Rajeev Kalambi and Cactus Partners: The Anti-Power Law Bet on India’s Series A Gap
How a 26-year banking veteran built a venture fund that targets zero failures, backs factories over software, and walks away from hyped valuations.
Most venture capitalists chase unicorns and accept that 90% of their bets will die. Rajeev Kalambi built Cactus Partners to do the opposite. He opened our conversation by handing me the toughest version of his own job interview.
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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