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.

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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

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!

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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

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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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

That day, roughly $20 million of Epigamia shares changed hands. It was not a fundraise; no new money reached the company. This was a secondary deal, where existing shareholders sell to other shareholders. What matters in a secondary is who chose to sell and who chose to buy more.

Who bought, and who sold

Two early backers used the deal to cash out. DSG Consumer Partners, one of Epigamia’s first institutional investors, sold down its stake. So did KA Enterprises, the family office of the actor Deepika Padukone. Both had held their shares for years, and each decided this was the moment to bank the return.

The buyers went the other way. Verlinvest, the Belgian consumer investor that first backed Epigamia with a roughly $6 million cheque in its 2016 Series A, increased its position. Sauce.vc joined the cap table for the first time. And Rohan Mirchandani’s own family bought more of the company he started.

“The strengthened commitment from Verlinvest, the Mirchandani family, and the new institutional commitment from Sauce is a strong endorsement of the business we have built and the opportunity ahead,” said Ritesh Gauba, who took over as CEO in May 2026.

The split is easy to read. The investors furthest from the founder decided their run was over, while the people who knew him best increased their stake in the company he built. Which leaves one question: what does the family see in Epigamia that a celebrity family office and an early fund were ready to sell? The best answer on record comes from Rohan himself, in one of the last long interviews he gave.

The category that didn’t exist

Rohan Mirchandani (1982-2024) grew up in New Jersey and took a degree from Wharton before coming home to India to build a fresh-food FMCG company. He co-founded the parent firm, Drums Food International, and launched Epigamia in June 2015 with Uday Thakker, Ganesh Krishnamurthy and Rahul Jain.

What he built was a market that did not exist. Greek yogurt had no Indian shelf to inherit and no domestic consumer already asking for it, so he created the demand himself. Revenue climbed from ₹87.8 crore in FY19 toward an ARR of ₹250 crore, and by December 2023 the brand carried a valuation of roughly ₹1,250 crore. Those numbers rested almost entirely on his conviction that Indians would pay a premium for a product they did not yet know they wanted.

He belonged to a generation of founders rebuilding Indian consumer from first principles. Shantanu Deshpande was building FMCG 2.0 at Bombay Shaving, Shankar Prasad was bootstrapping Plum into a ₹400 crore beauty brand, and Arman Sood was pioneering cold brew at Sleepy Owl. Epigamia carried the hardest version of that bet, because the others were at least entering categories that already existed. Rohan had to create his from scratch.

The pivot that made the company

Epigamia grew out of a failure. Its first product was not yogurt at all. It was ice cream, and at first it sold well. “We just thought we were kings of the world,” Rohan told the Founder Thesis podcast about that early run. “We literally thought we were unstoppable, we’d become invincible.” Then the monsoon arrived. Ice cream sales in India collapse for a third of the year, and the company could not build on a product that disappeared every wet season. So the team went looking for something Indians would eat in every month of the year, and settled on Greek yogurt.

His method for finding it was the real edge. New products went into a tight set of a couple hundred stores first, and the team judged them on whether strangers spent their own money before putting any capital into scaling. It let a small team test many ideas cheaply and commit hard to the few that worked. That discipline, turning a costly early failure into useful data, is the part of the company that never shows up on a cap table, and it is what the buyers are betting still runs through it.

The business that didn’t stall

The strongest evidence for his legacy is unglamorous: Epigamia kept performing after he was gone. Ritesh Gauba, a 24-year FMCG operator from Mars and Britannia, has driven the company toward profitability, with co-founder Ankur Goel elevated from COO and Uday Thakker still on the team. In FY24, operating revenue edged up 3.3% to ₹173.7 crore, while the net loss narrowed 74%, from ₹67 crore to ₹17.4 crore. The brand now sells Greek yogurt, artisanal curd, mishti doi, smoothies and snack packs through more than 25,000 retail touchpoints across 30-plus cities, and has raised over $60 million across its life from Verlinvest, Danone Manifesto Ventures and others.

A company that created its own category and has cut its losses sharply, now under an experienced operator, is the kind of asset early backers sell and long-term believers buy. What stands out here is that one of the believers is the founder’s own family.

Relive the Epigamia Journey with Rohan

Rohan rarely sat for long interviews, and now there will be no more. The conversation he recorded with us covers the ice-cream failure and the decade-long bet on a category that did not exist, and it is one of the few complete records of how he thought. To understand why Verlinvest and his family are buying while the early money sells, the founder’s own account is the place to start.

Watch the full conversation: A Masterclass on Pivoting & Scaling in Indian FMCG, Rohan Mirchandani (Epigamia)

Read the full story of how he built it: An Oral History of Rohan Mirchandani

Sources

• Inc42: Verlinvest, Mirchandani Family Raise Stakes In Epigamia In $20 Mn Secondary Deal

• Inc42: Epigamia Cofounder Rohan Mirchandani Passes Away

• Indian Retailer: Rohan Mirchandani Dies at 42, Leaving a Legacy in India’s FMCG Industry

• Wikipedia: Rohan Mirchandani

  Thanks for reading The Founder Thesis Podcast | Learn from disruptive founders ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

That’s when the penny dropped. And that’s when I started believing, saying, oh my God, this is something serious.

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

The hammers looking for a nail

Nothing in Ramakant’s CV pointed here. An MBA overseas, then strategy consulting, then investment banking at Goldman Sachs in London.

So I’m a consultant, so strategy consulting, investment banking. So as far away from mental health as you can imagine. So I probably caused more mental health issues than I solved in my earlier life.

In 2009 he and his wife left corporate life for a social enterprise set up under the UN and World Bank umbrella, endowed by the Qatari royal family, with Nobel laureates on the board and a mandate to build livelihoods in Middle Eastern conflict zones. Ramakant built a $100 million impact investment portfolio.

To make an impact or to move the needle on a big problem, you need creativity more than money.

They returned to India as, in his phrase, hammers looking for a nail. The nail found them. There was suicide and depression among friends and family. His father had bipolar disorder and was living alone. Ramakant became a caregiver, and the product’s first test subject, and remained unconvinced.

I was a skeptic, to be honest. When we launched, I was like, who will talk to an AI chatbot? Those days, they were customer service bots or bank bots or travel booking bots, and they were pathetic.

Within days of opening the invite codes, Wysa was adding 2,000 to 3,000 users a day, all organic, from people typing words like “therapy” and “anxiety” into the Play Store.

In mental health context, imagine a public health system serving maybe 3,000 people a year. And here we were getting 3,000 people a day.

Scale arrived years before a business model. What converted it was an email in 2020 that Ramakant assumed was a hoax until he checked the domain. A psychiatric nurse in the NHS wanted to know whether the founders had any idea what they had done, because her patients on long waitlists had nothing else and Wysa was the only thing staying on their phones. She then offered to teach them how to sell into the NHS.

Almost everything institutional flows from that stranger. Wysa now has more than 45 peer reviewed publications with partners including Cambridge, Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis. Its Digital Referral Assistant, built to the NHS DCB0129 clinical safety standard, has handled over 117,000 patients across 31 NHS Talking Therapies services since 2022, lifting self-referral completion to 91% and saving clinicians an average of 21 minutes per assessment. It powers Singapore’s national mindline.sg portal, works with nine insurers, and co-built a product with Swiss Re that reported a 30% fall in depression rates in December 2025. A trial with Travelers found injured employees using Wysa returned to work one third faster.

