How Sagar Agarwal and Beams Fintech Fund Rewrote India's Growth Stage Playbook
Most venture capitalists diversify their bets across sectors, stages, and geographies. Sagar Agarwal did the exact opposite. After 17 years of traditional private equity investing, he condensed his entire thesis into one radical proposition: India needed its first pure fintech-focused growth fund. The result is Beams Fintech Fund, a $120 million vehicle that represents one of the boldest sectoral bets in Indian venture capital.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The timing couldn't have been more prescient. Since launching in 2021, Beams has deployed 65-70% of its capital across six portfolio companies, including InsuranceDekho's recent $70 million Series C round and a string of 2025 investments that validate Agarwal's contrarian approach to growth-stage fintech investing.
The $385 Million Education
Agarwal's journey to fintech specialization began at Evolvence India Fund, where he spent 13 years managing $385 million across two funds and over 30 investments. But it was his experience with seemingly mundane financial services deals that planted the seeds of his fintech conviction.
"Financial services, if you look at the economic structure globally, one-third of our GDP globally directly and indirectly comes from financial services. It's the backbone of every economy whether you talk about agriculture, healthcare, education, commerce, logistics, automotive, property, every sector has a backbone of financial services."
The insight was counterintuitive. While most investors saw fintech as another tech vertical, Agarwal recognized it as the only sector that "cuts across all sectors" without traditional winner-take-all dynamics. Unlike e-commerce or social media, financial services supports multiple large players across different segments, a structural advantage that would prove crucial to his investment thesis.
His prescience became clear during India's digital transformation between 2016-2019. Demonetization, UPI's explosion from 1 million to 10 billion monthly transactions, and Aadhaar-enabled financial inclusion created what Agarwal calls "massive adoption of financial services online." By 2024, UPI would process $2 trillion annually across 131 billion transactions, validating his early recognition of India's fintech infrastructure moment.
The 10X Journey Philosophy
Where most growth-stage investors cast wide nets, Agarwal developed what he terms the "10X Journey" philosophy, a surgical approach to identifying companies at the precise inflection point between product-market fit and scale.
"The 100 crore to 1,000 crore is a 10X journey that any investor wants to go through. That's the journey that Beams wants to come into. That's the journey we invest into."
The methodology is ruthlessly systematic. Beams mapped 30 subsectors within fintech and financial services, identified the top 150 growth-stage companies generating ₹80-100 crores in revenue, and concentrated on market leaders positioned for the crucial scale-up phase. This approach targets companies that have already achieved product-market fit, built management teams, and established market positioning, but haven't yet reached institutional scale.
The portfolio construction reflects this philosophy: just 12 concentrated bets of $10 million each, designed to capture the highest-conviction opportunities while maintaining meaningful ownership stakes. It's venture capital as precision instrument rather than spray-and-pray volume game.
Building the Institutional Machine
Perhaps Agarwal's most innovative insight was recognizing that launching a specialized fund required more than just capital and conviction, it demanded rebuilding the entire value creation infrastructure around fintech expertise.
"You're convincing the investor to put money with you and you're convincing the founder to take your money. It's not like you're a source of capital and money goes to companies. You have to convince both sides of the table."
The solution was architecturally elegant. Beams assembled a three-layer institutional structure: an 11-person team with deep fintech experience, an advisory board of 12 senior industry veterans from banks and NBFCs, and most innovatively, strategic limited partners from the financial services industry itself.
This LP strategy creates unique cross-pollination opportunities. Banks and NBFCs aren't just passive investors, they become potential partners, customers, and distribution channels for portfolio companies. It's ecosystem investing at its most sophisticated, turning the fund's investor base into its competitive advantage.
The numbers validate the approach. Beams raised 60% institutional capital and 40% from family offices and corporates, with 80% domestic and 20% international LPs, a composition that provides both stability and strategic value-add capabilities.
Portfolio Deep Dive: Betting on Infrastructure
Agarwal's investment selections reveal a sophisticated understanding of fintech's evolution from consumer-facing applications to infrastructure plays that enable the broader financial ecosystem.
The Digital Banking Gambit
The $7 million investment in Neo represents perhaps Beams' highest-conviction bet on regulatory evolution. While India's Reserve Bank has issued no digital banking licenses, Neo has built consumer banking products through partnerships with six traditional banks, serving premium, mass, and blue-collar segments.
The regulatory arbitrage is complex but logical. Neo operates as a technology layer over licensed banks, building customer relationships and digital interfaces while partners handle deposit-taking and lending functions. If India eventually issues digital banking licenses, as many expect, Neo would be positioned as a leading candidate with proven scale and operational capability.
