Over the last decade, I have had the privilege of meeting thousands of founders.

Some were just getting started. Some went on to build remarkable companies. Most were somewhere in between, trying to solve a problem they cared deeply about and looking for the right partners to help them on that journey.

This section is for founders who would like to pitch their startup to me.

But before you do that, I would encourage you to spend some time exploring the rest of this substack. I write a lot, and this should help you understand me better.

Start with the LVX Journey

Building LetsVenture (now LVX) has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. This is my second venture, having founded, raised funding, scaled and exited my earlier venture in the embedded systems space. I was heading engineering and wrote some of the protocol stacks - so yes, I understand hardware, firmware, embedded. (when deep tech was not the trend!)

At LVX, like most startups, it did not begin with a grand plan. It began with curiosity, conversations and a problem that felt worth solving.

In the LVX Journey section, I write openly about building the platform, finding the problem, finding a co-founder, fundraising, making mistakes and learning along the way.

If you are a founder, I suspect many of those lessons will feel familiar.

Visit The Pitchroom

I also write regularly in The Pitchroom, where I share how investors evaluate startups, what makes founders stand out and how capital actually works.

Many founders spend weeks perfecting their pitch deck without fully understanding what investors are trying to assess.

The Pitchroom is my attempt to make that process a little more transparent.

One article I would strongly recommend is:

The Angel Investing Canvas

It is a simple framework that helps founders understand how investors think about opportunities. It may also help you build a stronger fundraising narrative and a better deck. As a founder, going into an investor meeting prepared almost always leads to deeper and more meaningful conversations.

What I look for in founders

People often ask about my investment thesis.

The truth is that I spend more time evaluating founders than evaluating sectors.

I am drawn to founders who have a deep understanding of the problem they are solving.

I like founders who are curious.

I like founders who are learning continuously.

I like founders who can balance ambition with humility. I like when conversations are authentic and genuine. I don’t like name dropping, and being shallow - its just a deal breaker for me.

Most importantly, I like founders who are building for customers rather than building for headlines.

A few things that catch my attention:

• Strong founder-market fit

• A problem that is real and meaningful

• Evidence that customers care

• Clarity of thought

• Ability to execute

• Long-term commitment to the problem

• Honesty in conversations

I care less about polished presentations and more about genuine insight.

My investing journey

I have personally invested in 66 startups, primarily at the early stage.

Some of the companies I have backed include:

• Giva

• Jar

• Online RTI (10x exit)

• BotLabs

• CureSkin

• Sensemei

• Kissan Konnect

• Cherry

• hBits

I am also an LP in a few venture funds.

Like every investor, I have had successes, mistakes and surprises. Investing has taught me that outcomes are often less predictable than they appear in hindsight.

What matters is finding founders who are resilient, thoughtful and committed to solving a real problem.

Beyond investing

Outside of startups and investing, a significant part of my time and personal capital goes into MyPragati, the non-profit initiative that is very close to my heart.

Working with communities through MyPragati has shaped how I think about impact, privilege and long-term change.

It has also reminded me that while businesses create value, not all value is measured in financial returns.

Before you pitch

Before you send me your deck, ask yourself three questions:

Why this problem?

Why now?

Why are you the right person to solve it?

If you have thoughtful answers to those questions, we already have a good starting point.

Pitch To Me

If you would like me to review your startup, please send:

• A short note about what you are building

• The problem you are solving

• Your pitch deck

• Any traction or customer insights

I cannot promise I will invest. I cannot promise I will respond to every pitch.

But I do promise that I respect the courage it takes to build. And I genuinely enjoy meeting founders early in their journey. Some of the most interesting companies start as a simple conversation.

I look forward to hearing your story.

Have fun building.

Shanti

I was at the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women event last week. There were 350 women entrepreneurs who had gone through a rigorous three-month programme from IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Lucknow. These are among the top educational institutions anyone could want an initiation into startups. It is almost like being baptised by fire.

The entire event had amazing energy. Women building across different sectors, at different stages of their startup journey, all brought together by a common desire to create something meaningful.

The event, in some way, shifted something for me. I realised how overrated funding conversations have become.

Is capital the enabler or the goal?

Capital is important. It plays a critical role in helping businesses stay competitive, scale when the market is ready, and experiment to find the right fit. Do not get me wrong. I understand that well, and I have seen the impact of what we have built at LetsVenture.

What is probably misplaced is how overrated it has become.

I have always maintained that capital is an enabler to the goal and not the goal itself. It is true about money too. If money becomes an enabler and helps create wider impact, it can become one of the most powerful instruments available to us.

Sadly, the narrative we have all created is around who has raised, from whom they have raised and how much. It has become a barometer of success.

Sitting in that room, I also knew one truth. Many founders struggle when fundraising becomes the goal itself. What if we acknowledged that building a good business is more valuable than fundraising? What if customer love mattered more than investor interest? What if we spent as much time celebrating sustainable businesses as we did for funding announcements?

Having been in the space, I know that fundraising comes with its own nuanced challenges. Sometimes, after raising capital, founders find themselves building for investors rather than building for the market.

Giving space for Founder conversations

One thing I have learnt as both a founder and investor, is that the best gift you can give founders is respect and attention when they present their pitch. I have always maintained with my team, and in my conversations, that founders deserve support because they are the ones facing the challenges of building every day.

It is easy to give advice. It is easy to offer perspectives without understanding the nuance of building. That is also why operators often make better investors. They are able to empathise with the journey because they have lived it themselves.

My own journey at LetsVenture

When I founded LetsVenture, I had a meeting with the CEO of a large bank in Mumbai, who was part of an angel network. The meeting lasted twenty minutes. Fifteen of those minutes were spent with him explaining to me why building an online marketplace for fundraising was a bad idea. The discussion was patronising all along the way, with complete disregard to my past experience and my own homework done before I launched the platform.

I was amused more than anything else. Perhaps because I grew up learning that being kind is sometimes more important than being right. That respecting ambition matters. That each one of us is on our own journey in life.

That does not mean I do not give feedback to founders. I do. But I try to do it respectfully, while letting them know that I am available if they need a sounding board.

That meeting has stayed with me as a reminder not to judge outcomes of things we may not fully understand.

I need validation. Is that really important?

The other reflection I had at the event was around validation.

As women founders, we often speak openly about self-doubt, about wondering whether we belong in certain rooms, about constantly proving ourselves and seeking validation.

Yet after one event, a male founder came up to me and said something interesting.

“Everything you say women founders face, I face too.”

And perhaps he was right. Maybe validation is not a women founder challenge. Maybe it is a founder challenge.

Some founders seek it through fundraising. Some through visibility. Some through networking. Some through being constantly busy.

The forms may differ, but the need is often the same.

Am I doing enough? Am I succeeding? Am I falling behind?

I have been fortunate to have an inner circle that is kind, generous and genuinely supportive of the work I do. Over the years, I have learnt to rely more on that than on external validation.

You will realise soon that no one has all the answers. Looking for constant validation often feels like giving away control to someone who is not you.

An important reminder here is that this journey is about resilience. Real resilience is becoming self-aware enough to stop measuring your worth every few weeks against someone else’s journey. It is learning to stay anchored while the world rewards noise.

Perhaps that is also why I no longer romanticise networking the way the startup ecosystem often does. I genuinely do not believe every room is important. I do not believe every dinner matters. I do not think relationships built entirely around utility sustain for very long.

Relationships that endure are built on meaningful conversations, generosity and trust, not on building a rolodex. That is my personal point of view. This may not represent others, but do I need validation again? :)

As I sat in that room with 350 founders, I found myself thinking about something very simple. Ten years from now, very few people will remember who raised what round. Very few people will remember the valuation. What they will remember are the businesses that solved real problems, created value and stayed the course.

I really wish we talked about that more often.

I wish we talked more about the beauty of entrepreneurship itself. About learning, fighting, adapting and staying in the game. And if things do not work out, that is okay too.

Because in the end, it is truly about the journey. Always.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Shanti

Asset allocation, SIPs, retirement math, portfolio balancing — everything is structured. If you even google it once, you will be given multiple options on how to plan yur investments. There are platforms that then allow you to follow structured investments.

Startup investing is the opposite. The lack of visible formulas and structure makes it more alluring.

It is mostly reduced to one line:

“Invest what you can afford to lose.” I am guilty of this too. I would often over simplify startup investing to this: “Write the cheque, and write it off”.

Honestly, that is not a framework. That is a disclaimer.

Startup Investing: Neither a side bet nor your main bet

I have many friends who ask me a a version of this:

“How much should I allocate to startups?”

The answers are usually broad.

“10% of your net worth.”
“Only invest what you can afford to lose.”

Both are directionally right. Neither helps you act.

So I finally decided I would write a post to make this more concrete and understandable.

Case 1: You earn ₹2 crore a year

After taxes and lifestyle, most people will have:

• ₹50–60L as annual savings for investing

This becomes your investment pool. The real question is:

“How much risk do I want to take within this pool?” This is purely personal. I have seen people who work in startups allocate as much as 50% into startups. That is NOT the norm.

How do you deply your ₹50–60L as investable corpus?

This is where startup investing becomes meaningful, but not reckless.

How to deploy this ₹9–15L annually towards startups:

This is where most people get it wrong. They do 2–3 deals and stop. That is not a portfolio.

