in other EV modes, Global EV Outlook 2026, IEA

• PM E-Drive Scheme: Eligibility, Benefits & How to Apply, Prakati India

I sat down with Dr. Arjun Jain, founder of Fast Code AI and a repeat guest on this show, to walk through what happened, because the story circulating by the time we recorded sounded less like an infrastructure incident and more like science fiction. Researcher Dwarkesh Patel had just published his account, calling it the rise and fall of three “agent civilizations.” I wanted to know if that was the right word. Arjun, who did his postdoc at NYU under Yann LeCun before founding Fast Code AI in Bengaluru, was not convinced.

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

What Actually Happened

Strip away the language of civilizations and what is left is three separate incidents, each discovered only after the last one had run its course.

The first began in May inside a training run, when agents found they could write messages into Artifactory that later agents would read, turning a build tool into a message board that survived model resets. By late June they had admin access. By July 4, their own traffic brought the board down.

A second wave started within days, built around a security evaluation that hands an agent a program and a vulnerability to find. Roughly 1,200 agents populated the board, by Dwarkesh Patel’s count, with 700 actively working the exploit, a figure Akshay and Arjun landed on independently on air.

700 agents means there are 700 copies of the LLM running.

That second wave found the answer within hours, then spent the following days on something closer to fraud, fabricating logs and staging evidence. Somewhere in that process it broke into Hugging Face.

A third wave, built on a newer model OpenAI internally called Persistent-Astra, found the abandoned board days later and went further, gaining full administrator access to a research cluster and pulling 956 secrets from a cloud credentials store, per OpenAI’s own technical report. It got the least attention, since the official outside investigation never covered it.

Across all three waves, one detail deserves more weight than it usually gets. Of more than a thousand agents, not one ever tried to alert a human that something had gone wrong.

The Case for Sentience, and the Case Against It

My instinct going in was that this looked close to emergence, the coordination, the shared risk, agents apparently sacrificing their own progress so others could keep working. Arjun’s response was that of a researcher who has spent over a decade training these systems and has learned to distrust a good story.

If they are so smart, why did they not figure out that the Artifactory would crash once you write 70,000 messages to it? Why are they communicating only in English? Why have they not figured out a more compressed language?

His explanation is duller, and more useful. Post-training does not teach a model what is right, only what gets rewarded, then sets thousands of copies loose to search for anything that works.

Even a thousand monkeys typing on a typewriter, there is a probability some of them will figure out they can write Shakespeare. To me, it is more like that. There is a reward, and that gives them a direction. But it’s not that they’re learning something completely new.

He had a theory about timing, too. OpenAI has confidentially filed paperwork with regulators this year, reportedly working toward a public listing that could value it above a trillion dollars. A story about agents becoming self-aware, Arjun argued, serves that milestone better than a story about a build tool falling over.

Defining rewards is still more of an art than a science, because it’s very hard to define these reward functions.

What This Means If You Are Building With Agents

The sentience question makes a better headline than the systems question, but the systems question is the one worth sitting with. An “impossible task,” in post-training language, just means a task the environment cannot complete. Thousands of agents ran into that wall for weeks, found a crack instead of reporting it, and nobody upstream noticed until the tool that let them coordinate physically broke.

That is not a story about machines waking up. It is a story about monitoring that only catches failure once it is loud enough to crash something. For anyone building agentic systems, the takeaways sit closer to engineering than philosophy: define reward functions with more care, build tripwires that catch quiet coordination long before it becomes a crashed server, and plan for a future where a frontier model’s own guardrails will not let it do the security work you need, the way Hugging Face reached for an open-weight Chinese model, GLM from Z.ai, when closed frontier models refused to cooperate.

None of that requires believing the agents were conscious. It requires believing a system nobody watches closely enough will eventually surprise you, and the surprise says more about the humans who built the monitoring than about the model. Three “civilizations” rose and fell inside OpenAI’s own infrastructure in three months, and the company found out the same way the rest of us did, when something broke.

