The Pattern Recognition Entrepreneur: Abhiroop Medhekar and Velocity's Rise
How systematic thinking and compound learning built India's largest revenue-based financier from the ashes of a $5.7M failure
In 2019, Abhiroop Medhekar found himself in an unremarkable office building in Raipur, Madhya Pradesh, studying the business model of Jimbooks, a GST invoicing app serving thousands of small businesses across India’s heartland. For someone who had spent five years at McKinsey and two years as a venture capitalist at SAIF Partners, the setting was humble. But the insight that emerged from this unlikely partnership would become the foundation for Velocity, now India’s largest revenue-based financier with over 350 companies funded and $30.3 million raised from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures.
The Raipur visit crystallized a pattern Medhekar had been observing across his varied career phases: 99% of Indian businesses bootstrap their way to profitability, yet the entire financing ecosystem focuses on the 1% chasing venture-scale outcomes.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Architecture of Systematic Failure
Most entrepreneurs stumble into failure. Medhekar engineered his deliberately, though not by design. In January 2017, TaskBob, his home services aggregator, sent shutdown emails to customers after raising $5.7 million and achieving market leadership in Mumbai. The company had connected users with verified servicemen for household repairs, competing in a space with 50 startups launched in 2015, of which only a dozen secured funding.
The failure wasn’t random. TaskBob faced UrbanClap, which had raised $25 million, ten times more capital to weather the funding winter of 2016-17. When TaskBob’s expected second funding tranche failed to materialize, the math became brutal: two months of runway versus an unsustainable cash burn rate in a low-margin hyperlocal business.
“Sometimes, things are not meant to be. Even though we could create a significant difference in customers’, service providers’ and teams’ lives, a solid business is created only by building scalability and profitability. And to achieve those in a low-margin business and in a tough external market proved unexpectedly daunting.”
But Medhekar’s approach to failure revealed the systematic mind that would later build Velocity. Rather than scrambling for emergency funding or pivoting desperately, he planned the shutdown months in advance. The company maintained a framework: when the bank balance hit a predetermined threshold, activate the shutdown plan. Employees received severance packages, vendor bills were cleared, and his network was leveraged to outplace the team.
This disciplined approach to failure embedded a crucial lesson that would shape Velocity’s capital strategy:
“You should raise funds when it is available which may not entirely tie with when you actually need it.”
The Consultant’s Systematic Framework
The patterns underlying Medhekar’s systematic thinking trace back to his foundational years at McKinsey from 2010 to 2015. While most MBA graduates view consulting as a stepping stone, Medhekar extracted something more valuable: a replicable methodology for problem decomposition.
“McKinsey was great because you again got to work with really smart people. You got to work on problems which are large and important for the organizations you’re working with. And it also trains you very well in terms of building a structured approach towards problem solving.”
This wasn’t mere corporate training. Since college, Medhekar had maintained a list of 58-60 business ideas, systematically cataloguing problems he observed across different contexts. The list became a testing ground for pattern recognition, a way to identify which problems were truly worth solving versus which were merely interesting intellectual exercises.
The consulting framework also taught him to resist the Silicon Valley mythology of inspiration-driven entrepreneurship. Instead of waiting for a eureka moment, he approached startup ideation like a McKinsey engagement: define the problem, gather data, test hypotheses, iterate based on results.
The Investor’s Lens on Systematic Gaps
After TaskBob’s shutdown, Medhekar made another systematic choice: rather than immediately launching his next startup, he spent two years at SAIF Partners leading fintech investments. This wasn’t career pivoting, it was pattern completion. He needed to understand the capital allocation side of the equation.
From 2017 to 2019, he evaluated over 1,000 companies and led investments in India’s fintech and financial services sectors. The experience revealed a systematic gap in the market: a $200 billion SME financing opportunity that traditional venture capital couldn’t address.
“What most people don’t realize about fundraising is that it’s a game of building. It’s a game of matching demand and supply. You have to ensure that you are creating enough demand for investment in your company.”
