Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital: The VC Who Rides Mumbai Trains and Breaks His Own Rules
How the Onida heir built India's most disciplined seed fund by staying small, moving slow, and betting on founders who pivot
In 1996, Sasha Mirchandani stood at Churchgate station, heir to India’s most recognized television brand (Onida), watching hundreds of commuters charge toward him. His brother had deliberately withheld a crucial piece of information: when the train stops, step aside or get crushed. Sasha didn’t step aside. He got dragged backward, his back smashed against the carriage.
His father had sent him there on purpose.
For the next six years, the son of Mirc Electronics founder rode second-class trains between Andheri and Churchgate. No first-class privileges. No chauffeur. Just the daily reality of how 99% of India actually lives. This wasn’t corporate hazing. It was training for what would become his edge as one of India’s most successful seed-stage investors.
My father said, You have to take the train from now on. I couldn’t believe it because it was like a medieval world. But within a week, it was like nothing to me.
That education in real India, not privilege-bubble India, would later inform how Kae Capital evaluates founders, structures funds, and has produced returns that outperform mutual funds started in the same period.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights
The Onida Math That Changed Everything
Before Sasha became a venture capitalist, he lived through a case study in bad timing. In 1991, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh called his father Guru Mirchandani to Delhi with devastating news: India was bankrupt. The doors would open to multinationals starting next month.
The numbers tell the story. Onida’s revenue: ₹150 crores. Not even a $20 million company. Samsung and LG: $10 billion each, with balance sheets strong enough to lose money in India for decades while building market share.
Out of 551 TV manufacturers licensed in 1981 for the Asian Games, 550 have shut down. The only one still listed and going strong is Mirc Electronics, where my dad is the founder. He’s 82 years old.
That survival story taught Sasha something venture capitalists obsess over but often misunderstand: TAM, or total addressable market, matters less than timing, capital access, and founder adaptability. Electronics across China, Korea, Japan, and Europe had grown behind closed markets. India opened when its champions were still tiny.
It’s why today, 98% of the Mirchandani family holdings sit in tech, not electronics. One conversation at a YPO event in 2000 about moving from textiles to pharmaceuticals for better multiples sparked the pivot. Sasha realized he could help entrepreneurs like his father who had no access to capital, while simultaneously escaping an industry with razor-thin margins.
The 25-Year Bet That’s About to Pay Off
In 2001, a team came to Mirc Electronics asking for televisions to use in product comparisons. Sasha asked about their business. By the end of the meeting, he’d offered to invest. They were shocked. There was no venture capital industry in India. Nobody gave money to startups.
That company, originally a comparison shopping site called Woodle.com, became Fractal Analytics. Twenty-five years later, it’s a unicorn preparing for an IPO in 2024.
That was my first investment. A 25-year journey.
But here’s what makes the story revealing: Fractal only succeeded because the founders pivoted away from Woodle.com into data mining, which eventually became AI and analytics. The TAM for comparison shopping in 2001 India was tiny. The TAM for what Fractal does now is massive. The founders saw it before the investors did.
The same pattern played out with InMobi, Kae’s investment through Blue Run Ventures (Sasha’s previous firm). Originally funded as mKhoj, a mobile search company, founder Naveen Tewari called within three months to say it wasn’t working.
I said, If you really believe it’s not working, tell me what you want to do next and we’ll support you. He did four such pivots till it reached mobile ads. That’s when they changed the brand to InMobi.
InMobi became India’s largest ad network globally. Not because of the original thesis, but because great founders know when to move.
The Small Fund Paradox
Kae Capital’s structure defies venture capital logic. While peers raise $200-400 million funds, Kae caps at $90-100 million. The firm takes four years minimum to deploy capital when the industry average is two years. They model for 25 investments per fund while others do 40-50.
This seems inefficient until you see the math. A $400 million fund needing 3x returns must generate $1.2 billion in exits. That requires enormous ownership stakes in multiple unicorns. A $100 million fund needing 3x only needs $300 million.
If we know the chance of success at that stage is so much harder, would we waste 12 years of our lives?
There’s another reason for staying small: alignment. With just 2% annual management fees on $100 million, the partners aren’t getting wealthy from fees alone. They need the carry, the profit share that only comes when LPs make money first.
We keep our funds small. LPs know we’re not making that much money with the 2%. They know we’re hungry.
The strategy works. One LP invested in 14 funds told Kae they were the only fund providing quarterly updates via Zoom calls. Not because Kae is over-communicating, but because everyone else under-communicates.
The Deal That Almost Didn’t Happen
Fund I, Deal #29. That’s how close Porter, now valued at $1.2 billion, came to not existing.
Standard venture fund structures don’t allow for recycling. When you make early exits, you distribute the principal back to LPs and move on. Kae negotiated a recycling provision: keep the principal, return only the profits, and reinvest in new companies.
Without the recycled clause, there would be no Porter. That small exit we made in some company would have been divided over 30 LPs. They wouldn’t have even known they got money in their account.