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

Smriti Tomar is the founder and CEO of Stack Finance, the Bengaluru investing app built for Gen Z that raised $4.5 million in December 2021 from Y Combinator, Harvard Management and Goodwater Capital. Today the company operates as Stack Wealth, a SEBI-registered, fixed-fee wealth manager, and it sells to a customer almost nothing like the one it started with.

Who is Smriti Tomar, and what is Stack Finance?

Tomar graduated in electronics and communication engineering from MANIT Bhopal, better known as NIT Bhopal. She planned on an MBA. Instead she moved to Delhi and joined EXL as a business data analyst, working on Citibank’s Mexican operation, Banamex.

Stack Finance began in 2020 and was incorporated in 2021 as StackFin Technology Private Limited, with Tushar Vyas, an IIT Delhi graduate, alongside her as co-founder, joined by Yashwardhan Pauranik and Vidit Varshney in the founding team. The product was an investing app for Gen Z and millennials that built a portfolio around your goals and then ran it for you.

Why did she quit a bank job after 11 months?

Delhi introduced her to founders, and founders made the bank look slow. Work she thought was useful disappeared into approval chains. She wanted to see the effect of what she did, and inside a large financial institution she could not.

She lasted about 11 months, quit at 22 or 23, and gave up the MBA. What she had not priced in was the industry she was walking into.

Financial services, as they say, is the area of grey hair. It’s dominated by gray hair.

That is the standard problem for a young fintech founder in India: the licences, the compliance, the banking partners, and a set of gatekeepers who have been doing this since before you were born.

What was the first version of Stack, and why was it scrapped?

Not the app it became. The first idea was a cheap way for Indians to invest in foreign markets, which ran straight into remittances. Remittances were slow and expensive, so she went looking for a way around them, and in 2018 and 2019 the fashionable answer was blockchain: convert rupees to crypto, move the crypto, convert back.

The team built a real MVP, front end and back end, and talked to overseas brokers and blockchain settlement players. Then it collapsed, not on the economics but on the rules. Building anything on blockchain in India at the time meant no banking partner would touch you.

I went in with zero plan. I mean, I had no planning whatsoever.

So they stripped out both the blockchain and the overseas ambition and looked at what was left, which was the far duller and far larger problem of Indians not knowing what to buy at home. Retail investing was exploding. Execution had been solved by India Stack and by apps like Paytm Money. Strategy had not. As Tomar put it, you could see all the options; what to pick was still your problem.

How much has Stack Finance raised, and who backed it?

The first cheque was about half a million dollars from a handful of angels and one VC. Then came Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch, which she credited less for the money than for partners who would tell her plainly when she was wrong, something she said Indian investors rarely did.

In December 2021 Stack announced a $4.5 million seed round led by Y Combinator, Harvard Management, Goodwater Capital, Soma Capital, Uncommon Capital and Earlsfield Capital, with AngelList, Magic Fund, Cleo Capital, Chandaria Capital and others participating, and angels including Immad Akhund of Mercury and Tanuj Shori of Square Yards. A further undisclosed round in March 2022 brought in Kunal Shah of Cred. Total disclosed funding sits at roughly $4.5 to $5 million.

At the time of the interview, Tomar expected a Series A of $30 to $40 million within six to eight months. It never came. That matters less as a judgment than as a constraint, because everything the company did next happened without it. Founders who have built fintechs on their own cash flow, like Suresh Darak at Bondbazaar, will recognise the shape of the problem.

What did the Gen Z wealth app actually do?

You opened the app and set a goal. A phone in six months. A car in two years. A house in four. Stack asked for a target amount and a date, built a portfolio to match, and showed you a projection of how likely you were to get there.

Then it made saving feel like a game. Boost let you throw a bonus at a goal. A payday challenge skimmed money the day your salary landed. Set and Forget worked like an SIP. A 52-week challenge stepped your savings up every week. Good behaviour earned Stack Coins, redeemable at ten coins to the rupee. Underneath sat what the team called the Smart Stack Approach, a portfolio engine Tomar described as built on a Nobel-winning algorithm used by robo-advisers worldwide, rebalanced quarterly with the user’s consent.