Winning by making the AI do less

While the industry raced to hand everything to large language models, Wysa built a cage around one. Ramakant calls the design neurosymbolic.

Symbolic architecture, which is creating guidance, control and safety, inside which there is a neural architecture which is delivering depth of conversation. And you need to have a fine balance between both.

His sharpest argument is about crisis handling. The liability-safe response of every general-purpose model is to refuse and print a helpline number.

Guess how many people actually make that call, even if they were in distress? It’s probably 10%. The remaining nine are in a sense left high and dry.

So Wysa builds a personal safety plan with users while they are calm, then invokes it when distress is detected. You said you would call your mother. Is this the time to make that call? Wysa is now working with IEEE on global standards for AI and mental health.

Buying the pathway, and printing a workbook

Healthcare carries a documented 17 year lag between proven innovation and adoption. Rather than wait it out, Wysa merged with April Health in March 2025, unlocking Collaborative Care billing codes inside US primary care, then acquired the physical therapy company Kins in September 2025, adding a second reimbursement pathway. Both were stock swaps, for equity in a Bengaluru headquartered company.

The economics are unusually disciplined for a nine year old AI business. Ramakant puts revenue at roughly $11 million ARR heading to about $20 million, split evenly between US healthcare reimbursement and population contracts, on a team of about 150 and an average burn of $1.1 to $1.5 million a year against roughly $30 million raised. He expects to be EBITDA positive within 18 months.

India remains 20% of usage and almost none of the revenue, because willingness to pay is close to zero.

One of the largest providers of mental health in India is an astrology platform.

So Wysa stopped selling an app here. Dream Kit is a printed emotional resilience workbook for adolescent girls, delivered through municipal schools out of textbook budgets, with QR codes opening anonymous chat in Marathi. It is designed for a girl who borrows her mother’s phone for an hour a day. In February 2026, Wellcome awarded Wysa £5.3 million to scale it across rural India.

A billion conversations in, the number that still runs the company is smaller. In a Slack channel logging every review, the team counts the people who write in to say the app kept them alive. Starting with that 13 year old, it stands at about 500.

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

In early 2020, Salone Sehgal was raising a first-time, sector-focused fund for interactive media in India. Over Zoom, because there were no roadshows. Against a consensus that arrived pre-argued.

When I was incepting the fund, I heard every version of it. Indians don’t pay. Sector-focused strategies don’t lead to exits. There is no talent. India’s a DAU farm. I heard every version of this from literally every corner of the world.

DAU farm. Daily active users. India as a supplier of cheap, unmonetisable headcount so a foreign platform could put a bigger number on a slide.

She raised $40 million anyway. Lumikai now runs north of $100 million across two funds.

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

The mispricing was in the diagnosis, not the data

The consensus had its numbers right. Indian users genuinely were not paying. Everyone read that as low willingness. Salone read it as high friction.

It was not so much about an innate unwillingness to spend. There was an inability to spend.

One word, a country-sized consequence. You cannot fix culture with a product roadmap, but infrastructure gets built. Jio cut data tariffs by over 90% in 2016 and 2017. Entry-level phones got processors capable of real-time multiplayer. Then UPI made a ₹10 transaction frictionless, solving what credit card penetration never would.

So when $13.8 billion sounds small, check the denominator. D2C sits on three decades of physical consumption behaviour. Interactive media sits on roughly five years of plumbing, and is already growing 17% a year on 877 million smartphone users.

Salone read the content curve off satellite TV in the 1990s: the pipe first, imported shows next, and only five or six years later Balaji, Zee and Hum Paanch. Her rule on timing that gap:

It is better to be early, but not the only, because if you are the only, you have to ask yourself why. If it is obvious, you are probably too late.

The failure that qualified her

Between 2013 and 2017, Salone ran TrulySocial in London, a narrative mobile world for female audiences, on $3 to $4 million raised. A strategic partner reshuffled its team and pulled a $5 million financing line. Then, with an acquisition nearly closed, the board vetoed it. Two months of runway.

Startups don’t fail in neat PowerPoint ways. They fail in messy ways. They fail slowly. They fail emotionally, operationally, legally, financially.

What she did next is why she is an investor today. Every salary paid, every vendor cleared, every employee placed in a new job before the runway ended, including one expecting a child. Then a debrief on what they had learned. She cites Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets: knowing when to take your chips off the table is a skill that hustle culture keeps mislabelling as weakness.

Her seed investors watched her close a company well, then hired her to invest their money.

The proof arrived faster than the thesis

Lumikai backed Eloelo in 2021 as a live social streaming platform. In June 2025 the group launched microdrama app Story TV, with Balaji Telefilms, Zee and Applause Entertainment supplying content. Group ARR went from roughly $23 million that month to about $230 million by January 2026. It turned cash positive in October and has appointed Avendus to raise upwards of $50 million.

Look at what TikTok did to social media, and what hypercasual did to casual games. Microdramas have done that to content and OTT. It is essentially OTT on steroids.

The category matches the company: $300 million in India in year one, 450 million downloads, 100 million monthly actives, projected to $4.5 billion by 2030. Elsewhere, Zoop grew sellers 300% by building tooling for the women already running businesses on Facebook Marketplace rather than chasing buyers. Loco exited in 2024 past 52 million users, answering the “sector funds don’t produce exits” objection.

The mechanics: 60% of dry powder into first cheques, 40% reserved. Seed cheques of $500,000 to $2 million, sized for 24 months, which buys two or three shots at product-market fit. And 85% of the portfolio is revenue-generating at seed, which she insists is design.

Founders believe their user is some 22-year-old guy sitting in Bangalore, because that is their social circle. The reality could be a 28-year-old woman in Lucknow who has three hours of uninterrupted time and is genuinely willing to pay for something that earns her attention. But are you thinking of her?

The call she got paid for

Fund II has zero real-money gaming exposure; Fund I had under 5%. Salone’s read was that the risk was asymmetric and regulation was a question of when, not if. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act took effect in October 2025, erasing an industry worth roughly $2 billion.

What survived is the interesting part. The gamer base contracted 9% to 555 million, but video games excluding RMG grew 17% to $1.5 billion and payer conversion held at one in four. The users who left were never the ones paying for entertainment.

She is watching two things now. A domestic entertainment unicorn out of microdramas, which Eloelo’s numbers make look less brave every quarter. And animation, where India’s $1.6 billion industry still earns about 80% of its revenue serving foreign studios instead of owning exportable Indian IP.

Her most recent deal is with a 19-year-old building Roblox games, who has been earning on that platform since he was 14. A fund told there was no talent in India is writing a cheque to a teenager. That is roughly where the DAU farm argument ends.

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

No, I’m not. In fact, I end up playing games mostly to deconstruct them.

This is not a contradiction. It is the thesis. Felicity Games is not a games company that happens to be analytical. It is a trading desk that happens to sell games.

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

Anurag spent seven years across Snapdeal and Swiggy, watching the latter go from seven cities to 500 and from 60,000 orders a day to a million. In 2021 he left to build Wakao, a split-screen challenge app riding the reels wave. Accel and Elevation put in $2.5 million.