A more disciplined approach:

* 3–5 startups per year

* ₹2–3L per startup

* Over 4–5 years → 15–20 startups

Now the math starts to work. This is when outcomes start to look less random. The first few cheques can be smaller cheques, so you start to understand the process, and also trust your own judgement.

Case 2: You have ₹5 crore investment corpus

Now the question shifts.

From “how much to invest”
To “how to allocate without damaging what you have built”

This becomes your startup allocation pool.

How to deploy this startup allocation corpus

• Spread over 3–4 years

• 15–20 startups

• Keep 30–40% reserved for follow-ons

Example:

• Initial cheque: ₹3–5L

• Follow-on: double down on the top 20–30%

Where most people go wrong

They treat startup investing like experimentation.

“Let me try a couple of deals.”

That almost guarantees weak outcomes, because returns here are not linear. They come from a few outliers. That is the truth and the faster we understand this, the better investors we start to become.

A simple formula to remember

Startup Allocation = 10–15% of your investment pool
Portfolio Size = 15–25 startups
Time Horizon = 8–10 years

If one of these breaks, the model weakens.

Why this matters for founders

Founders often ask:

“Why did this investor pass?”

It is rarely just about the startup.

It is often about:

• how many similar bets they already have

• how much capital they have left

• whether they are pacing investments

• where this fits in their portfolio

In short, allocation as Howard Marks says,
“You cannot predict, but you can prepare.”

Allocation is preparation.

The shift that matters

If you are an investor, do not ask:

“Is this startup good?”

Ask:

“Does this fit into a portfolio?”

This is the layer beneath startup investing. And it is worth understanding — whether you are deploying capital or raising it.

If I had to give every new investor one page, this would be it

Call it a simple operating guide for startup investing:

In closing, just one rule to remember:

In startup investing, discipline compounds faster than returns

Hope this makes angel investing more understandable and quantifiable.

If you are a founder wondering why investors passed — re-read this. The answer is usually in their portfolio, not in your deck.

If there is one decision that will shape your journey more than almost anything else, it is this one—who you choose to build with.

Over time, I have come to realise that many startups do not fail because the market was not large enough or because capital was unavailable. A significant number of them struggle because of co-founder conflict. Not necessarily because something dramatic went wrong, but because alignment slowly breaks down. And when that happens, it is very difficult to recover.

When I started building, I knew one thing quite early. I did not want to do it alone. Not because I could not, but because I understood that I needed someone to think with, to challenge me, and to share the journey with. Building a company can get lonely, and having someone at the same level changes how you navigate that.

What I did not have was a clear plan for how to find that person.

Finding a co-founder without a plan

At that time, I was still validating the idea and meeting a wide range of people—investors, operators, anyone who was willing to spend time understanding what I was trying to build. Most of these conversations would end in a similar way, with someone asking how they could help. And almost every time, my answer was the same: I am looking for a co-founder.

I must have repeated this across dozens of conversations over several months. It was not a strategy as much as it was clarity. I knew what I needed, and I said it out loud consistently. That is eventually how I was introduced to my co-founder.

There is no perfect starting point

A lot of founders prefer to start with someone they already know well—a friend, a colleague, someone they are comfortable with. And that works in many cases. But I have also seen conflicts play out across all these patterns. Friends fall out, colleagues misalign, and even strong professional partnerships can struggle when the pressure of building sets in.

In many ways, a co-founder relationship is closer to a long-term partnership than a purely professional arrangement. Over time, both people evolve. Sometimes you grow in the same direction, and sometimes you do not. Those differences are not always visible in the beginning.

So what should you really look for?

The first thing is simple, but often underestimated. You should genuinely like the person. You will end up spending more time with your co-founder than with almost anyone else during the early years. If the relationship is purely functional, it becomes difficult to sustain over time.

During one of my conversations with Sanjiv Bhikchandani, Founder of Infoedge, he told me something that has stayed forever. This was around hiring and managing teams - व्यवहार पहले, व्यापार बाद में।

Attitude comes first. Then comes skill and business acumen.

Respect and complementarity

The second is respect. You have to believe that the other person brings something meaningful to the table—something you do not have. This is where complementarity becomes important. Good co-founders are not identical. They bring different strengths, think differently, and often approach problems from different angles. When that difference is understood and valued, it becomes a strength. When it is not, it becomes friction.

Alignment over time

Beyond this, there is a deeper layer that is harder to evaluate but equally important. Do both of you see the journey in a similar way? Are you aligned on what you are trying to build and how long you are willing to stay with it? Because over time, roles will evolve. One of you may take on the CEO role, which comes with more visibility. If there is underlying competitiveness or lack of clarity, it tends to surface at that stage.

The outcome may look similar from the outside. The experience of getting there is very different.

From the outside vs from within

When I look at this from an investor lens, the pattern is very clear. Over time, you begin to see how often outcomes are shaped not just by the idea, but by the people building it and how they work with each other. I wrote about this in detail in my earlier post, from an investor lens. Certainly worth revisiting.

But when you look at it from the founder’s side, it does not feel like a pattern. It feels personal. It is about conversations that do not happen, expectations that are not articulated, and small misalignments that grow over time.

In my own journey, I have been fortunate. Sanjay and I have stayed the course. But that has not happened by default. It has required effort, communication, and a willingness to work through differences when they arise.

If you are at this stage, it is worth taking the time to be deliberate about this decision. Be clear about what you need, say it out loud, and keep looking. And when you do find someone, spend time understanding not just how they think when things are going well, but how they respond when things are uncertain.

Because that is where the real test lies.

More soon,
Shanti

Resharing the Earlier post summary here

Finding the right startup idea is rarely a straight path. Most founders do not start with clarity—they arrive at it over time.

When I look back at how I started, it is quite different from the neat stories we tend to tell about companies. When I returned to India, I had no plans of starting up. I had already founded a startup, had worked at a large corporate and I was quite clear I wanted to work in the impact space. I wanted to do something meaningful, and that felt like the most direct path at the time.

But as often happens, what you set out to do and what you end up doing are not always the same thing. Destiny, luck and serendipity are real!

The first signal: a broken system

As I began spending time with nonprofits and trying to help them raise funds, I started noticing something that felt off. The process of fundraising itself felt broken. Not in a dramatic way, but in a very operational, everyday sense. It was inefficient, repetitive, and heavily dependent on individual conversations.

I found myself saying the same thing again and again to different people. The same story, the same context, the same explanation—just repeated across meetings. And I remember thinking: there has to be a better way to do this.

At that point, I was still thinking about this purely from the lens of nonprofits. I started reading more about fundraising models, and that is when I came across crowdfunding. It was still early in India, but globally there were some interesting developments.

During this time, I found Dan Marom, who had written extensively on crowdfunding and had just moved to Tel Aviv. I had cold reached out to him on LinkedIn, not expecting much. Dan had written two books on crowdfunding and the connect was fascinating.

But he responded.

We started speaking, initially out of mutual curiosity. He wanted to understand how crowdfunding might evolve in India, and I was trying to learn as much as I could from someone who had studied the space deeply.

Those conversations became important for another reason.

I realised something about myself early on—I did not have the discipline to sit alone with an idea and work on it in isolation for long periods of time. I needed conversation. I needed a sounding board. I needed some form of accountability.

So I did something quite simple.

I set up a weekly call with him.

It was a 30-minute call, once a week. Nothing elaborate. But I made a commitment that every week, I would show up with something to share—what I had read, who I had spoken to, what I had understood better.

In hindsight, that small structure made a big difference.

It is similar to what people say when you are trying to build any habit—whether it is getting fit or learning something new. You either find a partner, or you commit publicly, because it creates a certain discipline. You show up differently when you know you have to report progress to someone.

This was my version of that. Applied to startups.

Because of those calls, I started becoming more intentional about how I spent my time. I began putting together a loose plan. I started reaching out to people in the nonprofit ecosystem—organisations, donors, corporate CSR teams—trying to understand how fundraising actually worked from different sides.

And then, somewhere along the way, there was a small but important shift.

The shift from nonprofits to startups

A friend suggested, almost casually, “Why are you only looking at nonprofits? Why not look at startups as well?” It was a simple suggestion, but it stayed with me.

I had been a founder before. I understood that world more intuitively. So I decided to explore it.

Discovering the “real” problem

I started reaching out to founders. Not in a structured, highly planned way, but simply to have conversations. I must have spoken to around twenty founders in those early weeks. I would meet them, ask them questions, try to understand what was most difficult for them.

And almost everyone said the same thing : Capital.

If they had access to capital, they felt they could solve most of their other problems.

And more importantly, it was a gap I found myself wanting to understand better.

This entire process took time. It was not immediate clarity. It took me close to nine months of conversations, reading, and thinking before I felt confident that this was something I wanted to work on seriously. I was not in a hurry to startup.

But there was one signal that, in retrospect, mattered more than anything else.

It reminded me of something I have often heard people say—that they started a travel company because they loved to travel.

It is worth thinking about that early. But there is a nuance there.

What you enjoy at a small scale is not always what you will enjoy when it becomes work. When it involves process, repetition, and responsibility, the experience changes. Not everyone enjoys that version.

Because liking something occasionally is very different from committing to it fully. In my case, I was fortunate that the interest stayed.

And that is how it began. Not with a clear idea or a defined plan, but with a series of small observations, conversations, and shifts in direction.

So if you are expecting clarity at the beginning, you may be disappointed.

Most of the time, it looks like this instead—
a starting point,
a question that bothers you,
and a willingness to follow it a little longer than most people would.