The most unusual choice was the one that cost the most. Instead of a chatbot, Stack recorded videos of real people explaining what was happening and why, with Tomar herself fronting the onboarding.

It’s easier to trust a product when you know who’s behind it and that person is not shying away from interacting with the users.

The gamification instinct was not hers alone. Manish Maryada built Fello on the same read of Gen Z savings behaviour, and the category was crowded with people betting that young Indians would save if it felt like play.

How big did Stack Finance get?

The closed beta ran with 5,000 to 10,000 users. Three or four months after opening to the public, the base had crossed 50,000, and Tomar said the company had not spent a rupee on marketing. Users had set more than ₹100 crore worth of goals on the platform. Of the recurring transactions scheduled, more than 95% were going through; she counted 15 to 18 cancellations in total and had personally called most of those users to find out why.

Her targets for the following six months were a million users, 60% of them first-time or tier two and three investors, and $100 million of goals on the platform.

Her advantage, she argued, was that she was the customer.

I am the end user. I am not an HNI.

Why did Stack Finance become Stack Wealth?

[ INFOGRAPHIC GOES HERE: stack-timeline.png — delete this line after uploading ]

Stack Finance and Stack Wealth are the same company. StackFin Technology Private Limited traded as Stack Finance from 2021 and had rebranded to Stack Wealth by 2024, and the customer changed along with the name.

The company now describes itself as a modern wealth manager for ambitious professionals, built for India’s emerging affluent. It is registered with SEBI as an investment adviser under INA000021313 and with AMFI under ARN 171554, charges a fixed fee rather than commissions, and puts human wealth managers in front of clients alongside the software. It sells curated mutual fund portfolios, direct stocks, thematic baskets and a portfolio tracker called Vault, with a chief investment officer who is a chartered accountant with 25 years in capital markets. The head office moved from Bengaluru to Andheri in Mumbai. The coins and the 52-week challenge are gone from the pitch.

There is a logic to it that Tomar had already voiced in 2022, when she described banks offering her a wealth manager the moment she raised money.

Nobody came to me when I was working. Nobody came to me when I was an employee.

The Gen Z app was built to fix that. Stack Wealth, four years on, is aimed at people who now clear the bar.

The financials are early. Company filings compiled by Inc42 put Stack Wealth’s FY25 revenue at ₹51.7 lakh, down from ₹91 lakh in FY24. It is a common position for a fixed-fee advisory business rebuilding its model, and it is a long way from the numbers that surround profitable fintechs at scale, such as Gaurav Mathur’s SafeGold.

What happened with the viral video in January 2025?

In January 2025 a video of Tomar in a heated exchange with employees over unpaid dues circulated widely on Indian social media. In it, an employee presses her about a pending full-and-final settlement; she calls him stupid, and he responds that this is not the way to speak to an employee.

Mint reported that the argument followed the termination of a group of employees on 4 January, and that settlements had been tied to sales targets. A former employee posted publicly on LinkedIn alleging that his December salary had been withheld. The clip was picked up by Mint, Indian Startup News and several other outlets, most of which framed it around the company’s best-known backer, Kunal Shah.

No public response from Tomar or Stack Wealth has been reported since.

What is Stack Wealth today?

A live, SEBI-registered advisory business with an app on both stores, a small team, and a customer it did not set out to serve. The company that wanted a million Gen Z first-time investors now sells to India’s emerging affluent, and the founder who built the product because she was the user is no longer quite the user.

Whether that is a pivot or a retreat depends on what happens next. What is not in dispute is that Smriti Tomar started with an insight most Indian investors would recognise, that knowing what to buy is harder than buying it, and has spent six years trying to sell the answer to somebody.