The flaw was structural. Asynchronous mechanics for a synchronous desire, seeded India-first, chasing attention nobody could charge for.

Wakao didn’t have the legs to monetise that attention span. We were just building empty DAU.

Eighteen months in, they closed the position.

We returned a million dollars that was left with us back to our investors, because we could sense there was no way to monetise this.

Forty percent of the capital, mailed back. Out of it came three rules. Never invent the category.

There’s all the glory in building a category, but a lot of the incumbents who ended up large were not the first ones to build it.

Never accept a ceiling on the addressable market. Never touch a monetisation model that is not already solved. And then the thing that made it gaming specifically:

Angry Birds was the 52nd game that worked for Rovio. It took 51 failures to get to that point of success.

A single-app founder lives or dies on one coin flip. A publisher flips forever, as long as the maths holds.

The mispricing

Understand what happened in 2021 and the rest of this business becomes legible.

Before Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, a hypercasual publisher knew you. Knew you liked puzzles, knew you would churn on day three, had the next title queued for day four. Deterministic targeting made the whole industry work at 50-cent installs.

Post the Apple IDFA change in 2021, I don’t know what kind of games Akshay likes to play.

Installs now start at $2 and climb. The recycling machine broke, and the industry was forced to stop selling impulse and start selling habit.

It’s like a dal chawal game versus a pizza game. Some games look incredibly good, you see the ad and you want to play, but you get bored very quickly. And then there are some you keep coming back to for comfort.

Block Blast does roughly $400 million a year on nothing but a difficulty curve tuned to perfection. Which is what this business actually is.

At the core of it, it’s a UA arbitrage business. People are running trade desks for user acquisition. What’s the ROAS profile, what’s the retention curve, what’s the LTV curve, when will it break even, when will it turn to cash?

Forty games, three survivors

India has around 30,000 game developers and 400 studios, and almost none can afford to find out whether their own game is good. A statistically honest retention read needs 400 to 500 users. At US install costs, that is $4,000 to $5,000 to learn whether anyone comes back on day two.

Anurag’s funnel closes that gap in three phases. A prototype commissioned for $5,000 to $8,000, with no advertising switched on at all.

In the prototype, we don’t switch on any type of ad. We want to see ad-free retention.

The bar is D1 retention above 30%. Clear it and the game gets $15,000 to $20,000 of soft-launch spend, 100 to 150 levels, interstitials and in-app purchases, cohorted for three to four weeks against a D7 target of 40 to 50% of D1. Clear that and Felicity buys the title outright for $40,000 to $50,000 and rebuilds the backend.

A lot of games are vibe-coded, and you’re trying to fix things as it’s flying. The code is not architecturally sound and is prohibitive to scale.

Roughly 40 games evaluated. Five or six reached monetisation testing. Three are currently getting capital. But the survivors are not the asset.

When you’re single-game focused, you build everything for that one game. But if you’re a multi-portfolio company, your core IP is not your game, it’s your infra.

FeliCore bundles the third-party SDKs and solves edge cases like ad initialisation on low-RAM phones, where a bad boot sequence leaves a player staring at a frozen screen for 25 seconds. FeliGenAI generates acquisition creatives and art assets, at up to 99% lower cost by the company’s own reckoning. FeliGrid lets a product manager ship a new difficulty curve to one country with no engineering ticket and no store review.

The PM creates an experiment only for Japan, original versus the new curve. Another for Korea. One week later, a report on which one worked better and on what metrics. That is infra.

Or, more plainly:

It’s like a smart engineer with Claude versus a smart engineer alone. That’s what the infra delta is.

The scoreboard

Last year a tapping mechanic went viral. The top three incumbents were driving 150,000 to 160,000 daily US installs in a genre that had not existed four months earlier. Felicity shipped its own iteration, Arrow Maze, and reached a $1 million annual run rate inside three weeks.

Out of the $3,000 it does every day, the US only does $1,000. The rest is coming from Korea and Japan, because we were able to make a Torii gate level, a South Korea temple level. All of this didn’t exist as a capability within Felicity even six months back.

The trend was available to everyone. Being in Osaka and Seoul by week two was not.

Felicity has now raised $11.8 million across three rounds, from a $700,000 pre-seed in December 2023 with Kunal Shah and Swiggy’s founders on the cap table, to a $3 million round led by 3one4 Capital, to roughly $8.1 million in Series A this March. Revenue runs north of $3 million a year on 50,000 daily active users, carried by US ARPDAU of 20 to 30 cents. Seek & Find and Nova Solitaire have each passed a million downloads. A Singapore entity, Felicity Labs, has $1 million committed behind Southeast Asian expansion.

The precedent is local. In 2021 Bengaluru’s PlaySimple sold to Sweden’s MTG for $360 million upfront on $83 million of revenue and 2 million daily users, built on ad-monetised word games. Anurag’s own bar is narrower and harder.

I’d feel validated if we could take one game to $10 million in a year. That’s when I’d say yes, it’s a true hit.

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

Roughly 70% of the money spent on games in the app stores goes to titles launched before 2020. That is Roby John’s figure, and it makes a lot of consumer strategy stop making sense. A market where seven of every ten rupees flow to five-year-old incumbents is not really a market. It is a queue, and the queue is closed.

Roby, co-founder and CEO of SuperGaming, has a word for this.

If you’ve been playing Fortnite for a while, there is no incentive to switch out. Fortnite, your friends, your skins, your purchases are all there. That’s why 70% of the revenue earned in the app stores goes to titles made before 2020. We call it ossification.

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

He stopped selling the game

The standard answer to an ossified category is to build something better and wait for taste to shift. Roby kept making games but stopped treating the game as the product.

His model of the industry is worth stealing. He argues there are only two genuinely great gaming companies, Valve and Epic, and both are built in three layers: a proprietary engine at the bottom, content in the middle, a marketplace on top. Everyone else rents the bottom layer from whoever owns it.

So SuperGaming spent a decade on the bottom layer. Its shooter framework uses Unity as a runtime, then swaps the rendering, memory and networking systems for custom modules, so games hold up on Android phones with 4GB of RAM. Underneath sits SuperPlatform, a live-ops backend built with Google Cloud and licensed to outside studios. Bandai Namco’s official PAC-MAN mobile game, a franchise past a billion downloads, runs on it, along with MaskGun and fifteen-plus other titles. Roby says the framework has now shipped on 200 to 250 million devices.

Every game makes the engine better, and a better engine makes the next game better. That’s how we de-risk. There’s no silver bullet here, just multiple lead bullets.

He puts the revenue split at roughly half platform and co-development, half SuperGaming’s own titles. For a hit-driven business, that ratio is the whole strategy: it buys time in market, and time in market buys shots on goal. Investors followed. A $5.5 million Series A in 2021, then $15 million in August 2025 at a $100 million valuation, close to 5x the earlier mark, with a16z Speedrun, Bandai Namco’s 021 Fund, Steadview and Skycatcher on the register.

The pearl diver, and the pronunciation problem

In a battle royale, 99 people out of 100 walk away with nothing. That is the genre, and also its churn problem. SuperGaming’s answer is BRX, battle royale extraction, where loot you carry out of a match persists into the next one.