The pattern became clear through repeated exposure. Venture capital worked brilliantly for businesses chasing exponential growth with unclear paths to profitability. But thousands of digital-first companies were generating consistent revenues, serving real customer needs, yet couldn’t access growth capital because they didn’t fit the venture template.
These businesses had predictable cash flows, growing customer bases, and clear unit economics. What they lacked was a financing model that aligned with their revenue patterns rather than forcing them into the binary venture outcome framework.
The 2019 Testing Laboratory
In 2019, Medhekar applied his systematic framework to entrepreneurship itself. Rather than rushing into his next venture, he spent twelve months methodically testing four different business hypotheses. The approach reflected his consulting training: treat each idea as a discrete workstream with specific success metrics.
One hypothesis focused on building an invoicing app for small businesses, reasoning that capturing transaction data would enable later monetization through credit products. The resulting app, BIMO (Bills on Mobile), gained initial traction but revealed a fundamental flaw in the data depth assumption.
“The data was not deep enough for us to be able to extend financing in a less risky kind of a way.”
Rather than persisting with a flawed hypothesis, Medhekar pivoted to testing the credit extension directly. This led to the Jimbooks partnership in Raipur, where he attempted to provide financing based on their invoicing data. The experiment failed for the same reason, but it confirmed a different pattern: the businesses that could provide sufficient data for credit assessment were already operating digitally across multiple platforms.
The insight crystallized during his time with Jimbooks, a profitable company generating healthy revenue streams but completely invisible to traditional financing channels. Here was the missing piece: not data capture, but data utilization from businesses already generating comprehensive digital footprints.
The COVID-19 Contrarian Launch
In May 2020, as most of the startup ecosystem was retracting, Medhekar launched Velocity with Jimbooks as the first customer. The timing appeared contrarian, but it reflected another systematic insight: infrastructure moments create the biggest opportunities for new business models.
COVID-19 accelerated India’s digital transformation in ways that made revenue-based financing not just viable, but necessary. The number of online shoppers surged from 140 million in 2020 to 260 million in 2024. Direct-to-consumer brands proliferated as offline retail struggled, creating exactly the data-rich, digitally native businesses that could support sophisticated underwriting models.
Velocity’s core insight was recognizing that online businesses, while asset-light, are extraordinarily data-rich:
“Online businesses, while asset-light are data-rich. We leverage this digital data to evaluate an application across 50+ parameters and extend up to Rs. 4 Crore of financing within 5 days. The repayments happen flexibly as a share of the company’s online revenues.”
The technical architecture reflected Medhekar’s systematic approach. Rather than relying on traditional credit scoring, Velocity built integration capabilities across 15+ platforms including Shopify, Amazon, Google Ads, and Facebook. The system evaluates businesses across 50+ parameters, from customer acquisition costs to repeat purchase rates to seasonality patterns.
Current prediction accuracy stands at 7 out of 10 for payback periods, with the goal of reaching 8 or 9 out of 10 by year-end. This level of precision enables Velocity to offer a fundamentally different financing model: revenue share rather than fixed interest, aligning the financier’s returns with the business’s growth trajectory.
The Validation Sequence
The systematic approach to building Velocity showed in how Medhekar sequenced validation milestones. Rather than trying to serve all digital businesses immediately, he focused specifically on e-commerce and D2C brands, building deep expertise in their data patterns and cash flow cycles.
The focus paid off. In March 2021, Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures led a $10.3 million seed round. Eight months later, the firm doubled down with a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $30.3 million. Andrew McCormack from Valar noted the exceptional trajectory: “Since our last investment, Velocity has grown 10X and secured the lead position in this fast-growing market.”
This validation came during a constrained funding environment. India’s fintech sector saw funding drop 33% to $1.9 billion in 2024, yet Velocity secured backing from one of Silicon Valley’s most selective funds, known for investments in TransferWise, N26, and BlockFi.