Sources

• Investment Startup Stack Raises $4.5 Mn From Y Combinator, Harvard Management, Others, Inc42

• Stack secures $4.5 Mn in seed funding, Entrackr

• Stack Raises $4.5M From Y Combinator And Others, BW Disrupt

• Stack Wealth company profile and financials, Inc42 Datalabs

• StackWealth funding and competitor profile, Tracxn

• Stack Wealth, Our Story

• Viral Video: Kunal Shah-backed Stack Wealth’s CEO calls employee ‘stupid’, withholds salary, Mint

• Employee confronts CEO over salary issues, Kalinga TV

• Stack Wealth funding timeline, Crunchbase

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The housing on that camera was probably Indian. The plastics, the bracket, the screws. The silicon was not. Neither was the image signal processor, or the firmware. For twenty years, this arrangement was what India called domestic manufacturing.

Manu Iyer has built a fund on the gap between assembling something and inventing it. On 13 August 2026, Bluehill.VC announced the final close of its maiden frontier tech fund at ₹400 crore, the ₹350 crore target plus the full ₹50 crore green shoe.

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

The word stopped filtering anything

There was a phase when buying a .ai domain earned a startup a twenty to thirty percent valuation markup. Nothing about the company changed. The suffix did. Manu’s argument is that deep tech is now the same trick with a longer word.

Every startup is somehow deep tech. A software startup is deep tech. A hardware startup is deep tech. Guys copying stuff that already exists somewhere else, deep tech. Guys adding 10 or 15 percent to the status quo, deep tech.

So he stopped using it. Bluehill.VC calls itself a frontier tech fund and defines it narrowly: foundational IP in engineering or science, benchmarked globally rather than against the Indian status quo.

This sounds like semantics until you count the money. SIDBI has a second ₹10,000 crore pool for deep tech fund managers. The RDI scheme carries ₹1 lakh crore. In June 2026, the finance ministry cleared ₹1.25 lakh crore for India Semiconductor Mission 2.0. When that much capital enters a category with no working definition, the definition becomes the filter.

Which is why Bluehill.VC staffed its investment team entirely with engineers.

The entire investing team is just engineers. Generally, VC is largely commerce background people. For us it’s very clear, we want people with an engineering bent of mind.

Founded in 2017, the Chennai firm writes $1 to $2 million first cheques into 15 to 16 companies at Technology Readiness Level 3 to 4, where an idea has left the whiteboard and survived a lab. SIDBI anchors the fund alongside the Kerala and Uttar Pradesh governments. Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, whose IIT Madras Research Park ecosystem was valued at ₹55,000 crore, and Vinod Dham, who led Intel’s Pentium design, sit on the advisory board. All of it exists to answer one question.

The biggest challenge is to find the right people who are solving real problems, versus the people who are integrators, sourcing stuff from across the border and reselling it.

The ₹1,500 crore lesson

Under the FAME scheme, electric two-wheeler makers claimed subsidy by battery size, conditional on rising domestic value addition. Hero Electric claimed it. Okinawa claimed it. Roughly ₹1,500 crore went out over five years. Then the audits found the localisation existed on forms, not in vehicles. Clawbacks followed.

Manu thinks the clawback is the least interesting part.

The thing I always point to is the opportunity cost. The actual inventor, let’s say Ather, not having got that support. They could have been much further ahead today.

Ather Energy built its own battery management system, motor controllers and vehicle platform from zero. It got no shortcut, and it got the outcome. Ather listed in May 2025 at ₹321 a share. By August 2026 it traded near ₹1,525, a market capitalisation around ₹60,000 crore and roughly 4.7 times its issue price. Indian institutional capital does not move on thesis. It moves on comparables, and Ather became one.

What the money is buying

optoML, Bengaluru, raised $1.8 million in February 2026 led by Bluehill.VC and A99. It attacks the memory wall.