A pearl diver jumps to the ocean floor searching for a pearl. He doesn’t find one every time, but he comes back with lobster, or oysters, or maybe seaweed. All of it has real world value. Extraction shooters work like that. You bring something back from every raid.

He did not make winning more rewarding. He made losing less total. Indus, which launched worldwide in October 2024 and took Google Play’s Best Made in India Game that year, now carries the BRX name on the stores.

Where he points that engine is the part founders should argue about. By Roby’s numbers, in-app purchase conversion in India runs under 1%. In Brazil it runs 6% to 12%. He still launched in India first, because roughly 500 million Indians have played a battle royale and feedback arrives in hours. He calls the past year his hardest and most useful, with core metrics improving 3x to 5x. Then he pointed the engine somewhere it could pay. In March 2026, Prime Rush launched in Brazil with Spacecaps, parent of the esports org LOUD, set on a floating battleground called Maré. A MENA edition follows with PlayHera.

One detail stayed with me. Indus struggled abroad partly because nobody could pronounce it.

What we noticed from a UA perspective is that when people see Indus, they don’t install it. You’ve got to have a name that’s third grade English friendly, so everybody can write the spelling.

Prime, because Amazon taught the world it means good. Rush, because shooters already shout it, and in Brazilian Portuguese the R softens to a hush. Four years of world building, rescued by phonetics.

What actually compounds

None of that is the moat. Roby has built software with his CTO for 24 years, and the founding team has held together for 15, against his own observation that most good studios take a decade to work. Before SuperGaming there was Tap2Learn, a Y Combinator company that died on the problem of convincing children to play and parents to pay, leaving him in what he calls a dark zone for two years.

Which is why his closing line lands.

There will be a Black Myth: Wukong moment in India. We’re probably five, seven years away. Indus was an ambitious idea, and we kept our head down and got it out. We’re not successful yet, but we’re heads down figuring out the next thing.

A founder with 200 million installs, PAC-MAN as a client and a16z on the cap table, telling me he has not made it. In my experience that is the most reliable signal a founder is still compounding. The ones who declare victory have usually stopped.

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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

One EV, a four-wheeler on average, consumes three to five times the electricity of your house in one go. And everybody is going to come back at 6 or 7 in the evening and plug their vehicles. So the utility company was getting scared: what’s going on?

That worry is why Kazam exists. Where the engineers saw a threat to the grid, Akshay Shekhar saw the largest new consumer category in India. Not the vehicle, bought once, but the energy, bought every day.

Imagine petrol was available to you in your house, in your tap. You would actually end up filling your vehicle there. Now electricity has come to your house, and your house has become the petrol pump.

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

From a YouTube channel to a broken prototype

Most founders in EV infrastructure come from energy or auto. Akshay came from neither. His first venture, FurnishQ, tried to sell IKEA-style flat-pack furniture in a country that, as he puts it, behaves like a “princely state,” where customers want the assembly done for them. It reached about 1.5 million dollars in annual revenue and ended in an acqui-hire, after which he spent time in strategy roles at PepsiCo and Godrej.

So he tested demand before building anything. In September 2020, he launched a YouTube channel reviewing early EVs in Hindi and English, and videos pulled 15,000 to 20,000 organic views each. Then he tested willingness to pay with a single line, “make money from your parking spot,” which drew roughly 20,000 leads and converted about 1,500 in three months, before Ola Electric had even launched. The hook worked because it tapped a specific aspiration, owning a cash-generating petrol pump, in a country where 300 million of 350 million vehicles are two- and three-wheelers.

The first product barely worked; the socket had to be forced in by hand. Akshay took it to Lightning Logistics, a Bengaluru fleet operator, anyway.

I went with that broken device. It was not working, it didn’t even start. But I think I was wearing my good shirt. I don’t know what they liked about me. They ended up giving me an order, because competition was too less.

They ran a proof of concept first, then placed a founding order of 100 units in April 2021, which funded the move into manufacturing. The real problem in those early deployments was not charging but coordination. Depots were packed with vehicles parked back to back, and one overnight security guard did the plugging and unplugging.

At night, the security guard is like the champion of the place. And obviously he’ll make a mistake, he’s a human, so not all vehicles were getting charged fully.

Around 40 percent of vehicles were not fully charged by morning, and simultaneous charging triggered peak-overload penalties. Kazam connected each charger to the cloud over a SIM, wrote load-balancing software to keep total draw within the transformer’s limit, and pinged the guard the moment a vehicle hit full charge. The uncharged rate fell to 5 to 10 percent. That reliability won Kazam the BigBasket dark-store deployment in October 2021, beating Tata Power, a client it still holds.

A business where customers pay to be acquired

Do you call Pine Labs a manufacturing company? They gave POS machines, physical hardware, and eventually became a software company allowing transactions to happen. You make the infrastructure ready, then you manage it, and then you do more with it. That’s the playbook here.

Kazam earns from three streams. Hardware, sold directly and bundled by vehicle OEMs, is still more than 80 percent of revenue at 10 to 12 percent EBITDA margins. Software subscriptions, at 300 to 500 rupees per asset per month, are about 15 percent. Transaction and energy-trading fees make up the remaining 5 percent. The hardware is not the profit centre; it is the distribution mechanism, which produces an unusual result.

My CAC has become positive. Imagine that. People are paying me to be my consumers, by buying the hardware.

The instinct is inherited. Akshay’s family built M-Swipe and Prism Payments, businesses that placed physical terminals to capture long-term software and transaction fees.

Dhanda runs in the blood. Conversations on the dining table have always been around business. There is this rule of running a business for at least three or four years before you actually start seeing profits.

Energy as UPI

Once energy is digitised, charging is the first application, not the product. The bigger prize is a market for electrons. Time-of-day tariffs, now piloted in several states, let a driver shift charging to off-peak hours and cut a monthly bill by 20 to 30 percent. That matters because of a waste few people see: base-load thermal plants cannot be throttled, so at night, when demand collapses, the surplus has nowhere to go.

A power plant is like an open tap, or a river. You can’t just switch it off. If you have a bucket underneath it, you are collecting it. If you’re not, the bucket overflows, and you put all that energy into the earth. Seriously, into the earth.

The next layer is peer-to-peer trading, where a rooftop-solar household sells surplus credits to a neighbour and Kazam takes a margin as broker. Beyond that is vehicle-to-grid, the car battery selling power back at peak prices.

UPI unlocked one-rupee transactions without me adding a beneficiary. This is going to unlock the same, where you can now trade the electricity from your home with anyone.

The rails are being laid through the Unified Energy Interface and India Energy Stack, mentored by Nandan Nilekani and driven by the Ministry of Power with REC as nodal agency. It is, in effect, an ONDC for electricity, and Kazam is a founding member.

Where Kazam stands, and why it works

Revenue rose from 1.5 million dollars in FY24 to about 6 million dollars, or 40 crore rupees, in FY25, roughly a 3.5-times jump, and Kazam is guiding to a 100 crore rupee run-rate and profitability. In June 2025 it closed a 6.2 million dollar Series B led by the IFC, part of the World Bank Group, with Vertex Ventures SEA and India and Avaana Capital, taking total capital raised to 19.2 million dollars across five rounds.