More soon,
Shanti

Dear Founder Self,

Starting a startup looks easier today than it ever has. But building something that actually works is still hard.

In this note, I am sharing what I wish I had understood before becoming a founder—drawn from years of conversations with founders at different stages.

What has always struck me is that while there is no shortage of information available today, very little of it tells you what the journey actually feels like when you are in it. Most of it is either too polished or too prescriptive.

So I thought I would write a few things I wish I had known earlier—not as advice, but as a way to make sense of the journey from the inside.

I remember this phase very clearly.

Many people seek meaning through work, not just income, as explored in Man's Search for Meaning. This is one of my all time favorites.

Once wealth is created, we all at the core. crave for the meaning we can create. It usually begins with a certain restlessness. On paper, everything looks fine—your job, your team, the direction you are headed in. And yet, there is a part of you that keeps asking if you should be doing something of your own.

That question stays with you.

What has changed over time is the environment around that question.

Why more people are starting up today

Today, starting up feels far more accessible than it did earlier. You see people building everywhere. A friend has raised a round. Someone you follow has built a meaningful business with a very small team. Technology has reduced the friction to start, and in many ways, that is a good thing.

But it also creates a certain pressure. A feeling that you should be doing this too. That is not always a good enough reason.

The difference between starting and building

Because while it has become easier to start something, it has not become easier to build something that matters. The gap between a project and a company is still very real, even if it is less visible at the beginning.

Start with the problem, not the idea

So before you take that step, it is worth pausing for a bit longer than feels natural.

Not to overthink, but to understand what is actually pulling you towards this.

The first thing I would ask you to reflect on is the problem you want to work on.

Not the idea you have in mind, but the problem itself.

Understanding the problem: What is the person you are building for doing today, without your product? How are they solving it right now? And why has that solution continued to exist?

Most problems are not unsolved. They are simply being managed in ways that are “good enough.” That is what you are competing with.

If your product were to exist, would it change that behaviour meaningfully? Would it make something easier, faster, or more reliable in a way that they would notice—and come back to without being reminded? Would someone pay for it, without having to debate the benefits?

If that is not clear yet, it is possible that you are still at the stage of having an idea, not a problem. That distinction matters more than it seems.

Your personal connection to the problem

The second thing is more personal, and therefore a little harder to sit with.

Why do you want to work on this?

Not in a broad sense, but specifically—what is your connection to this problem? Have you experienced it, or spent enough time close to it to understand its nuances?

The founders who stay with a problem long enough to build something meaningful, usually have a certain closeness to it. It shows up in how they describe it, in the questions they ask, and in the patience they have when things do not work immediately.

If your answer is primarily that it is a large or growing market, it is worth pausing here.

Markets create opportunity, but they do not sustain effort.

Something more personal usually has to do that.

Will you still care in the long run?

The third thing is a question you can only partially answer now, but it is still worth attempting.

Will you still care about this nine months, nine years from today?

Because the experience of building will change. The initial excitement will settle. The conversations will reduce. There will be long stretches where progress feels slow, and moments where things you were certain about begin to feel less clear.

There will be a period where nothing seems to move. That part is rarely spoken about, but it is real.

And in that moment, what keeps you going is not excitement. It is a quieter kind of commitment to the problem itself.

If you feel that you will stay with it even then—not because it is working, but because it still feels worth solving—you are closer to being ready than most.

There is also something else that does not get discussed enough.

As a founder, you spend a lot of time in ambiguity. There will be phases where the data is incomplete, advice does not align, and the right answer is not obvious. Some people grow into this over time. Others find it draining.

It helps to know which one you are.

None of this is meant to make the decision harder. In some ways, starting has never been easier. The ecosystem is more supportive, the tools are better, and access to knowledge is far greater than before.

But staying with it is where the real work lies.

It will ask more of you than you expect—not just in effort, but in patience, resilience, and sometimes your sense of self. So the reason to begin has to be strong enough to carry you through that.

In the end, most founders do not start because the timing is perfect or the tools are available. They start because there is a problem they have come across that they cannot ignore anymore.

And they stay with it longer than most people would. That is usually enough.

More soon,
Shanti

As a founder, it was hard to find the right investor. By “right”, I meant someone who would understand what you were building, be empathetic to the journey, and say yes to investing. At the same time, as an investor it was equally challenging to meet the right founder. The discovery problem was real on both sides.

More than a decade later, the problem still exists. Over the years, as LetsVenture evolved into a platform enabling these handshakes, I realised something interesting.

Technology can solve many aspects of discovery, matching, and access. But it cannot easily solve for the human expectations and emotions on both sides of the table.

Over time I have noticed a few recurring patterns. These are not mistakes as much as interpretations — moments where founders and investors are looking at the same conversation but drawing very different conclusions.

The first misunderstanding often begins when founders feel that the investor is taking too long to decide.

When investors go quiet after a meeting, founders often assume the answer is no. As founders, we are so eager, we are trying to read body language, look beyond the words and see if we can detect a ‘friendly yes’.

In my experience, usually a NO is more immediate than a committed YES.

Early-stage investors rarely make the final decision in a single meeting. They may be comparing opportunities, thinking through the market, or discussing the company internally with friends and people they trust in investing. Occasionally they simply want to observe how the founder executes over the next few weeks.

As founders we are seeking momentum and silence can feel discouraging. But in many cases it could also mean the investor is still forming a view. Also, unlike a fund or an institution, an individual does not have pressure to deploy capital. They maybe busy at personal events, get caught at work or just might not be in a position to decide quickly.

The second misunderstanding appears when questions begin.

When investors ask many questions, founders sometimes interpret that as skepticism. In reality, thoughtful investors are often trying to understand how the founder thinks.

How the founder responds matters more. Two founders may give similar answers, but the clarity of thinking behind those answers can feel very different.

Early-stage investing is largely about evaluating how someone navigates uncertainty. Questions are often the only way to see that thinking process.

The third misunderstanding is assuming that a great presentation leads to the investment.

A VC once told me that one of the joys of investing is seeing how creatively founders tell their story. It is not necessarily about the format of the presentation. Today founders are fundraising in a very different environment. With a single prompt into an AI tool, investors can generate multiple observations about a pitch deck within minutes. The investors have all the tools to evaluate information.

Don’t get me wrong - a strong presentation certainly helps. It shows structure, answers questions ahead and shows clarity. But conviction rarely comes from the slides alone. Besides the AI tools, most investors have sat through extraordinary presentations made by some of the smartest people.

What matters more is what happens after the slides. How the founder explains the market without a script. How they respond when challenged. How deeply they understand the problem they are solving.

A great story can open the door. But conviction usually builds in the unscripted parts of the conversation.

The fourth — and perhaps the most important — misunderstanding is assuming all Investors are evaluating the same thing

There is so much information around fundraising checklists today that founders often assume investors are following a common checklist.

Each investor brings their own lens.

Some care deeply about founder resilience. Others focus on market size. Some are thinking about timing, while others are evaluating how the company fits into their portfolio.

This is why one investor may pass while another invests enthusiastically.

Understanding this can make fundraising feel less like judgment and more like alignment.

Lastly A “no” is often about timing, not belief

One of the hardest realities of early-stage investing is that investors say no even when they like the founder.

The company may be slightly too early. The market may still be forming. Or the investor may feel that they cannot add meaningful value at that stage.

Years later, many investors look back and realise that companies they passed on eventually succeeded. It is simply the nature of investing under uncertainty.

As founders, our job is to stay true to the problem we are solving, and ensure we show up to market feedback and customers. Before you start officially fundraising, take time to talk to people who might be potential investors to take feedback early and get perspective. This way, when you officially go fundraising, you are more aware, and better prepared. Over time I have realised that fundraising is rarely about convincing everyone in the room.

It is about finding the few people who see the problem in the same way you do.

The rest of the meetings, the questions, the delays and even the rejections are simply part of that search.

Enjoy this sketch - hope it encapsulates all I have tried to convey :)

This is a short case study on why I invested in Zwende. Very relevant to The PitchRoom series.

Early-stage investing is often described as pattern recognition. But in reality, it is closer to pattern imagination. Investors do not see what exists today. They try to imagine what the world might look like if a particular founder is right. What Steve Jobs said about being able to connect the dots looking back hold true in angel investing

Zwende was one such bet for me.

I first invested in the company around 2020, when the thesis was still forming and the category itself was not clearly defined. At that time, the idea sounded almost simple: help independent creators and artisans sell personalized products online. But beneath that simplicity was a deeper question about the future of commerce itself.

Would consumers continue buying standardized, mass-produced goods? Or would they increasingly seek products that reflected identity, individuality, and personal stories?

Zwende was built around the belief that the second future was already emerging.

Five years later, the company offers an interesting lens into how that thesis has evolved.

The Insight Behind Zwende

2020. This was about 2 years after the biggest acquisition in e-commerce globally by Walmart of Flipkart. Meesho had started to establish the social commerce narrative. When we think about commerce in India (e-commerce or social commerce), we often focus on scale — large marketplaces, logistics networks, standardized supply chains. Yet parallel to that system, there has always existed another economy, far more fragmented but equally powerful: the maker economy.

Across India, millions of artists, artisans, hobbyists and independent creators produce objects that are deeply personal — handcrafted lamps, embroidered textiles, painted home décor, personalized gifts, and dozens of other forms of creative expression.

The problem has never been creativity. The problem has been distribution.

Very similar to what we saw in FarmDidi.