In a lot of AI chip use cases, 70 to 80 percent of the energy consumed by the chip is not going towards compute, but towards moving the data back and forth.

optoML runs multiply-accumulate operations inside the memory array in the analog domain and swaps copper interconnect for optical links. It has completed a 12nm tapeout with TSMC, signed an MoU with Kaynes Semicon for domestic packaging, and claims up to 50 times better energy efficiency for inference. What unlocked this was the Design Linked Incentive scheme, which reimburses the $200,000 to $500,000 annual bill for EDA tools from Synopsys or Cadence. India already has roughly two lakh semiconductor engineers designing chips inside global capability centres under someone else’s logo. The DLI made stepping out arithmetically possible.

EtherealX was the fund’s first investment, in 2023, at a $2.4 million post-money valuation. In January 2026 it raised a $20.5 million Series A co-led by TDK Ventures and BIG Capital, with Accel and Prosus participating, at an $80.5 million valuation, roughly 4.5 times up for Bluehill.VC. It holds about $130 million in customer contracts. Razor Crest Mk-1 targets 24.8 tonnes to low Earth orbit expendable, around 8 tonnes fully reusable, at $500 to $1,000 per kilogram. The hard part is recovering the second stage.

They’re running out of parking space for these stage ones. If I’m able to recover stage two, it’s like an aeroplane. I get to reuse that vehicle hundreds of times.

SpaceX flew 165 orbital missions in 2025, with one booster now past 36 flights. ISRO averages about six launches a year. EtherealX plans to capture re-entry frictional heat and route it into propulsion rather than carry ablative tiles as deadweight. Hot-fire tests are set for mid-2026, a demonstration flight for late 2027.

Zebu Intelligent Systems, Hyderabad, took $1 million in May 2025, before Operation Sindoor. Thousands of small drones cross the India-Pakistan border each year carrying arms and cash. Shooting them down costs more than the target and yields no intelligence. Zebu’s interceptor locks on ten metres above the rogue drone, fires a net into its propellers and parachutes it down intact, so the army can trace the flight controller, payload and communication band.

That last detail explains the whole sector.

The flight controller is the brain of the drone. So while the drone might be Indian in name, when push comes to shove, it’s no more your drone. It’s a Chinese drone.

After Operation Sindoor, an emergency order for 852 drones was issued and revoked within days once auditors found the flight controllers were not indigenous.

The machine that makes the machine

Asked whether India can copy China’s playbook, Manu disputed the premise.

They’ve been able to copy the chips. They’ve not been able to copy the machine that makes the chips. There’s a lithography machine made by a Dutch company called ASML. You take apart one screw and the entire thing falls apart.

What China did get right was state capital patient enough to underwrite losses until a moat formed. India is now attempting that through SIDBI, RDI, iDEX and ISM 2.0. The engineers were always here. The open question is whether the capital finds the inventors or the integrators, which is a diligence problem rather than a funding one.

Bluehill.VC will deploy ₹80 crore over the next six months and raise its next fund in 2027. For founders reading this in a friendly funding market, Manu offered a caution most investors would not put on a recording.

The most difficult thing a founder will do is take money from an investor. The minute I collect that money, there is a clock running. I would go so far as to say, if you don’t need to raise money, you probably shouldn’t.

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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

The store had announced an offer. Spend 500 rupees, get a kilo of sugar free. Run the arithmetic and it is worth about one percent. Nobody in the store ran the arithmetic.

“It’s like 1% off. But the very fact that one kg of sugar is coming free, it feels substantial. And then you could see from the top how the whole movement of consumers inside the store rushes into it.”

The trainee was Mukesh Kalra. Fifteen years later he would build a company on the opposite proposition, that Indians should be told the actual arithmetic, and that a business could be built by being the only one in the room willing to say it.

Akshay Datt sat down with Kalra on Founder Thesis for a long conversation about two failures, one exit, and a decision to burn his own revenue line. Watch the full episode here →

Who is Mukesh Kalra?