By early 2026, Kazam had integrated more than 120,000 chargers and run over 7 million sessions, a 76 percent rise in six months, with about 150,000 three-wheeler drivers on its platform. It works with more than 14 OEMs, including Maruti Suzuki, alongside ONGC, 150-plus resident welfare associations and 45 bus depots. It helped shape India’s IS-17017 charging standards for light EVs, became one of the first networks to show two-wheeler charging on Google Maps, and has begun expanding into Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

The durable position in this shift is not the vehicle brand that grabs headlines but the layer beneath it that also owns the software and the payments. Akshay built it the way a second-time founder does, knowing when to call a stop-loss and how to sequence the asset before the software. The petrol pump has moved into the home, and Kazam is betting that whoever owns that gateway owns a real share of the next decade of Indian energy.

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

I didn’t go to school till Grade 2. I was sitting in my dukaan. That’s where my first business school happened.

Four decades later, Ajay is the co-founder and managing partner of Silverneedle Ventures, the Hyderabad firm whose second vehicle, SilverX, is raising ₹800 crore with a ₹400 crore greenshoe that could push assets to ₹1,200 crore. The mandate is narrow: deep tech, semiconductors, materials, space, and vertical AI. No consumer plays, no crypto, no gaming, no lending, despite the family history.

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

From dukan to deep tech

Most Indian VCs arrive through investment banking or a startup exit. Ajay arrived through neither. After the dukaan came an MS at the University of Arizona, then seven years at Intel doing pre-silicon chip verification, where he absorbed the math of the power law before he had a name for it.

Only one in ten chips actually saw the light of day.

Then came an ISB MBA and Gray Matters India, where Ajay raised $8 million from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation before the company was acquired by ConveGenius in 2020. At T-Hub, modeled on Paris’s Station F, he screened roughly 3,000 startups in two years. He once watched Travis Kalanick walk through and broker an Uber Eats Singapore order for a Hyderabad EV startup. A venture ecosystem, he realised, is not the cap table. It is the corridor.

In 2018, Ajay and six friends started Xseed Partners. Across roughly 30 investments, the breakout was Paymatrix, where Muthoot Pappachan acquired a 54 percent stake at roughly 7x the syndicate’s money. That deal gave him the credibility to institutionalize. Silverneedle was incorporated in 2022.

The Silver X bet

Fund I closed at ₹80 crore across 16 companies. By late 2024, follow-on capital had gone into a third of the portfolio, and the standouts were compounding fast.

OnFinance AI, a generative AI compliance platform serving BSE Ltd and Kotak, raised a $4.2 million Pre-Series A led by Peak XV’s Surge. Silverneedle’s position is marked up 5 to 8 times in eighteen months. BrainSight AI, a precision neuro-imaging startup pursuing US FDA certification, raised $5 million led by IAN Alpha Fund. Dhruva Space, entered sub-₹40 crore, has been greenlit by IN-SPACe for Ground Stations as a Service. SuperK secured a ₹100 crore follow-on after Silverneedle’s entry.

In India, the power law is not very apparent yet. But OnFinance is at 5 to 8x in eighteen months. SuperK has a ₹100 crore round around our investment. Dhruva is sitting very pretty.

Silver X is structurally different. Forty percent of the fund, roughly ₹320 crore, goes into initial checks. The remaining 60 percent is reserved for follow-on tranches of $4 to $5 million into the winners. The arithmetic is unforgiving: a single primary check that goes 50x can return the entire corpus.

I’m doing what I ask my founders to do, which is grow 10x. But I’m only doing 4 to 5x on first checks, then doubling down.

Silver X has signed an MoU with the Amaravati Quantum Valley to co-invest roughly ₹10 crore each in up to 10 quantum startups.

Why deep tech, why now

The data backs the pivot. Indian deep-tech startups raised $1.6 billion in 2024, a 78 percent jump year on year. By July 2025, $1.06 billion had flowed across 137 equity rounds. Deep tech’s share of total venture rounds has risen from 2.6 percent in 2016 to nearly 7 percent in 2023.

The state is catalyzing the shift. The Union government’s ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Scheme attracted 124 proposals worth ₹25,000 crore in its first three months. The ₹76,000 crore Semiconductor PLI is building the fabrication ecosystem. Space FDI now allows 100 percent automatic investment in satellite components, 74 percent in satellite operations, and 49 percent in launch vehicles. IIT Madras alone incubated 104 deep-tech startups in FY2024-25 and filed 417 patents, more than one a working day.

The founder’s playbook

Ajay’s diagnosis of why most pitches fail is the most useful part of any conversation with him.

The first sin is the top-down TAM slide. Founders walk in with a $50 billion global market estimate and expect the number to do the persuasion. It never does.

It’s not the best products that necessarily sell today. You need to know the best problem to solve. A great product needn’t sell. But if it is a problem that needs to be solved, that’s what people are willing to pay for.

The second is outsourcing the business plan.

If you cannot create your own business plan, that’s a problem. Do not let a CA create it for you. ChatGPT can build your deck. What I want to hear is your story, why you are really in this.

The third is treating cash flow as a Series B problem when it kills startups at Series A. The fourth is failing to articulate the next round; a founder pitching Silver X must explain why a $4 million follow-on will be justified eighteen months out.

The discipline extends to what Silver X will not touch. No crypto, no real-money gaming, no lending despite the family lineage, no consumer plays where Silverneedle cannot add value.

We will never play a game where we don’t add value.

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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

Most people would call that a layoffs story. Sridhar calls it a story about agency.

Anybody with high agency is going to survive in this market. Anybody who waits for somebody to tell them what to do is going to have a hard time.

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

The people he could not keep, he is careful to say, were not the juniors. They were whoever could not relearn fast enough.

The core competency you brought in has become a commodity. The folks we couldn’t retain are folks who couldn’t change quickly. Not that they won’t be able to change. It’s just they couldn’t change quickly with us.

Sridhar has watched this kind of thing before. He started his first company in 2000, founded Hyderabad’s first Java user group in 1997, and built telecom systems at PanTerra Networks before he ever touched a mobile app. That history is why his read on the present is worth slowing down for. He knows what subsidized booms do.

Right now tokens are subsidized, heavily. They’re like drug dealers, getting us used to it, giving it away for free. But there’s going to be a reckoning soon. We are going to be helpless without those tools.

The new math of building software

The economics today are lopsided. An entry-level engineer in India costs roughly one lakh a month. Enterprise-wide token spend, by Sridhar’s estimate, runs $10,000 to $20,000 a month. Across building and running products, [x]cube LABS already spends more than $1 million a year on tokens. The arbitrage is real, though he insists nobody prices it that way yet, because the gap is still too wide to bother.

What actually changed inside the agency was not “developers use AI.” It was a shift from writing code to orchestrating the agents that write it.

You set the vision, the framework, the non-negotiables. These decisions are mine alone. Those are the things you need to articulate well to any coding agent.

And like any collaborator, the agents forget.

You can’t say, I told you two hours back. The context gets so big they start compressing things. So every one hour or so, you come back to it.