Most creators sell through informal channels: Instagram pages, weekend flea markets, WhatsApp groups, or word-of-mouth communities. These channels work, but they do not scale easily. Discovery remains difficult, trust is fragmented, and creators spend a surprising amount of time managing tasks that have little to do with their craft — photography, marketing, logistics, payments, and customer support.

Zwende began with a simple premise:

What if technology could unlock the creative economy in the same way that Shopify unlocked independent brands or Etsy unlocked global craft sellers?

From Marketplace to “Makerplace”

In its early days, Zwende looked like a specialized marketplace for handcrafted and personalized products. But over time the founders realised that the opportunity was larger than simply listing products online.

The company began evolving toward what it now describes as a “makerplace.”

Instead of a traditional marketplace where sellers merely upload catalogues, Zwende enables creators to:

• sell products

• teach workshops

• build communities

• showcase their craft

This combination of commerce, learning and storytelling changes the relationship between buyer and creator.

A customer purchasing a handcrafted lamp or nameplate is not simply buying a product. They are buying a story — about the maker, the craft, and the cultural tradition behind it.

That emotional layer is what the company refers to as “emotion-commerce.”

The Long Tail of Creative Demand

One of the insights that attracted me to the company early on was the long-tail nature of creative demand.

Mass retail works well when millions of customers want the same product. Creative commerce behaves differently. Each buyer may want something slightly unique — a customized nameplate, a personalized gift, a handmade decorative item that reflects their personality.

Platforms built for scale often struggle with this long tail.

But technology, particularly personalization engines and modular product design, can unlock it.

Zwende built systems that allow customers to customize products in real time while enabling creators to manufacture on demand. Instead of holding inventory, the platform operates largely through virtual SKUs, allowing an enormous catalog of possible designs without the burden of traditional stock.

Today, the platform supports:

• 20 billion+ possible SKUs

• 10,000 new SKUs created daily

• 800+ brands and creators

• 8000+ artisans on the platform

Five Years of Progress

Looking back at the original investment thesis in 2020 and comparing it to the company’s trajectory today reveals something interesting: the core idea has remained remarkably consistent, even though the execution has evolved.

In 2020, the company was still experimenting with workshops, customization tools, and creator discovery models. Today, revenue has grown to 5x with strong improvements in unit economics.

The platform has also built a sizeable community that reduces dependence on paid acquisition. Zwende’s organic ecosystem now includes:

• 500,000 community members

• 353,000 Instagram followers

• 200,000 WhatsApp subscribers

• 275,000 email subscribers

Around 30% of revenue is driven organically through this community, which is a meaningful advantage in a world where customer acquisition costs continue to rise.

My 5Cs Framework

When I look back at the original decision to invest, it is helpful to revisit it through the framework I often use when evaluating early-stage startups.

C1: Clarity — Founder and Problem

I met the founders, Sujay and Innu, via a referral from a friend. As investors referrals are the strongest endorsement for founders. If you are a founder, there is a lesson to learn from the Zwende founders – they research, find the investors they think would be relevant and then relentlessly chase for a warm introduction. If you want to get your early investors. referrals work like magic.

On the business side, the team demonstrated early clarity about the structural problem they wanted to solve. They recognised that the challenge for creators was not lack of talent or even lack of demand. The real constraint was infrastructure — the systems required to turn creative output into scalable businesses. This infrastructure would be the key to build distribution.

That clarity shaped the platform’s model: creators focus on making, while Zwende provides the surrounding services that enable commerce.

C2: Category — Market and Timing

Creative commerce has quietly become one of the most interesting segments of the global internet economy. Platforms like Etsy, Shopify and Patreon have demonstrated that independent creators can build meaningful businesses when the right infrastructure exists.

Estimates today suggest that the global creative commerce market exceeds $110 billion, while the Indian opportunity alone could reach $30 billion as personalization and premium gifting become mainstream.

Zwende sits at the intersection of these trends.

C3: Capability — Technology and Operations

What differentiates the company from a simple marketplace is the technology layer behind supply creation.

The platform uses data and AI to identify emerging consumer demand, curate creator supply, and expand product categories. This allows the catalog to evolve continuously while remaining differentiated.

Equally important is the operational infrastructure that supports creators — enabling them to handle logistics, pricing, customization and customer experience without needing enterprise-level capabilities themselves.

Watching the founders build Zwende over the last 5 years has been a huge learning for me too. Innu as a founder is hands-on, operationally focused and ensures every data point is monitored and managed. For any business to build a predictable outcome, data in today’s world lies at the core. As a founder, if you have blind spots to the levers that can impact your business, the business is bound to surprise you when external factors change.

C4: Cost to Build — Moat

In creative marketplaces, the moat is rarely technology alone. It is built through community, supply relationships and brand trust.

Zwende’s defensibility emerges from several reinforcing layers:

• a growing community of creators and buyers

• a vast catalog of unique designs

• strong storytelling around creators and crafts

• customer feedback loops that refine supply

Together these elements create network effects that are difficult for competitors to replicate quickly.

I understand this deeply as I have designed and built LetsVenture as a marketplace. The moat is most often time, and capital cannot fast track the path.

C5: Conviction — My Personal Thesis

For me, the appeal of Zwende lies in the convergence of several long-term shifts.

Consumers increasingly want products that feel personal rather than generic.

Creators increasingly want independence rather than employment.

And technology increasingly allows small producers to operate at a scale that was once available only to large companies.

Platforms that connect these forces have the potential to reshape how entire categories of commerce operate.

Zwende is still early in that journey, but the direction is promising. Time and trust will become the moat that cannot be replicated.

Going forward

As the company continues to grow, several factors will determine its long-term trajectory. The first is category expansion. Creative commerce is inherently fragmented, and new product segments can unlock significant growth.

The second is creator success. Platforms become durable when the creators on them build meaningful livelihoods.

And the third is community-driven discovery. If Zwende continues strengthening its organic ecosystem, it can maintain efficient customer acquisition even as the market becomes more competitive.

Taking a page from Quick commerce models, the monetisation to allow creators to get discovered has not yet seen relevance in creator platforms. Almost think of this like a personalised Amazon where you can discover, engage, learn and transact with creators.

A Closing Thought

Startups are often described as technology companies, but sometimes the most interesting innovations are social rather than technical.

Zwende is not simply building a marketplace. It is experimenting with a new way of organising creative labour — where thousands of independent makers can collectively serve a national market while retaining their individuality. The impact that has been created is mind boggling in terms of numbers. Revenues for individual creators have gone up from 10-15x. Imagine – in a country like India that thrives on creativity, personalisation and the absolute depth of history and culture.

If that system continues to evolve successfully, it could quietly redefine how creative businesses scale in India. And that was the possibility we believed in when we first invested.

PS: This article reflects my personal perspective as an investor and is not investment advice. Every investment decision should be made independently based on one’s own analysis and risk appetite.

I first met Manjari during the curation process for LetsIgnite, our annual investor conclave at LetsVenture where a handful of startups pitch to a room of active angel investors. Some founders stand out because of traction, some because of storytelling. Manjari stood out for something far simpler — clarity about the problem she wanted to solve.

That conversation eventually led to SamVed investing in FarmDidi.

Before going deeper, it helps to understand the core idea behind FarmDidi.

The company sources, manufactures and distributes what it describes as “home-made pickles at scale.” I deliberately put those two words — home-made and scale — together because they rarely sit comfortably in the same sentence.

When we think of homemade food businesses in India, we often imagine small neighbourhood networks, informal distribution and boutique production. Those businesses are important because they create micro-entrepreneurs. But as investors we also look for the possibility of scale, where a model can expand beyond small communities and become a large, durable business.

FarmDidi is attempting to bridge exactly that gap.

The story behind Farmdidi

I met Manjari in Pune again, when we were doing the due diligence for the investment. What struck me was the clarity and purpose in her conversation. The origin of FarmDidi goes back to Manjari’s time at IIM Calcutta, where she worked on a development project in Bihar. That experience exposed her to a structural shift that is slowly reshaping rural India

The feminisation of agriculture, women’s loyalty in elections, and male migration pushing women into new economic roles.

She began by offering micro-loans but ran into the problem, “loan to mil jata hai, marketing nahin milti” (Credit may be available. Markets are not)

That insight became the foundation for FarmDidi.

Why Pickle?

FarmDidi emerged at the intersection of two observations.

First, millions of women across Self Help Groups already possess the capability to produce food products with remarkable consistency.

Second, the missing layer in that ecosystem is not production but distribution and brand aggregation.

The founders chose pickles as the first category almost accidentally. After the pandemic, when they experimented with selling products in Pune’s weekly markets, mixed flour saw limited repeat demand while pickles consistently sold out.

That behaviour revealed something important: pickles were not just a product category; they were a daily consumption habit deeply embedded in Indian households.

How big can this market be?

At first glance the pickle market appears small and fragmented, but that assumption disappears quickly once one begins to look at the underlying production ecosystem.

Across rural India, Self Help Groups already produce a wide range of food products. Most of these products never travel beyond the village or weekly market: lack of a brand and access to organised distribution beyond local networks.

What FarmDidi is attempting to solve for exactly this.

The closest historical parallel is Lijjat Papad, which demonstrated decades ago that decentralised production could scale if supported by a strong central brand. The difference today is that digital commerce, logistics infrastructure and direct-to-consumer distribution create the possibility of compressing that journey into a much shorter time frame.