The InsuranceDekho Success Story
The crown jewel of Beams' portfolio demonstrates the power of the 10X Journey thesis in action. InsuranceDekho's March 2025 Series C round raised $70 million, led by Beams alongside Japan's MUFG and BNP Paribas Cardif.
The numbers tell the scale story: 10.2 million customers, 220,000 distribution partners, coverage across 99% of India's pin codes, and 720+ insurance products from 49 providers. More importantly, InsuranceDekho issues 21 new policies every minute, the kind of operational scale that validates Agarwal's focus on companies that have moved beyond product-market fit to genuine market leadership.
The Collection Infrastructure Play
Perhaps no investment better illustrates Agarwal's "fin first, tech second" philosophy than Credgenics, the debt collection SaaS platform that participated in a $50 million Series B round.
"Lending is more a collection business than a lending business. Everybody wants to lend money. Somebody has to build a collection stack."
Credgenics handles 40 million retail loans and sends 60 million digital communications monthly for 100+ BFSI clients. The platform claims to increase resolution rates by 20%, improve collections by 25%, and reduce collection costs by 40%, metrics that reveal the unsexy but crucial infrastructure layer beneath India's lending boom.
The Contrarian Lens on Risk
While much of Indian fintech has focused on unsecured consumer lending, Agarwal maintains a contrarian stance rooted in his traditional financial services experience.
"I'm still evaluating businesses, but I can invest in a secured lending business. Why should your first loan be not profitable? Every loan that you disburse should generate a return on investment for you and should add to your balance sheet."
This philosophy influenced Beams' investment in PropCap's supply chain finance platform, which focuses on asset-backed lending to small and medium businesses. The approach prioritizes sustainable unit economics over growth-at-all-costs metrics that characterized much of the 2021-2022 fintech boom.
The vindication came during 2023's funding winter, when unsecured lending startups faced severe capital constraints while asset-backed lenders maintained more stable performance. Agarwal's emphasis on collection capabilities and secured lending structures proved prescient as the market shifted toward profitability and sustainability metrics.
Market Timing and the Recovery
Beams' launch timing proved remarkably astute. The fund began deploying capital during 2022's peak valuations, continued through 2023's funding winter, and is now benefiting from 2024-2025's fintech recovery.
India's fintech sector remains the most funded with $2.5 billion across 162 deals in 2024, despite a 16% decline from 2023's peak. More significantly, Q2 2025 showed 19% year-over-year growth to $1.1 billion, with a notable shift toward larger deals, exactly the growth-stage segment where Beams operates.
The regulatory environment has also improved substantially. The 2024 elimination of angel tax, reduction in long-term capital gains rates, and streamlined foreign venture capital investor registrations created a more favorable investment climate. These policy changes, combined with India's position as Asia-Pacific's second-largest VC destination with $13.7 billion in total 2024 funding, provide structural tailwinds for Beams' strategy.
The Institutional Validation
Perhaps the strongest validation of Agarwal's thesis comes from portfolio company exits and follow-on funding. InsuranceDekho's $70 million round represents the kind of institutional validation that growth-stage funds depend on, while BharatPe's unicorn status from Venture Catalysts' earlier portfolio demonstrates the ecosystem's ability to generate category-defining outcomes.
More importantly, Beams' 2025 investment activity, including a ₹200 crore pre-IPO investment in an undisclosed NBFC expected to go public in June 2025, and the recent Infinity Fincorp participation, suggests the fund is moving toward its exit phase with several portfolio companies approaching institutional scale.
Looking Forward: The Specialization Test
Beams Fintech Fund represents more than just another VC story, it's a real-time experiment in whether deep sector specialization can generate superior returns in India's maturing venture ecosystem. The early indicators are promising, but the definitive test will come through exits over the next 24-36 months.
The broader implications extend beyond fintech. If Beams' concentrated, sector-focused approach outperforms traditional generalist strategies, it could accelerate the evolution of Indian venture capital toward deeper specialization and industry expertise.
"When you're raising growth capital, it's very easy to burn through the money. You need to have an eye on return on investment on every capital that you spend, where you're spending, who you're spending with, and why you're spending that capital."
For now, Agarwal's contrarian bet appears to be paying off. In an ecosystem often characterized by momentum investing and sector rotation, Beams' sustained focus on fintech infrastructure and growth-stage discipline offers a different model, one that prioritizes domain expertise, regulatory navigation, and sustainable unit economics over growth-at-all-costs metrics.
As India's fintech market approaches an anticipated $2.1 trillion opportunity by 2030, and UPI transactions project toward 1 billion daily by 2025, Agarwal's early recognition of financial services' structural advantages may prove to be one of Indian venture capital's most prescient sectoral bets.
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