Done well, he says, one person becomes a team of five, or a hundred over two years. Which is also why he expects a reckoning for software vendors. When the cost to build approaches zero, the per-seat subscription gets interrogated.

Somebody charging you $300 a month per seat will get asked: what’s your cloud cost for my 100 people? I’m paying you $30,000. Your actual cost is $3,000? So why am I paying 10x more?

India hosts more than 110 unicorns, roughly half of them SaaS companies. Sridhar expects heavy price pressure across that group within a year. The only durable moat, he argues, is proprietary data, not workflow logic that AI now copies instantly. The bigger prize is a rebuild: for 40 years, humans bent themselves to software’s menus. He thinks that ends, with applications becoming conversation-first and the primary user shifting from a human to an agent.

Right every time, rich almost never

What makes Sridhar a useful narrator is that he keeps being early and selling cheap. PurpleTalk was the first Indian company to ship a game on the Apple App Store. In 2008 it built AdShare, an early iOS ad network with 400 to 500 developers, and sold it for a few hundred thousand dollars, because from Hyderabad, 500 felt small. A near-identical competitor, Pinch Media, had about 40 customers, sat beside Silicon Valley, merged with Flurry, and was eventually acquired by Yahoo for a reported $200 to $300 million.

Then there is Nukkad Shops. In 2015, its CEO Vivek Shukla pitched dark stores and 15-minute delivery, years before Zepto and Blinkit. Sridhar killed it, partly to avoid the capex, partly out of a wish to protect kirana stores rather than compete with them.

The takeaway is chase money. You won’t regret chasing money. Don’t confuse entrepreneurship with social entrepreneurship.

The bet he’s staying in

Now he is building Ello.ai, a voice platform engineered for 12 Indian languages and over 100 dialects, targeting 100 million monthly minutes of enterprise calls by 2026. A sibling product, Upshot.ai, was named Best Customer Engagement Platform, India at the 2024 Martech Awards. His philosophy on voice is deliberately plain: not to sound human, just to work, to read tone, to hold context, to deliver value without pretending to be a person.

For the first time, the founder who wandered off every wave is staying with one.

We’ve tried about 20 things. Six, seven of them are doing quite well. So no regrets that way. But we could have been billionaires instead of millionaires.

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Your Feedback matters

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

Until next time,

Your Host,

Akshay Datt

This is not an obvious place to find a man who ran the enterprise division of a publicly listed technology company at 26, helped scale Zynga’s India operations when Farmville had 400 million players worldwide, and watched the company’s 2011 IPO become the second largest in the US after Google’s own. And yet here Shan is, obsessively mapping the ecosystem of India’s 3,000-plus fishing harbors.

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

The Making of a Consumer Guy

Shan arrived in New York in 1999 from Model Engineering College in Cochin. SupportSoft, Debox (a cybersecurity firm he co-founded), and then Zynga formed his CV before he turned 40. At Zynga, he set up the India studio and helped grow it into one of the world’s four largest consumer internet properties.

We were sitting on a rocket ship and building it while it got launched. Going from $100 million to a couple of billion dollars of revenue in literally 18 to 24 months. You couldn’t miss it.

What Zynga also taught him was the cost of missing a platform shift. The company was built on the web. Mobile arrived, and it took three years to recover. Shan left in 2015, along with a group of co-founders he had worked with across multiple companies. Mark Pincus, Zynga’s founder, wrote one of FreshToHome’s first checks. Peter Thiel reportedly followed.

The Fish, the Train, and the Co-Founder He Hunted Down

The origin is personal. Back in Bangalore to build Zynga’s India business, Shan could not find the quality of fish he grew up eating near Kozhikode. His wife found a website, seedtohome.com, run by a fish exporter named Mathew Joseph, who was shipping fresh fish overnight by train from Cochin. The fish was good. Then it disappeared.

I hunted down the guy who built his website. Mathew was a fish exporter, not on Facebook or LinkedIn. We eventually met, and I asked him what went wrong. He said: it is a completely different brick-and-mortar business, and I am trying to go online.

Shan gave Mathew seed capital. Then he and his former Zynga co-founders realised the real problem was structural. The traditional supply chain ran from harbor to city middleman to Shivaji Nagar to neighbourhood wet market, covering three days of transit, open ice trucks, and preservatives to compensate. FreshToHome would need to cut that chain at the source. In 2015, the company was formally incorporated with eight co-founders.

The Moat Is in the Harbor

India has up to 5,000 fishing harbors employing roughly 14 million people, contributing about 1% of national GDP. Almost none of it was organised. Shan describes a harbor honestly.

A harbor is probably the most unhygienic place you would have seen. It is not a Tokyo fish market or a waterfront in Dubai. But it is a lifeline for 14 million Indians. The fishermen are some of the most exploited workers in the country.

The first plan was to build a full ERP for harbors. That did not survive contact with reality. What FreshToHome built instead was an e-auction platform. Mathew’s existing relationships gave them entry. Fishermen would receive real-time price signals on their phones, red or green, while machine learning processed 1,000 to 1,500 bids simultaneously at 4 a.m. The economics genuinely favored fishermen: by aggregating across harbors, FreshToHome could always offer a better price locally while buying below peak prices available elsewhere.

The infrastructure behind it today is formidable. 400 harbors. 40 collection centers. 15 processing factories. 200 dark stores. 5,000 delivery workers. 140 cities. Wastage, which opened at 20% when the company started, has been brought down to 2%. The full chain, harbor to doorstep, runs in 24 to 36 hours. The old chain took three days minimum.

Building the Brand, and the Proficorn Position

For the first two years, FreshToHome barely thought about marketing. The supply chain was the whole problem. When they did turn to demand, one insight unlocked the strategy: consumers think in protein wallets, not categories. The average FreshToHome customer spends around 3,000 rupees a month on proteins. Selling only fish generates roughly 1.4 purchases per month from that wallet. A full basket of fish, chicken, and mutton generates 2.6. FreshToHome moved into contract chicken farming by 2017 and extended its no-antibiotics, no-preservatives brand positioning across every category.

Marketing spend peaked at 25 to 30% of revenue during the brand-building years, with Ranveer Singh as brand ambassador to bridge from a South India base to a national audience. Today that spend has compressed to around 2 to 3% of revenue, a signal of how much the brand now carries itself. Shan operates across both his own app, which handles roughly 80 to 85% of volume, and as one of the largest meat and fish brands on major quick commerce platforms. In early 2025, FreshToHome launched 10 to 20 minute delivery from its own dark stores.

The company has raised $320 million in total, with the most recent Series D of $104 million led by Amazon’s Smbhav Venture Fund. Current annual revenue run rate is approximately $115 million (around 1,000 crores). Business units are EBITDA profitable. The gap to full company profitability is the fixed cost of central engineering and corporate overhead. Shan expects to close it within months, and is targeting an IPO in late 2026 or 2027, requiring a flip of the Singapore holding structure back to India.

A thousand crores in this category is nothing. India is going to be the scale engine for compounding. I am thinking about this as a lifestyle business. Working with fishermen and farmers is what really energizes me.