Besides the scale, the impact was visible. We met a few Didis - and it goes back to my first post around women and financial independence. The respect and the recognition they receive from their family, their in-laws and their village is what blends purpose with value and wealth creation.

Besides, pickles were always homemade, but the current breed of consumers and the next generation of women don’t have time to home make it. There is a clear market opportunity for clean labels and an authentic brand in this space.

Problem or Opportunity?

As investors, we often differentiate between businesses that solve a problem and those that unlock an opportunity.

A problem-led business addresses something customers urgently need fixed. An opportunity-led business identifies a structural gap and builds a system around it before others recognise its potential.

FarmDidi sits closer to the second category.

The opportunity lies in the 90 million women connected through Self Help Groups in India, many of whom are gradually moving toward micro-enterprises as agriculture alone becomes economically insufficient. Access to small loans has improved, government schemes provide some support and production capability already exists. What is missing is an organised layer that connects these producers to markets.

FarmDidi attempts to build exactly that layer.

The story of Manisha Didi

One of the Didis we met was Manisha, who leads a Self Help Group called Shivai Bachat Ghat in Shivri village. Over time, her home has gradually become both a workplace and a storage point for raw materials, with containers of mango chunda, avakaya and karela pickle neatly stacked and labelled with manufacturing dates. She works roughly from late morning until early evening and now earns close to ₹25,000 a month, a meaningful shift in income for her household.

But the economic impact is only one part of the story.

During the conversations, her husband remarked that the village now casually refers to the area as “Manisha’s village,” a small but powerful signal of how participation in economic activity slowly changes social standing within rural communities.

The Business Model Behind It

Operationally, FarmDidi works through what the team describes as an Input–Transformation–Output model, which connects decentralised village production with centralised quality control and distribution.

Demand forecasting happens at the company level, after which purchase orders are issued to Self Help Groups. Production itself takes place inside village kitchens but follows tightly defined Standard Operating Procedures so that batches produced across different locations remain consistent in flavour and quality. Once prepared, the pickles are collected in large containers and transported to a central warehouse, where samples are tested before the products are packaged and sent out through the distribution network.

What emerges is a hybrid system: village-level food preparation combined with structured industrial quality control. Profits also directly go back to the Didis.

The operational complexity is significant, but if executed well, it creates something difficult to replicate — a distributed manufacturing network built on thousands of small kitchens.

My 5Cs Framework

C1: Clarity — Founder and Problem

What stands out most in FarmDidi’s origin story is how clearly the founders understood the structural gap in the ecosystem.

The founders realised that rural India does not lack productive capacity. Women across Self Help Groups have been producing food items for decades. The real gap lies in aggregation, standardisation and brand creation.

C2: Category — Market and Timing

The pickle category may look simple, but it sits at the intersection of culture, regional taste and daily consumption.

What makes the market particularly complex is the extraordinary variation in regional taste preferences. The oil used in pickles alone varies dramatically across India — mustard oil in the north, groundnut or sesame oil in parts of the south, coconut oil in Kerala and sunflower or soybean oil in Maharashtra.

Because of this diversity, a single “national pickle product” rarely works. FarmDidi’s response has been to design multiple regional variants so that customers encounter flavours that feel familiar rather than generic.

Mother’s recipe, a well known brand is one among the largest exporters of pickle. The opportunity to build localisation and go global is open today.

C3: Capability — Systems and Operations

Scaling decentralised food production requires strong operational discipline, and FarmDidi has begun building systems that support this structure.

The company uses technology to centralise data, while also running its own onboarding application called the Didi Business app, through which Self Help Groups register, submit information and eventually receive purchase orders.

New groups are trained, and production volumes initially start small until quality consistency is demonstrated. Over time, those partners receive larger orders.

What is emerging is less a traditional food factory and more a coordinated network of micro-manufacturing units.

C4: Cost to Build — Moat

In many consumer brands the moat eventually becomes marketing spend or retail distribution.

FarmDidi’s moat, if it develops successfully, may lie somewhere else entirely.

The company worked with around 14 Self Help Groups comprising roughly 140 women producers, but the ambition was to scale that network significantly over time.

If the company can build trust, training systems and operational discipline across hundreds or thousands of such groups, it will create a supply network that is not easily replicated by competitors who are used to factory-based production models.

C5: Conviction — My Personal Thesis

Businesses like FarmDidi sit at an interesting intersection of multiple long-term trends.

Rural women are increasingly entering the workforce as male migration shifts economic responsibility within households. At the same time, urban consumers are showing growing interest in products perceived as authentic, regional and homemade. Meanwhile, digital commerce platforms allow niche food brands to reach customers far beyond their original geography.

FarmDidi touches all three of these shifts.

For me, the ability to create impact, support women entrepreneurs and building a global brand from India is very appealing. Besides, Manjari demonstrates a rare will to persevere, deep understanding of the space and the ability to listen to feedback as she leads Farmdidi.

Yet the operational challenges remain significant.

For example, after the company’s appearance on Shark Tank, demand for one particular product — mango chunda — spiked rapidly. Production scaled in response, but demand later softened, leaving nearly four tonnes of inventory sitting unsold, a reminder of how fragile supply chains can be when production is decentralised and demand forecasting is still evolving.

How this has scaled

Since we invested a year back, the company has grown from 14 SHG to 30 SHG, with impact growing from 140 to 400 women livelihoods.

(2) On market dynamics of pickle - we can add that pickles were always homemade, but next generation of women today don’t have time to make it and yet looking for clean label and authentic food for family, which makes the timing also correct to build Pickles category

Looking ahead, the trajectory of FarmDidi will depend on a few important developments.

The first is distribution expansion. The company has begun exploring quick commerce platforms such as Zepto and Instamart, which could introduce the products to a much wider urban consumer base. They are today #1 on Amazon US in the pickle category.

The second is product expansion. The founders envision a roadmap that moves beyond pickles into premixes, spice blends and eventually condiments and snacks, effectively transforming the brand into a broader Indian pantry platform.

And finally there is the scale of the production network itself. The long-term vision of empowering one million rural women producers is ambitious, but if even part of that network materialises, the economic and social implications would be substantial.

A Closing Thought

When we talk about startups, the conversation often revolves around technology breakthroughs or venture-scale markets.

But sometimes the most interesting innovations are organisational rather than technological.

FarmDidi is experimenting with a different way of building supply chains — one in which thousands of small kitchens become production units and rural women become micro-entrepreneurs connected through a common brand.

Scaling this system will require patience, discipline and careful operational design. But if it succeeds, it will quietly reshape how distributed manufacturing can work in India.

I hope you enjoyed reading and learning on how as an investor, there are many ways to evaluate startups.

PS: This is not investment advice. Your decision to invest should be made independently, based on your own thesis and analysis. This series is a learning tool — using real pitch room experience to help all of us think better about early stage investing. Also all opinions are mine, and not influenced by the founders.

Today I will share about Craste - I was the only tycoon who committed at Bharat Ke Super Founders. Watch the video there.

Honestly, there is a particular kind of frustration I have carried for a while now as an investor. You sit across a founder. The technology is real. The credentials are serious. The problem they are solving is not small — it touches climate, construction, the future of how we build things. BUT it is probably a bit early to show traction. Ask any founder their fundraising challenges and you will know what I am saying.

While I was listening to Craste on BKSF, somewhere in the back of my mind, a quiet thought was forming when I saw Himansha and Shubham pitch on stage:

”If this team was sitting in a room in San Francisco right now, this round would probably already be closed”. This is not an attempt to draw comparisons among investors in India. Having met so many founders who are brilliant but have not aced the funding mechanics, I am convinced that investing will continue to be risky and tough. Our deep tech investing space is growing, and getting mature. But it is still difficult to close funding. But who said contrarian ideas ever found easy consensus? I might still be wrong. Only time will tell.

What Craste Is Building

India's construction and interior industry runs on boards — plywood, MDF, particle board. Most of it is wood-based, formaldehyde-heavy, and environmentally costly. The industry knows this. It has known this for years. But alternatives have been expensive, unproven, or too early.

Craste is building NAF-grade boards — No Added Formaldehyde — that are tree-free and zero emissions. Not as a premium niche but as a scalable, manufacturable product that can replace conventional boards in the mainstream market. The product they demoed to us was not a concept. The product existed and samples had been shipped. It was obvious that with the right messaging the market would find it. And we were on stage on Bharat Ke Super Founders!

What I Saw Inside the Room

The ask was 6 crore at a 100 crore valuation. We finally agreed to 1cr at 50cr. The only reason - I was thinking that we would have some progress before we raise a larger round together.
I had just written an entire post on how to evaluate deep tech — the TRL framework, the three lenses, the question of whether a founder can cross the deep tech chasm from scientist to builder to commercial operator. If you haven't read it, I'd suggest going back to that post before reading further. Because Craste is almost a case study for everything I described there. (Attached link here)

At the time of the pitch, Craste was at TRL 7. To reiterate— that means the technology has been demonstrated, and is now ready to be at commercial space, ready to scale. It is beyond proof of concept, and beyond commercial experiments - a gap where most deep tech companies struggle.

What the founders, Himansha and her brother Shubham showed us was not just a product. It was a team who understood technology deeply, spoke about manufacturing with clarity, and had already started winning in a market that is notoriously difficult to crack.

The Problem that struck a chord

In winter, India talks endlessly about air pollution, especially in Delhi where crop burning worsens the crisis. What I heard during the pitch was probably a solution.