Deal #29 became the most valuable business in Kae Capital Fund I. The recycling provision effectively increased the fund’s surface area for discovering outliers without raising more money.
It’s the kind of structural innovation that comes from deep pattern recognition. Sasha had watched his father pivot from packaging to watches to shoes before landing on televisions. He’d watched Fractal pivot from comparison shopping to analytics. He’d watched InMobi pivot four times. He understood that the best investments often come later in a fund’s life, when you’ve learned the most.
Breaking the Rules for Foxtale
Kae Capital has clear preferences: teams over solo founders, sectors they understand, companies in their defined themes. Then Romita Mazumdar walked in.
Solo founder. Consumer company (Kae was slowing down on consumer). No co-founder in sight. But partner Gaurav called Sasha with a simple message: “She’s awesome.”
All this bullshit I’m spouting right now is thrown out the window if the right person walks in the door.
What made Romita special? Her clarity of ambition. She wanted to build India’s Procter & Gamble. Not a successful cosmetics brand. Not a profitable D2C company. India’s P&G.
You have to be audacious. If you’re yourself scared, who’s going to believe you? Somebody built P&G. Why not Romita?
Foxtale is now one of Kae’s success stories, proof that rules exist to be broken by exceptional founders.
The Mistakes Worth Making
Sasha keeps a mental file of misses. Ola: moved too slow. Mintify: just said no. Nium (formerly InstaRem): dismissed the India-Australia remittance corridor as too small.
We saw that at a ₹10-15 crore valuation. The founder was amazing. India-Australia, how big can it really be? Now it’s a $2 billion business.
But he’s made peace with the nos. The yeses that went wrong hurt more, especially when they came from chasing hype. In 2021-22, when crypto valuations hit absurdity, Kae watched entrepreneurs pivot from SaaS to crypto within weeks, raising at $40-50 million pre-money with three term sheets and 24-hour deadlines.
I’m like, something’s not adding up here,” Sasha remembers. “Best that we’re not smart enough, which we honestly were not. We just backed off. Thank God.
They did make edtech bets during the pandemic boom, though the companies are now right-sized and moving in better directions. The lesson: when valuations disconnect from fundamentals, slow down. Way down.
The Optimist Who Doesn’t Decide
Here’s the paradox at Kae Capital’s core: Sasha Mirchandani, former entrepreneur and eternal optimist, doesn’t make the investment decisions.
Being an entrepreneur, I’m also optimistic. I’m always looking at the good thing in the company. My partners are more practical, pragmatic, sensible. They’re the ones who wear me away from most deals.
It’s structural self-awareness. He knows his bias toward believing in founders would lead to too many yeses. So his partners do the actual decisioning. Sasha focuses on relationships, LP management, and creating the conditions for his team to do their best work.
I can guarantee you the 25-year-old analyst is much smarter than me in deciding what to do. It’s just that because they’re 25, we are deciding for them. If I got out of the way, we’d probably do better.
What Founders Get Wrong
Every Thursday morning, 25 pitch emails hit Sasha’s inbox. Most make the same mistakes: sprawling TAMs (”1% of this massive market”), cluttered decks, multiple use cases in month two, and problem statements that take paragraphs to explain.
His formula: 10 pages maximum. Problem in one line. Solution in one line. Team credentials without jargon. Brief demo. Clear differentiation. One graph showing early traction.
We look for founders who have clarity of mind. You can tell in a single meeting in the first 10 minutes.
The other critical element: come through a reference. Cold emails don’t work at Kae, just like Kae tells entrepreneurs cold emails to VCs don’t work. It’s about signal and trust.
The 50% India Shift
Kae Capital’s LP base has transformed. Early funds: 100% international (US, UK, Israel, Middle East, Africa). Current funds: roughly 50% India.
The shift reflects India’s maturation as a startup ecosystem. Wealthy families, especially younger generations, want exposure to tech. They understand the 10-15 year lock-up. They’re willing to put small percentages of net worth into an asset class where 90% of funds globally underperform.
What they want in return: radical transparency (quarterly updates), access to founders (events where LPs can spend time with portfolio CEOs), and returns that beat public markets. Kae targets 20% net IRR to compete with equity and gold, while global LPs focus more on multiples.
One asset management company asked Kae to compare their fund performance to the company’s own mutual funds started in the same period. Kae won. They invested.
The Porter Principle
As Kae Capital prepares to launch Fund IV, likely at $90-100 million despite pressure to go bigger, Sasha keeps returning to one idea: the best returns often come from capital you almost gave back to LPs.
Deal #29. Porter. $1.2 billion. Only possible because of a recycling provision most funds don’t negotiate.
It’s a metaphor for Kae’s entire approach. Stay small when others go big. Move slow when others race. Break your rules for the right founder. Trust your 25-year-old analysts. Ride the train even when you can afford the car.
And when everyone’s chasing the same hype, remember: 551 TV manufacturers got licenses in 1981. Only one survived by adapting, pivoting, and never giving up.
That’s the Mirchandani DNA. From Onida to Kae Capital, the lesson stays the same: capital access and timing matter, but founder grit matters most.
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