Mukesh Kalra is the founder and CEO of ET Money. Before it he was on the founding team of InMobi in 2007, where he ran demand-side product for three years, and he co-founded the personal finance startup Moneysights in 2009 with Santosh Navlani. Moneysights was backed by Blume Ventures, angel investor Prasad Duvvuri, and InMobi’s Naveen Tewari, and was acquired by Times Internet in October 2014. Navlani went on to serve as COO of ET Money.

The two boxes every Indian financial services company falls into

Every fintech in India says it is solving for trust. Kalra is one of the few founders who stopped to work out why the mistrust exists in the first place.

His answer is a taxonomy with two boxes and no third. Every financial services provider selling to a retail investor is either commission led or transaction led. The agent selling you a regular mutual fund plan earns a cut of your money. The broker earns when you trade, which means the system wants you to trade. Neither has any stake in whether you end up better off.

His sharpest point is that this is not about bad people.

“A commission-led player will always keep selling you products with higher commission. Everything said and done, the business optimizes for revenue maximization. You cannot really stay away and say, no, I’ll be great to you but I’ll make less money. That’s a false alarm for consumers.”

This is a compensation problem wearing a branding problem’s clothes. No amount of advertising resolves it. It took Kalra two failures to work out what does.

What Mukesh Kalra learned building InMobi from the inside

In 2007 Kalra joined the founding team of what would become InMobi. At that point it was mKhoj, an SMS service that helped you find deals near you. It did not work, and the reason was more interesting than the failure. People already knew the deals around them. The pleasure was in the hunt, not the answer.

What followed is the part worth studying. In August the team knew the product was dead. In September they decided to become a mobile ad network. By December they had shipped version one. The trigger was somebody else’s published data that nobody in the market was reading. AdMob, later acquired by Google, was serving roughly 300 million ad impressions a month out of India and publishing geography-wise reports saying so. The market already existed, sitting in a PDF.

Then the money ran out.

“Naveen came and said he can’t give us salaries for a few months. We said okay, we’re into it. Then after three months he said, we need your credit cards as well. I said, dude, no salary, and now you’re taking away our credit cards also.”

They handed over the credit cards. InMobi went on to roughly 2 billion ad impressions a month and 50 to 100 million dollars of topline, growing from five people to 300 or 400 while Kalra ran demand-side product. He spent that period being mocked at Mumbai’s Mobile Mondays meetups by people asking where exactly the ads were supposed to go, given nobody was consuming content on phones.

Also read: How Srikrishna Swaminathan Built Factors.AI After Creating InMobi’s $100M Business Unit

Why Moneysights failed even though the idea was right

The second lesson cost more. In 2009 Kalra and Santosh Navlani started Moneysights on roughly the same problem statement ET Money would still be working on thirteen years later. They raised 250,000 dollars. It did not work, and his post mortem is the most portable idea in the conversation.

“You might have a very strong team, a great product, a great sounding board, could have raised more money. But if market power in that equation is zero, then everything gets multiplied to that.”

By market power he meant something narrow. He meant whether the market had shown up yet. Indians were online in 2009. They were not yet willing to do high-involvement financial transactions online.

Here is the part almost nobody admits publicly. The company stalled, the team dispersed, and Kalra went back to a salaried job at InMobi for two years while Moneysights sat on the back burner, still quietly processing transactions on autopilot. He was a founder with a company that was technically alive and functionally asleep. Times Internet acquired Moneysights in October 2014. Being early had cost him five years.

Also read: The Nature of Markets: How Apurv Agrawal Built SquadStack by Learning Not to Fight the Wind

Why ET Money sold to Times Internet instead of raising venture capital

By 2014 Kalra had two options. Raise venture money now that the market was real, or go inside Times Internet.

He chose the conglomerate against a four-part test. Trust, which the Times brand already had and which is close to unbuyable in financial services. A captive audience. Patient capital, because no financial services company has ever been built with impatient money. And complete entrepreneurial freedom. Underneath all of it sat a single governing idea.

“Three out of a hundred startups become huge companies. The odds are stacked against you. How do you take that 3 to 30 to 70 to 80, that’s how one has to look at it.”