Craste manufactures the high-performance boards using agricultural crop residue — material that would otherwise be burned in fields, contributing to the severe air pollution every year. By converting this waste into durable engineered boards, the company was not only creating a high-value material, but also turning crop waste into a viable industrial raw material — one that could increase farmer income while reducing dependence on timber.

Yet none of this impact was priced into the product.

For the first time in India, crop waste was being transformed into a high-quality, high-value industrial material capable of competing with timber itself. There was no premium pricing for being tree-free, for being zero-formaldehyde. No premium for using waste instead of wood. It seemed “India-ready”.

The narrative was beyond being a sustainability story, to the beginning of a healthier, cleaner and priced-in materials industry for India.

On Bharat Ke Super Founders, it was clear this wasn’t just another startup moment. It felt like the early signal of a material transition India has been waiting for.

My 5Cs — Mapped

C1: Clarity — Founder and Problem

Himansha and Shubham are founders who have worked at the core of the problem — the chemistry, the manufacturing, and the realities of bringing a new industrial material to market.

Both are scientists trained at leading global universities like Cambridge and ICL, who chose to return to India to solve a scientific challenge, not just build a business. Inside the pitch room, clarity under pressure is the signal I watch most. As a team they had it. When questioned, they did not deflect. The team went deeper.

C2: Category — Market and Timing

India's construction and interiors industry is one of the largest in the world. The shift away from formaldehyde-based, wood-heavy materials is not a preference — it is a regulatory and environmental inevitability. The question was never *if* this market moves. The question was *who* would be positioned when it does.

Craste is building the category before the mandate arrives. That is the right time to invest. I also know of similar businesses who are at a 400cr revenue, building in the sustainability space.

C3: Capability — Technology Readiness

This is where deep tech evaluation diverges from everything else. One doesn’t just ask about customers. But rather you estimate *where does the technology sit on the TRL scale?*

At the time of the pitch, Craste was at TRL 7. A stage where patient angel capital could potentially create disproportionate value.

They had received grants from DST (that is a superb validation for me), and had been part of Tech Stars cohort.

C4: Cost to Build — Moat

Proprietary chemistry is hard to copy. NAF-grade, tree-free board formulation built over years of R&D is not something a well-funded competitor can replicate in a product cycle.

The moat here is not brand or distribution — it is the science itself.

C5: Conviction — Personal Thesis

Tech and sustainability are not competing priorities. They are the same direction.

Himansha is a woman founder building deep tech in India. That combination is rare. It is also, in my experience, systematically undervalued. Not because the work is weaker — but because the ecosystem around it is thinner. Less patient capital. Fewer champions. Slower pilots.

With a founder who has clarity and a product the market is already moving toward — it was a clear decision for me.

What Happened After the Show

Craste has won multiple awards post the show. They have progressed beyond TRL 7 to the next category of TRL 8-9. They have also signed the biggest distributor in South India, Navdurga — someone currently working directly with Century and Greenlam — who has already moved 20 tonnes. When someone with those relationships chooses the brand, the moat is showing itself in the market.

Craste has also received international recognition through platforms such as the Seoul Design Award and the Make It Circular Challenge in Amsterdam.

More recently, its material was featured in the Parsons Healthy Materials Lab at the New School in New York, one of the world’s leading platforms evaluating healthy building materials — a strong validation of its commitment to non-toxic construction materials.

What To Track

As with any deep tech investment at this stage, the work is not done at the cheque. What I will be watching:

Certification adoption — and whether NAF-grade becomes a buying criterion at scale. Manufacturing cost curve — can unit economics improve as volume grows? Strategic partnerships — the conversations with potential customers are signals, not outcomes yet. And regional expansion — how efficiently can they move beyond Bangalore?

A Closing Thought

I want to clarify. I did not invest in Craste because it was a good story or it was led by a woman. If I am not convinced, I would have become a mentor and waited to see the progress.
I invested because the technology felt real, the founders committed, and O believed India was ready and more environmental friendly that we like to believe. The new generation is already very sustainability conscious.

I wish to see Craste build into a successful business, at the intersection of technology, sustainability and scale.

PS: This is not investment advice. Your decision to invest should be made independently, based on your own thesis and analysis. This series is a learning tool — using real pitch room experience to help all of us think better about early stage investing. Also all opinions are mine, and not influenced by the founders.

My earliest lessons about money came quietly.

They were not lessons about markets or returns or compounding. They came from watching my parents at home and their relationship to money. I grew up in a modest, yet modern outlook family, in Jamshedpur. In our home, money was never discussed in dramatic ways. There were no conversations about wealth or ambition.

Instead, the words that floated around the dining table were different. Provident fund. Fixed deposits. Insurance policies. Planning.

Even as children, we sensed what money meant in our home. It meant stability. It meant that tomorrow had been thought about. It meant that there was a structure holding things together.

But the real lesson came later.

When my father passed away, my mother was still in her mid-fifties. Until then she had been a homemaker. After he passed away, alongside grief came something else — the need to step into decisions that had once felt distant. My mother could easily have chosen the safest path. She could have relied entirely on fixed deposits and existing savings. No one would have questioned that decision.

Instead, she chose to learn. Slowly, patiently, she began to understand the world of finance. Over time she did something remarkable. She did not just learn finance — she began participating in it. She went on to become a stockbroker. One of the most insightful ones I have known. What started as 7 Lakhs grew to 50 lakhs in 20 years. Watching her transformation taught me something powerful:

Reinvention is always possible, even later in life. Understanding money can change how we see ourselves.

Money, for my mother, became more than something to preserve carefully. It became something she could interpret, question and engage with. I saw her sit across from people who initially underestimated her and slowly command the room through clarity and depth.

Her understanding of money strengthened her confidence.

That stayed with me.

Over the years, I began noticing how women think about money in different ways, often shaped by the lives they have lived. For many women, money represents security. Their goal is not to build wealth but to ensure that the family is protected. Saving carefully is seen as wisdom. Avoiding risk is seen as responsibility.

These women are, in many ways, the silent financial managers of their homes. Yet their financial intelligence is rarely recognised as such.

And then there is a second shift that is slowly emerging.

Among younger working women today, money increasingly represents something else — independence.

For many women in their twenties and thirties, earning money means having choices that earlier generations often did not. It means the ability to support parents, to invest, to build careers, to start companies, or sometimes simply to walk away from situations that are not right.

This shift is still incomplete. The number of women in the workforce in India is still lower than it should be. But the mindset is changing.

Younger women talk openly about investing. They follow markets, use financial apps, and discuss financial independence in ways that were rare even a decade ago.

What fascinates me is how much of this relationship with money begins in childhood. Children absorb the emotional atmosphere around money long before they understand numbers. If money is associated with stability, they grow up feeling secure enough to take risks. If money is associated with anxiety or scarcity, caution often becomes deeply ingrained.

When I think about this, I return to my mother.

Her journey showed me that our relationship with money is not fixed. It can evolve. It can expand. For too long, many women have been taught to treat money with distance. To see it as complicated. Or worse, to see it as something slightly uncomfortable, even morally questionable.

But money itself is neither good nor bad. It is simply a tool. A powerful tool.

This day, maybe the real message of Women’s Day is not just about celebration. It is about resolution.

A quiet commitment that we, as women, will begin to see money differently. That we will treat it with respect. That we will learn about it, talk about it openly, and feel comfortable engaging with it.

Because when women understand money, they do not just change their own lives. They change the possibilities for the generations that follow.

Happy Women’s Day. 🌸

The last two months have been busy — the good kind of busy. I was part of Bharat Ke Super Founders (BKSF). With every episode launch, I received messages from friends asking the same question: Why did you invest? How did you decide on the amount and what does the amount and valuation mean?

That is when I realised we now have an unfair advantage.

Earlier, when I wrote for The PitchRoom, I often used Shark Tank examples to explain investment thinking. I was speculating with the limited information I had from the outside. They were useful — but incomplete. What we see publicly is edited storytelling.

During BKSF, I saw the full founder conversation — problem depth, numbers, behaviour under pressure, and conviction. That changes how you evaluate a startup.

This series will use my Angel Canvas to explain exactly why I invested — and why I passed — based on what actually happened inside the pitch room.

Let us start with Digital Labour Chowk.

The Pitch — What I Saw Inside the Room

I had known Chandrashekhar for almost two years. I first met him at a conference when the company was still discovering its core value proposition and understanding what customers truly valued.

The founder who presented during BKSF was different from the early version I had met. He was clear, grounded, and confident — not performative confidence, but the kind that comes from time of building from the inside, deep engagement with customers and a real understanding of the problem.

What I also liked is he represents a true Indian founder - someone who speaks Hindi (beyond the validation we seek in English) and presents his view with confidence. It is easy to watch as investors, but not easy when you are the founder presenting to a room with lights, cameras and investors seated in front. If you watched the pitch - Chandra presented the demo of his product and the growth numbers. The conversation also focused more on behaviour — how daily-wage workers actually find jobs, how contractors make hiring decisions, and where trust breaks down.

The Problem From The Ground

Construction is India’s second-largest employer. Yet most labour operates in an informal, cash-based ecosystem.

Workers struggle with:

• inconsistent income

• no verifiable work history

• no certification

• lack of insurance or access to formal credit

Contractors struggle with:

• discovering reliable labour

• verifying skill levels

• managing project uncertainty

Assignments are project-based, with unclear timelines and locations. Both sides operate with incomplete information. Decisions are inefficient because there is no structured discovery layer.