The bigger bet underneath all of this is demographic. India’s per capita fish consumption sits at roughly 2 to 2.5 kilograms per person per year. As incomes rise, protein consumption rises. Shan predicts India will become a net importer of seafood within this decade, a claim that sounds bold until you do the population arithmetic he sketches out: if every Indian adds one prawn to their diet, the volumes involved outweigh current total export consumption. He says he can already see it happening across FreshToHome’s last ten years of order data.

Think through your unfair advantage many, many times. A pure brand alone may not be it. If you are really sure about that unfair advantage, then you can expand like crazy. Otherwise, when the music stops, you will be trying really hard to figure out growth vectors.

The supply chain is that unfair advantage. Not the brand, which came later. Not the technology alone, which capital could replicate. The combination of 400 harbor relationships, cold chain infrastructure, a decade of wastage data, and eight co-founders who have worked together across multiple companies for 30 years, that is the thing that is genuinely hard to copy.

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

He almost did not sell. His banker, Hemendra Kothari of DSP Merrill Lynch, talked him into it.

More important than knowing when to enter a business is knowing when to exit. You will never get this kind of valuation again. This money will give you the freedom to do what you want in life.

The timing was close to perfect. The NASDAQ peaked in early 2000; Rajesh’s second payment tranche cleared in June 2000, as the market was already falling.

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

From a room-sized computer to 30 failures

Born on Independence Day, 1967, into a middle-class Mumbai family, Rajesh expected to follow his civil-engineer father until a computer his father bought for the office, a machine nobody there could operate, changed his path. He taught himself BASIC on it.

I just fell in love with the idea that you could write software and control the actions of a machine.

After IIT Bombay, a master’s at Columbia and two years at NYNEX in New York, he returned to India in 1992. The next two and a half years were a string of failures: reselling US software, a multimedia database, an image-processing product killed by two-year government tender cycles. The pattern became the thesis of his career.

Every time I’ve been enamoured and excited by the tech side of it, tried to create tech in search of a solution, I failed.

He has a related line founders tend to remember.

There are hundreds of moments when you are one little tiny second away from failure. People think it’s overnight success. No, you avoided failure probably more than others to have succeeded.

IndiaWorld: a portal before India had the internet

The idea that worked came after he read Competing for the Future in late 1994. Rajesh launched IndiaWorld in March 1995, aimed at non-resident Indians; commercial internet did not reach Indian consumers until that August. He and Bhavna took turns watching Doordarshan at night to send out news updates, and he answered every feedback email himself, letting the replies tell him what to build next.

Paid money can get a person to the site once, but it’s only the content which will keep that person coming back. I wanted IndiaWorld to be a habit in people’s lives.

The best decision came out of the worst setback. After losing the indiaworld.com domain, he and Bhavna, on a drive back from a temple in Rajasthan, hit on a contrarian idea: split the portal into separate, memorable, Indian-named sites rather than nesting them under one roof like Yahoo. Of 13 launched, four worked. Samachar became a single-page news start page drawing about four million page views a month, effectively a precursor to Google News.

Out of probably the worst adversity of my life came the best decision.

After Sify, Rajesh did not become an investor. He tried angel investing in about 15 startups and concluded it was not for him: “I am the entrepreneur type.”

Seven flat years, then the $500 billion argument

Netcore grew out of a small side business setting up Linux mail servers, a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Exchange. For about seven years it barely grew, undone by the same disease: technology in search of a problem. A consumer SMS service scaled to four million subscribers around 2007, then regulators raised SMS pricing sharply and killed it overnight, teaching a lasting lesson about depending on a platform someone else controls. Netcore re-architected to deliver email and SMS as cloud services for enterprises, becoming one of India’s earliest SaaS companies. Email gross margins ran at 80 to 90 percent; today Netcore sends 30 to 35 billion emails a month, close to a billion a day.

In 2014 the company built a MarTech layer on top of its pipes: a customer data platform, personalization, and journey orchestration. Because Netcore owns its own delivery channels rather than renting third-party aggregators, it can optimize send times and inbox placement in ways pure-software rivals like CleverTap or Braze cannot.

The greater the control you have across the stack, the better the recommendations and messaging. That’s really where we stand out.

But the sharpest argument is Rajesh’s diagnosis of how marketing money is spent. Roughly 90 percent of budgets go to acquisition, 10 percent to retention, and most acquisition spend re-buys customers the brand already had.

70 percent of the 90 percent is spent reacquiring the same customer again and again. For me, this 70 percent is actually ad waste.

In a $700 billion global ad market, he sizes that waste at $500 billion.

Agentic AI, and the Proficorn

Netcore’s newest move is an Agentic Marketing Stack built with Google Cloud, using AI agents to remove the manual “drudgery” that pushes marketers back toward ads. The deeper bet is on pricing. Rajesh argues MarTech has capped its own market by charging for inputs rather than results, and wants to price like a hedge fund: a baseline fee plus a share of incremental revenue, a model he calls “Progency.”

You go from a red ocean, every MarTech and CPaaS player fighting, to a blue ocean where you tell the brand: I’m on your side of the table. I’ve got skin in the game.

The anchoring number: Netcore crossed $100 million in revenue, reported at around $136.5 million ARR for FY25, with 6,500-plus brands including Walmart and Unilever, and no venture capital. In 2022 it funded a roughly $100 million all-cash acquisition of US-based Unbxd from its own savings; Unbxd now contributes 12 to 13 percent of revenue. Rajesh calls companies like this, the subject of his book, “Proficorns”: private, bootstrapped, profitable, scaled.

Many businesses are funded by venture capitalists. Netcore is funded by its customers.

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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

What qualifies me to be a venture capitalist is my experience. I have 26 years across consulting, research, investment banking, corporate banking, and on the buy side sitting on the boards of companies and helping them scale.

That career began on a debt desk, not a cap table. Lending to multinationals at HSBC and DBS, then mid-market corporates, taught Rajeev to read cash flow and downside before he ever underwrote upside. He moved to sell-side investment banking at Edelweiss, now Nuvama, and SMC, then to the buy side at FidelisWorld, a roughly $100 million consumer fund backed by Middle Eastern LPs. There, the instinct that would define Cactus was born: back the infrastructure, not the gamble.

Private equity or venture capital requires one way up. You don’t want fluctuations. So the strategy focused on the ancillary and the infrastructure side.

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

The scar that built the thesis

At FidelisWorld, Rajeev backed Raw Pressery, the premium cold-pressed juice brand. The product was excellent and growth was fast, until COVID froze the capital markets and the company hit a cash crunch, forcing a sale to Wingreens Farms. It now runs at roughly 4x its acquisition-era revenue. But the durable lesson was about physics, not pandemics.

You’re effectively transporting volumes of water across the country. The costs are too much and it makes it very difficult to get your margins.

That insight rewired a later call. When portfolio company Auric started in Ayurvedic beverages, Rajeev pushed it toward effervescent tablets and lighter form factors to escape the same logistics trap.

His read on the Indian consumer is just as blunt. There is no single market of 1.4 billion buyers, he says, there are “three or four Indias.”

The top 10% of the population has the ability and the intent to pay. Below the top 100 million, it’s very difficult. You don’t have too much disposable income.

The data backs the instinct. Goldman Sachs projects India’s affluent cohort, those earning over $10,000 a year, will grow from about 60 million in 2023 to over 100 million by 2027. Cactus underwrites only to that top slice, where margins survive.