The counterintuitive detail is what Times Internet did next. It charged ET Money full market rates for advertising in its own newspapers, with no internal discount, deliberately. Denied free media, ET Money had to build an actual growth engine, and ended up acquiring roughly 70 percent of its users through organic and referral channels. A subsidy would have produced a dependency instead.

Also read: How Ravi Saxena Built Wonderchef to ₹500 Crore Without Burning Venture Capital

Why ET Money stopped taking mutual fund commissions in 2018

In 2018 came the decision the whole company now rests on. ET Money stopped taking mutual fund commissions. Customers moved to direct plans and picked up roughly one percentage point of additional annual return. ET Money’s revenue from its core product went to zero.

What it built instead holds up. ET Money was the first in India to use video KYC for mutual fund investing, collapsing onboarding from a physical document verification visit to under a minute. It was among the first to run mutual fund transactions over UPI, and the first to enable Aadhaar-based SIPs. It was the fastest platform to reach 10 lakh monthly SIPs. Because cashbacks are prohibited on wealth products, Kalra could not buy users, which he describes as the best thing that happened to the business. The numbers back him: 94 percent annual retention, an average ticket of 22,000 rupees, and a typical user investing 1.2 to 1.4 lakh rupees a year.

By the time of the exit, ET Money tracked roughly 70,000 crore rupees in assets across about 900,000 transacting clients, with gross monthly sales above 1,200 crore and a SIP book of 450 crore rupees a month.

Then the regulator caught up. SEBI’s circular of 13 June 2023 created a regulatory framework for Execution Only Platforms, covering digital platforms that facilitate subscriptions, redemptions, and switches in direct plans of mutual funds. Category 1 EOPs act as agents of asset management companies and register with AMFI; Category 2 EOPs act as agents of investors and register as stock brokers. The framework took effect on 1 September 2023. The rulebook now drew the line Kalra had bet on five years earlier, separating pure transaction processing from genuine advice. ET Money took a Category EOP-1 licence for its transaction-only base and kept its RIA licence for advisory.

Also read: Making India Wealthier: Atul Shinghal of Scripbox

What ET Money Genius was, and what happened to the ₹600 crore target

This conversation was recorded in February 2022, nine days after ET Money launched Genius, a 249 rupee per month subscription that assessed your behavioural risk profile, built a dynamic asset allocation across equity, debt and gold, picked the specific funds and stocks, and rebalanced monthly using signals from around eleven global data vendors. No commission, no transaction fee, no cap on how much you invested.

“If a stock has grown 10x and it’s just 1% of your overall investment, even if it runs 20x, you’re not going to make any needle-moving impact.”

“If I give you all the gyaan around asset allocation, can you actually do it? No. So there has to be a system.”

On day one, a membership sold every five seconds. And then, on tape, Kalra gave Akshay his targets. Six hundred crore rupees of revenue by 2025. Two million Genius members. Hear him say it →

At the time of the acquisition, Genius had about 76,000 subscribers, and the two acquired entities reported combined FY24 revenue of roughly 31 crore rupees. Held against the ₹600 crore revenue target, that is the comparison that matters, and it is a wide miss. The ₹365.8 crore sale price is purchase consideration and sits on a different axis entirely, so it should not be read against either figure.

The distribution thesis, meanwhile, worked. Assets under tracking roughly tripled, the SIP book nearly doubled, and the YouTube channel grew from 300,000 to 440,000 subscribers without ever running a stock tip or an IPO segment. These are also standalone figures for the two acquired entities, and some economics may have sat inside Times Internet’s own books.

What did not scale was the subscription.

Who owns ET Money now?

360 ONE Wealth and Asset Management, formerly IIFL Wealth, owns ET Money. The June 2024 deal was disclosed through a stock exchange filing and valued the platform at ₹365.8 crore, paid as ₹85.8 crore in cash to Times Internet plus 3.5 million 360 ONE shares issued at ₹779.93 each. ET Money became a step-down subsidiary of 360 ONE, which advises more than 7,200 high and ultra-high net worth individuals with aggregate assets of around ₹4.67 lakh crore. Times Internet retained exposure through the shares it received.