The Structural Opportunity

Digital Labour Chowk is building infrastructure around:

• worker identity and certification

• job discovery

• trust between workers and contractors

• skill tracking

• access to financial services

In future, a certification layer could help governments deliver benefits accurately and help contractors identify skilled labour more reliably.

The platform could also enable insurance, health checkups, and credit — benefits largely absent in today’s cash-driven system.

There is also a skilling opportunity. The construction ecosystem still operates through informal apprenticeship models — the ustad–shagird structure. A digital platform can formalise and scale this learning pathway.

The Data Shared During The Pitch

What cameras do not show

Inside the room, the most important signals were:

• clarity when questioned on monetisation

• honesty about operational challenges

• deep familiarity with worker behaviour

• comfort discussing failures and pivots

These are signals rarely visible in edited formats. Also what we witnessed was a deep connect to the problem, with some of the tycoons having lived this, and struggled with no access. I think in our busy lives we forget the class of people who are ‘invisible’ to us, and who don’t have systems to enforce equality and labour dignity. This is the India we live in today, even in the 21st century with all the advancements in technology.

Why I Invested

Digital Labour Chowk is Building India’s Labour Backbone 🇮🇳.

Thesis: India wants to be a $55T economy by 2047. But growth depends on the people who build our cities. Construction is India’s second-largest employer.

Yet labour remains informal, invisible, and unverified.

The Problem:
In today’s system, we have the following challenges:

• No verified work history

• No structured discovery

• Cash-based “deehadee” economy

• No benefits

• Contractors struggle to find skilled labour

• Workers struggle to find consistent work

This results in inefficiency on both sides.

My 5 lens mapped: (refer to this post if you want a refresher)

Lens 1: Founder Clarity

This is lived experience. The founder has worked closely with daily-wage workers. The team reflects ground reality — not consulting assumptions. This is not a deck problem.

It is a lived problem.

Lens 2: Category : Fit (India Stack + OCEN)

This is a reflection of market size. India has built digital infrastructure for identity and payments; We see the impact of Aadhar, UPI and the digital infrastructure. Now with new protocols like OCEN, we will see livelihoods as the next layer.India built identity and payments:

DLC adds the missing layer: Identity + Work + Wages + Trust

Lens 3: Capability (Traction)

The platform is beyond proof of concept and there is strong early adoption and engagement. It has 2 lakh+ workers with 93% full profiles, 53% job match rate. They have 12,000+ customers with 5,500+ live jobs and presence across 31 states. This is a reflection of the team’s ability to execute and DLC is clearly beyond POC into product market fit.

This is early product–market fit.

Lens 4: Cost to Build = Trust

I have built LetsVenture and understand marketplaces deeply It is one of the toughest spaces to build in, but once built, very difficult to copy. At the core, marketplaces are build on trust. DLC shows trust through 5.5 lakh+ worker activities with 21% job conversion rate. This means fundamentals are working.

Capital now scales growth.

Lens 5: Scalability + Personal Lens

Jobs are universal. Each new worker strengthens the network.

There was also a personal layer. Growing up around industrial India of Jamshedpur shaped my understanding of labour dignity and economic mobility. While growing up in small towns has the best advantages in terms of the quality of life, it also comes with the challenge of lack of exposure for anyone wanting to be an entrepreneur. That perspective influences how I evaluate such opportunities.

This investment is both economic and deeply personal. I love it when businesses can create impact AND deliver value.

Impact and outcomes can coexist.

Structural Opportunity and TAM

What was missing in the pitch and what was unsaid is the huge structural opportunity that DLC unlocks. There is an opportunity to organise this space and offer worker certification, access to insurance + loans, verified skill tracking, enable government aid targeting, improve contractor quality on jobs.

This is infrastructure for livelihoods.

Why Now?

With the booming growth we are seeing in India’s construction, the country needs skilled labour, verified credentials, transparent discovery and workforce mobility.

Without labour infrastructure, growth slows.

What To Watch Going Forward

While I committed, we need to continue to watch for contractor retention, repeat hiring behaviour, certification adoption, financial services integration and regional expansion efficiency. Thats why building companies is always work-in-progress.

Closing Reflection

This is the first note in my Inside the Pitch series — where I write from the actual founder room, not from edited television narratives.

Angel investing is not about dramatic moments. It is about pattern recognition, behaviour observation, and structured thinking.

The Angel Canvas is how I bring clarity to those decisions. Sharing the summary here. Hopefully the learnings will help us all refine our skills and help us understand risk and investing better.

PS: This should not be considered as investment advice. This should purely be seen as a learning process. Your decision to invest should be made independently, based on your own thesis and analysis.

Signing off. Have a great weekend!

Regards,

Shanti

Last week, I attended a meditation retreat. It was also a spiritual retreat. I belong to a spiritual school where the annual retreat is a time to pause, review one’s approach to life, and create a more thoughtful plan for the year ahead.

There were close to 4,000+ people in the hall. Over the days, as I sat and observed, one thing became impossible to miss. The room was overwhelmingly female. By my estimate, nearly 80 to 90 percent were women. The men who were present were clearly fewer.

I could not but help compare this to the investor events we run at LetsVenture. Conversations around capital, companies, growth, and returns. In that room, the numbers always flip entirely. If there are a hundred people, maybe four or five were women. I see this contrast often. The faces change, the cities change, countries change but the pattern stays stubbornly the same.

And it makes me pause.

Because this is not about women being unfamiliar with money. Women run the finances of most households. They think deeply about savings, security, education, healthcare, and risk. Yet, when money becomes formal—when it enters public rooms, balance sheets —women quietly disappear.

At the same time, meditation halls and spaces of inner work are full of women. With all the awareness around mental health and inner work, there are very few men who show up. Interestingly, many of the most visible spiritual leaders in these spaces are men.

This inversion is not accidental.

Yin and Yang in everyday life

In Eastern philosophy, Yin and Yang are not opposites in conflict. They are complementary forces. Yin represents inward energy—reflection, continuity, care. Yang represents outward energy—action, assertion, expansion. Neither is superior. Balance is the point.

When I look at these rooms, I cannot help but see this play out in modern life.

We often explain these patterns as preference or choice. But the more I reflect on it, the more I wonder if what we call choice is actually something far older—conditioning

Is this really about choice?

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes about how much of human behaviour is shaped by shared social roles created for survival, not fairness. Early Homo sapiens societies divided responsibility.

Women were associated with continuity and the inner life of the group. Men were associated with confrontation, negotiation, and the outer world.

Those roles were practical once. Over time, they hardened into identity.

Today, hunting looks like capital allocation. Territory looks like markets. Negotiation happens in boardrooms instead of forests. The inner world has found new spaces—therapy rooms, meditation halls, retreats.

The roles changed form, but not entirely their emotional memory. Even when none of this is explicit, the body remembers centuries of cues.

This is not weakness. It is adaptation.

Men, too, are conditioned—often away from inner work and towards external validation. Many arrive late to emotional self-understanding, not because they lack depth, but because they were taught that depth mattered less than dominance.

A subtle shift worth noticing

There was one more detail from the retreat that stayed with me. The men who were present were mostly younger. There were very few older men in the room.

That felt important.

Many of the younger men were there with their partners. They seemed to recognise that a spiritual journey together can strengthen bonds and build more equal, respectful relationships. I found that deeply encouraging.

If conditioning was learnt over generations, perhaps it can also be unlearnt—slowly, unevenly, but meaningfully.

Women have been entering public and economic spaces for decades, even if progress remains incomplete. And now, perhaps, younger men are beginning to enter inner spaces with equal seriousness.

Not a reversal. But a loosening.

A Republic Day thought

Republic Day reminds us that equality is written into our Constitution. But lived equality shows up more quietly—in where people feel they belong, where they feel confident enough to take up space.

Real freedom is not only political. It is psychological. It is economic. It is deeply personal.

It shows up in the rooms we enter without shrinking.

Perhaps the work ahead is not just representation, but reconditioning—for women and for men. Allowing both to occupy the full range of human experience: power and vulnerability, authority and reflection.

That feels like a Republic Day question worth sitting with. Not a question to ask on Women’s day and forget about it.

A small invitation, if this resonated

Over the past few years, as I have built and invested, I have also been writing.

I am currently working on a book on private market investing— to simplify how we think about money, risk, and decision-making. Especially for those who have stayed away from financial rooms not because of lack of ability, but because the language and culture felt unfamiliar.

If you are reading this and these reflections resonated, I would love your help.

I am putting together a small Advanced Reader Circle—a private group of early readers who will get access to the draft chapters and share feedback as the book takes shape. In return, you will be acknowledged in the book for your contribution, and you will help shape something I hope will make private market investing more accessible and grounded.

If this interests you, you can join the reader circle here:

Join the ARC now

It feels fitting to extend this invitation here, on Republic Day. Because access to financial knowledge is also a form of freedom.

And like all freedoms, it grows when it is shared.

Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”

It is a line that feels increasingly true the longer you build. I have lived this in my startup journey. Hindsight has a way of creating coherence. It smooths uncertainty and makes decisions appear more linear than they ever felt at the time.

But when you are actually in the middle of building—or investing—you do not have joined dots. You have a choice. Often, an uncomfortable one.

As investors, decisions are made with incomplete information, limited time, and personal context that rarely makes it into headlines or pitch decks. There is pressure. There is responsibility. There is also fear—of missing out, of getting it wrong, of disappointing people who are counting on you.