The Fortune Recognition and Current Scale
By May 2024, both Medhekar and co-founder Saurav Swaroop were recognized in Fortune India’s 40 Under 40 list, cementing their position as leaders in India’s fintech transformation. The recognition coincided with India’s D2C market being projected to reach $100 billion by 2025, growing from $33.1 billion in 2020.
Today, Velocity has funded over 350 companies including Power Gummy (healthcare supplements), Bella Vita (personal care), Berry Lush (apparel), and Itsy Bitsy (children’s fashion). The company has processed investments across 175 companies and connected over ₹1,200 crores of fundable revenues to its platform. Annual revenue reached ₹22.2 crores in FY24.
The business model continues to demonstrate the alignment principle that drove its creation:
“The fundamental premise of revenue based financing is that the financier also has a skin in the game to support your growth. If these customers grow, it directly benefits me. I have a commercial incentive to support their growth through my partnerships, through my capital, through a bunch of other analytics support that we provide.”
Customer retention metrics validate this alignment: 78% of businesses become repeat customers within six months, suggesting that the financing model genuinely supports growth rather than merely extracting returns.
The Competitive Landscape and Differentiation
Velocity operates in an increasingly competitive revenue-based financing market. Klub has raised $12 million and offers financing from ₹5 lakhs to ₹30 crores. GetVantage provides $20K-$500K financing with flat fee structures. N+1 Capital offers ₹1-15 crores in revenue-based growth capital.
But Velocity’s systematic approach to a specific market segment has created defensible differentiation. The company’s focus on e-commerce and D2C businesses enabled building deep API integrations and sector-specific underwriting models that generalist competitors struggle to match.
The technical moats continue expanding. Velocity recently launched Velocity Insights, a free analytics platform that aggregates customer data across all touchpoints, and is rolling out corporate credit cards with dynamic limits based on revenue performance. The company is also expanding into adjacent services like quick delivery through its Shipfast offering launched in January 2025.
The Infrastructure Timing Thesis
Medhekar’s systematic success with Velocity reflects broader infrastructure timing that few entrepreneurs fully leverage. India’s digital public infrastructure, including UPI (now powering nearly half of global real-time transactions), Aadhaar authentication, and the Account Aggregator framework (over 100 million consents), created unprecedented data transparency and payment efficiency.
Revenue-based financing leverages these rails to offer faster, more accurate underwriting than traditional banking systems while serving market segments that conventional venture capital cannot address economically.
The current goal reflects the systematic scaling approach: deploy over $134 million to more than 1,000 e-commerce businesses while expanding the product suite beyond pure financing into full-stack business enablement.
“Our long-term vision is to empower new-age businesses through multiple financing products. The reason we started with revenue-based financing is because we felt the access to financing is the biggest gap for them.”
The Pattern Recognition Advantage
Medhekar’s journey from consultant to failed founder to investor to successful entrepreneur illustrates the compound learning advantage that systematic thinkers can leverage. Each phase built capabilities that proved essential for the next: consulting taught structured problem-solving, startup failure embedded capital efficiency lessons, investing provided market gap identification, and the combination enabled building a business model that none of the individual experiences could have produced alone.
The systematic approach extends to Velocity’s expansion strategy. Rather than pursuing horizontal growth across all financing needs, the company is deepening its integration with digital business infrastructure, becoming the primary growth capital partner for India’s emerging D2C ecosystem.
For the thousands of profitable, growing businesses that don’t fit traditional venture capital models, revenue-based financing offers a path to scale without dilution. Medhekar’s systematic approach to building Velocity provides a template for entrepreneurs who prefer deliberate construction over inspirational pivoting.
The pattern recognition that started with a list of 58 business ideas and continued through multiple career phases has produced India’s largest revenue-based financier. In a market where most entrepreneurs chase the next trend, systematic thinking and compound learning create more durable advantages.
For the complete analysis of how Medhekar’s systematic approach built Velocity and his insights on the future of alternative financing in India, listen to his full conversation on The Founder Thesis Podcast.
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