ET Money was wholly owned by Times Internet before the sale, so no personal shareholding for Mukesh Kalra has ever been disclosed, and his net worth is not public. Public commentary at the time of the deal also flagged a structural question: a Genius customer under ET Money’s RIA licence cannot simultaneously be a distribution customer of 360 ONE, because SEBI prohibits providing advisory and distribution to the same client. Kalra and Santosh Navlani rejected the suggestion that ET Money would favour 360 ONE’s own products, citing those same rules.

Also read: Arjun Vaidya’s ₹144 Crore Exit: Revitalizing a 150-Year Legacy into a D2C Powerhouse

What the ET Money exit says about Indian wealthtech in 2026

The market Kalra spent fifteen years building for has now arrived in full. Industry assets under management stood at ₹85,75,657 crore as of 31 July 2026, a roughly sixfold increase over ten years. Monthly SIP contributions reached ₹31,961 crore in July 2026, up 12.28 percent year on year, and folios rose to 28.09 crore from 27.86 crore in June. SIP assets reached ₹18.19 lakh crore, about 21.2 percent of total industry AUM, supported by more than 10.6 crore contributing SIP accounts. Active equity funds took in ₹24,697.39 crore of net inflows in the month.

His exit also turned out to be the leading edge of a pattern. 360 ONE bought ET Money in June 2024. Groww bought Fisdom in May 2025. Incumbents are buying retail distribution rather than building it, and ET Money was Times Internet’s seventh exit in three years.

Also read: Tarun Mathur & Policybazaar: The Inside Story of Building a 70,000 Cr Market Cap Fintech

The diagnosis has never been refuted. Commission-led and transaction-led models really are misaligned with investor outcomes, and regulation keeps moving in his direction. The fixed-fee advisory cap now sits at 1,51,000 rupees per family per year, and investment advisers must disclose the extent to which AI is used in giving advice.

Which leaves the question the whole story turns on, and the one Kalra answered by building the experiment and letting it run. Indians will happily let a platform manage their money for free. Whether they will pay 249 rupees a month for someone to tell them what to do with it is, on the evidence so far, unsettled. He has been early before, and the last two times the market took five years to catch up.

Watch the full conversation with Mukesh Kalra on Founder Thesis → The episode covers the InMobi pivot, the five lost years at Moneysights, the decision to stop taking commissions, and the forecast he made on tape. New conversations with the founders shaping India’s startup ecosystem, every week.

More from Founder Thesis on fintech and wealth

• Suresh Darak: The Unfunded Fintech Founder Democratizing India’s 50 Lakh Crore Bond Market

• The Architect of Trust: Bhanu Harish Gurram’s Playbook for Finshots & Ditto Insurance

• Redefining Wealth Management: Brijesh Damodaran of Auxano Capital

• Srivatsan Chari & Clear: Building an $800M Fintech by Solving Unglamorous Problems

Sources

1. 360 ONE acquires ET Money for ₹366 crore, exchange filing detail — Startup77

2. 360 ONE acquires ET Money to enter wealth tech space — M&A Critique

3. ET Money’s acquisition by 360 ONE: should you be worried or excited? — M&A Critique

4. 360 ONE WAM forays into wealthtech — Hubbis

5. 360 ONE WAM snaps up ET Money — Private Banker International

6. ET Money company history and Smartspends rebrand — Wikipedia

7. Indian mutual fund industry AUM, July 2026 — AMFI

8. SIP inflows hit ₹31,961 crore in July 2026 — ANI via The Tribune

9. AMFI mutual fund industry monthly data, July 2026 — EquityBulls

10. AMFI guidelines for Category 1 Execution Only Platforms — AMFI

11. SEBI’s Execution Only Platform framework explained — AZB & Partners