Why asset-heavy became the new asset-light

The genuinely contrarian move came in 2021, when the herd was paying up to 25x revenue for software. Cactus walked into factories.

We were early investors in manufacturing in 2021, when investors were giving crazy valuations. We look at the tailwinds. There’s a China plus one benefit coming our way.

The bet is paying off. The set-piece is Showroom B2B, where two former furniture entrepreneurs mapped India’s fragmented apparel supply chain.

They identify where the best yarn is made at the lowest cost. They send it to the next place where it gets dyed, the third where it gets woven. They go and aggregate unused capacity. There are lots of small factories using only 50% of capacity.

In February 2026, Cactus led a $17 million Series A (about ₹150 crore in equity and debt) into Showroom B2B, the firm’s 12th investment from Fund I. Elsewhere in the portfolio, electronics manufacturer Brandworks Technologies posted ₹258 crore in FY25 revenue at a 43% revenue CAGR; Cactus led its $7 million Series A in 2025, since extended to $11 million total. Intangles, a physics-based predictive-AI firm for fleets, manages over 400,000 vehicles across North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, predicting engine failures up to a month ahead with about 95% accuracy; Cactus followed on in its $30 million Series B led by Avataar Venture Partners. The clearest proof the model produces liquidity, not just paper marks, was an early exit from Rubix Data Sciences at a 48% IRR.

The discipline of saying no

Cactus runs every deal through a framework Rajeev calls the five Ts: Team, TAM, Tech, Traction, and Transaction. The last one is where the banker shows.

Every business is good at a certain price. If the business is looking really good but the valuation expectation is out of whack, we’d be happy to not participate.

This connects to the intellectual core of the fund. Rajeev enters after product-market fit, which changes what he is betting on.

We are basically underwriting growth risk. We are not taking mortality risk. Your biggest concern is, will you not be able to scale.

It also shapes how he reads aggregators. He strips out inflated GMV and prices the business on its real take rate, typically 5 to 6%, and its unit economics, not the throughput routed through its balance sheet. The same restraint governs his AI exposure, drawn from a gold-rush analogy that runs through his whole career.

We prefer the picks and shovels strategy to the gold prospecting one. The gold prospecting one is binary. The large names just become stronger and stronger.

So he funds application, not foundational models. Kapture CX, an agentic-AI customer-support platform in the portfolio, now draws 35 to 40% of revenue from its AI products. The logic returns, every time, to consistency over lottery tickets. He models a downside tranche returning 1.5 to 2x, a hard middle at 4 to 6x, and a handful of outliers at 8 to 12x, and accepts missing far more than he catches.

We will miss 50, 100 of them, but we have to do 15. We need to make sure these 15 give us the returns we need to give our investors.

Cactus Partners closed its first fund at over ₹630 crore, about $77 million, with 60% from domestic LPs including SIDBI, and reports zero write-offs to date.

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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

He agreed. Five weeks later, the investor pushing for the change walked away anyway.

It was like they dropped a brick into the pond, watched the ripples, and then ran away. They didn’t support us when we really needed it.

The man who lost his company this way went on to build the next one so it could never happen again.

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

The engineer who never wanted to be a founder

Amrit’s drive runs three generations deep. His grandparents migrated from India to Kenya, then to the UK, working three factory jobs at once. His father became an optometrist with his own practice. Amrit, the third generation, returned to risk.

My grandparents worked really hard to make it better for my parents. My parents worked really hard to make it better for us. So what am I doing for the next generation?

He earned a First-Class Honours in Chemistry at Birmingham, top of his class, then hit the 2008 crash and the depersonalised graduate-recruitment machine.

I found the process so inhumane. After doing one application I said, this is not the path for me. I’m going to work out my own path.

A PhD in chemical engineering, a £500 university grant, and a UN scientist who told his research group the world was beyond saving pushed Amrit toward mission instead of fatalism. The product that came out of it was simple to explain. Conventional lithium battery modules are spot-welded and glued, so one dead cell kills the whole unit.

Imagine you’re driving and the tyre bursts. Imagine if that tyre was welded to the car and you couldn’t repair it. You had to throw the whole car away.

Aceleron’s patented compression technology used nuts and bolts, letting modules be opened, serviced, and reused. Amrit calculated the approach could extract up to ten times more value per cell than a welded battery, and the company reached a manual assembly capacity of one megawatt-hour per day with 35 employees.

The right technology, the wrong capital structure

The trap was never the engineering. Aceleron raised over £15 million across seven years from Mercia, the Business Growth Fund, and Toyota Mobility 54, with rounds nearly every year. By the 2022 Series B, Amrit and co-founder Carlton Cummins held roughly 30% combined. He names the structural cause directly.

In the UK the feeling is very much optimizing to reduce downside, not optimizing for maximum return. So they take larger stakes earlier.

That early dilution pre-determined the ending. Asked whether the cap table was the real villain, Amrit pointed deeper.

There are only two types of problems in business. People problems, and problems you don’t yet realize are people problems.

Aceleron entered administration in September 2023, owing around £880,000 to creditors. In April 2024, India’s Advik Hi-Tech, a tier-one auto supplier with roughly $131 million in FY25 revenue, bought the assets and IP. Amrit refuses to call any of it a tragedy.

It was one of the most challenging experiences, but genuinely one of the best gifts I could ever have received. I’d never want to go through it again. But it was a present.

From atoms to bits, and a company that needs no one’s permission

In mid-2024 Amrit founded Lorefully with two former Aceleron colleagues, Barry Diffin and Paul Jennings. The name comes from lore, knowledge passed person to person by word of mouth. The first product, an AI knowledge tool for field engineers, died in enterprise procurement because no multinational has a budget line for “knowledge management.”

The pivot that worked came from a free booth. Lorefully approached the organisers of InstallerSHOW, a UK trade event with over 31,000 attendees, who handed over exhibition space in exchange for a debrief. On the floor, human operators hold consented, structured conversations that AI transcribes and categorises, with human editors reviewing every output. It is research disguised as conversation.

Unlike a survey, where you ask one question and get a response, this is a conversation starter. We come back with a rich data set.

The insight underneath it is what Amrit calls thought equality.

So many people in the room have an informed view who never get the chance to express it in a way where it’s recorded.

The timing fits the market. Event-management software is forecast to grow from $17 billion in 2025 toward $96.5 billion by 2036, while post-event survey response rates sit near 5%. Lorefully occupies the gap as a live, on-floor extraction layer, and the numbers are moving. The company is on track for £500,000 in revenue this calendar year and expects to be profitable this quarter, on roughly £500,000 raised entirely from angels and zero institutional VC. The team is six full-time, supplemented by paid students through its Future Voices Programme, which gives newcomers a structured first rung. The platform has captured over 5.5 million words by May 2026, up from one million in January. Events range from 10 people to 45,000, with a pipeline of more than 100 events in 2026 and a first-of-its-kind National Shipbuilding Office study that gathered 500 structured inputs.

Bigger opportunities in Southeast Asia, with organisers running 500 to 700 events each, would mean turning the internal tool into a self-serve product. When the host suggested funding that through upfront customer payments or debt rather than equity, Amrit did not flinch.

Why would you want to repeat the same mistake twice?

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