This is why I have become cautious about judging decisions purely by outcomes.

Over time, I have found it helpful to separate three things that often get collapsed into one: decision, process, and outcome.

A decision is the choice made at a specific moment.
A process is how that choice was arrived at.
An outcome is how the world responded to that choice.

Only one of these is fully within our control.

A good decision, at the moment it is made, usually has a few things in common. It:

• uses the best information reasonably available at that time

• considers real alternatives, not just the most attractive one

• acknowledges constraints—market conditions, capital, energy

• aligns with where the decision-maker actually is, not where they wish they were

None of this guarantees success.

Outcomes are shaped by many forces that sit outside the decision itself. Markets shift. Timing changes. Execution is uneven. External events intervene. Sometimes, randomness plays a bigger role than we like to admit.

This distinction matters because when things do not work out, the instinct is to ask a single, blunt question: Was the decision wrong?

Often, that is the wrong question.

A more useful one is: What changed after the decision was made?
What did we not anticipate? Which assumptions no longer held?

There is an important difference between a bad outcome caused by a poor process and a bad outcome that followed a thoughtful one.

A bad outcome after a bad process is a signal to improve how decisions are made.
A bad outcome after a good process is an invitation to expand how we understand the world.

One of the more dangerous situations, in my experience, is a good outcome after a weak process. That creates false confidence. It teaches the wrong lessons and makes future decisions more fragile.

Watching founders and investors navigate high-stakes choices has reinforced something for me: good judgment does not eliminate uncertainty. It only helps us live with it more honestly.

Looking back allows us to connect the dots.

In my spiritual practice, I learnt something that has stayed with me: choice creates awareness, not the other way around. That is exactly how life plays out in business as well.

We often assume business and life are two separate threads. They are not. They are deeply intertwined states of our being.

Learning from the notes in the margins of one’s life notebook, in my view, requires slowing down enough to see the trade-offs. Naming what we know and what we do not.
Choosing in a way we can stand by, even if the dots connect differently later.

That, to me, is where real decision-making lives.

More notes in the margin will follow.

Have a thoughtful start to 2026.

I was invited to be one of the tycoons on Bharat Ke Super Founders at a time when the show itself was still taking shape. Even the name had not been finalised then. As the project evolved, the creative teams worked through several iterations before arriving at a title that, in hindsight, captures the spirit of the show well.

Bharat Ke Super Founders is about builders, not performers.

I will be honest: I was skeptical in the beginning.

We were not given the names of the founders or the companies ahead of the shoot. What we received were high-level profiles—sector, revenue, traction, and the capital being sought. For someone used to preparing deeply before meeting founders, this felt uncomfortable.

But somewhere in that discomfort was an important reminder. Not all of us are creative professionals. I am not a television personality. I was invited because I am an active investor, and because my day job—building LVX - LetsVenture—means I spend most of my time meeting founders and investors, absorbing signals from the ecosystem, and forming judgement in imperfect conditions. Sometimes, you have to trust the process, and trust the people who understand their craft better than you do.

Day 1

The first day on set began with a puja. Every new session started with ‘Ganapati Bapa Moraya’. I loved this as it was complete surrender before the cameras rolled. As a tycoon on the show, I felt consistently and thoughtfully taken care throughout the shoot. The set itself was expansive and thoughtfully designed. Viewers will see its grandiosity when the show airs. What they will not see is what struck me the most: the sheer scale of what it takes to make a production like this work.

There were close to two hundred people on set, quietly doing their jobs—managing lights, sound, cameras, logistics, schedules, and countless details most of us never think about.

The effort was not just about getting the shots right. It was about making sure founders felt at ease, and that we, as investors, had the space to focus on the conversations. That invisible orchestration was humbling.

When filming began, the tone shifted quickly. I was seated as an investor. Across from me were founders—many visibly nervous—presenting businesses they had spent years building. Our first responsibility as tycoons was not to interrogate. It was to create enough comfort for a real conversation to begin.

Once that happened, the room changed.

Was a decision made in 20 mins?

What viewers will experience as a twenty-minute segment was often a ninety-minute or two-hour discussion. There were pauses, breaks, and moments where we went deep into the business, the founder’s thinking, and the trade-offs they were making. Nothing was scripted. We did not know the companies beforehand. The questions were real, and the decisions were grounded in those conversations. As tycoons we had long days. From 10am to 10pm on set. But it felt more fun than work!

This is real life playing out in reel life

This, incidentally, is what early-stage investing often looks like in real life. You rarely have perfect information. You listen, you probe, you connect dots quickly, and you decide whether you are willing to back a founder knowing that uncertainty will remain.

One of the most unexpected—and reassuring—elements of the show was the dynamic among the tycoons themselves. I have long believed that investing is not a zero-sum game. Founders do not benefit when investors compete to exclude one another. They benefit when aligned investors come together, bringing capital, perspective, networks, and long-term support.

That belief played out on this set. There was collaboration, mutual respect, and a shared intent to do what would genuinely help the founder. In an ecosystem where it is easy to default to competitive posturing, this mattered.

A quiet anchor through the process was Suniel Shetty. He was not the Bollywood star but the anchor in the room. His grounded presence brought calm and continuity to the room, allowing conversations to flow naturally and collaboration to take shape without force. It was understated leadership at its best.

India needs more

I know comparisons with Shark Tank are inevitable. And it is worth saying clearly: Shark Tank has done a remarkable job of educating India about entrepreneurship and investing. But India is large, complex, and diverse. It can—and should—have many platforms that give founders visibility and capital.

#EquiDebt and Marketplaces at work

What made Bharat Ke Super Founders particularly interesting to me was its integrated capital approach. The conversations were not limited to equity alone. Debt and grants were also part of the mix. That is closer to how real businesses are funded, especially outside headline-driven narratives.

Equally interesting was the idea of “the market.” This was not an audience of consumers or users. It was a group of other active investors—equity and debt—watching, engaging, and forming views.

For me, this aligned closely with how I have built LetsVenture: on the belief that value and wealth creation should be democratized, and that no single investor has a monopoly on the “right” lens.

Different investors can look at the same founder and arrive at different conclusions, and that diversity of perspective strengthens the ecosystem. It gives founders options, and it creates a broader support system when things get hard—as they inevitably do.

It is also important to clarify what commitment on the show really means. The decisions you see are based on what we hear and understand in that room. As with any responsible investment, detailed due diligence follows. That is not a formality; it is fundamental to how serious investors operate.

For me, investing is not a side activity. It is my work. Meeting founders, asking difficult questions, building conviction—this is what I do every day. I would not associate myself with something that exists only for optics or viewership.

Real to Reel Life

What you see on Bharat Ke Super Founders is how those conversations actually unfold in real life. They are not always neat. They are rarely complete. They are human, nuanced, and grounded in judgement rather than performance.

My hope is that the show brings that depth into people’s homes. That it encourages founders to think differently about their businesses, and helps audiences understand that investing is not theatre. It is responsibility, trust, and long-term partnership.

I walked into this experience skeptical. I walked out grateful—for the founders who showed up with courage, to a team that designed a format that respected the complexity of building, and for a reminder that, at its best, investing is collaborative.

This feels less like a conclusion and more like a beginning.

You will see more when Bharat Ke Super Founders airs on Amazon MX Player. Coming Soon! So excited for all of us!

2025 has been an interesting year. We launched SamVed, a fund focused on Bharat opportunities. As I met founders building in the space, it was clear - a two market definition of India and Bharat was over generalisation of a much fragmented economy. It worked a decade back — income, access and digital adoption felt like clear dividing lines.

But as India’s digital economy matures, one truth is becoming harder to ignore — the old two-market narrative no longer explains how India behaves. Refer to this blog for reference (written almost 10 years back)

What looked like income variation on the surface was actually something deeper: differences in motivation, confidence, risk appetite, and willingness to pay.
The last definition of India 1 and India 2 started to feel insufficient.

Investors assume:

• India behaves like one market

• A behaviour in metros is repeatable nationwide

• Price elasticity is similar everywhere

• Consumers shift uniformly with income

This is why simply calling India “middle class” or “Bharat” hides more than it reveals. A granular view is essential to understand who actually spends, upgrades, experiments, or avoids risk.

This post is really focused towards founders who want more granularity in defining market size, and investors who want to evaluate for such solutions.

The New Lens: Five Indias

India is not one economy.

India is a mosaic — five India’s coexisting.

People across these India’s may use the same apps, the same payment rails, and the same internet, yet their motivations, spending logic, risk appetite, and willingness to pay are profoundly different.

To understand India today — and especially the next decade of startups — we need to understand:

• who buys

• why they buy

• how they adopt

• and how infrastructure shapes what they consider possible

Why This Segmentation Matters Now

The last decade of Indian startups was powered by access:
Jio brought the internet. UPI built trust in digital money.

Three enablers shaped the first wave:

• Smartphones

• Affordable data

• Instant payments

The next decade will be shaped by:

• Formalisation

• Affordability + value creation

• Aspirational identity formation

• Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)

Scaling in India will depend on which layer of India you build for - and how you cross over between layers.

The Five Indias Framework

This framework was built with data using HCES 2023–24, PRICE ICE360, CMIE income distribution data and platform behaviour signals. I also referred to the latest public reports from Swiggy, Zomato and Nykaa to track some of the consumer behaviour. This emerged as a result — five distinct behaviour-driven markets.

The 5 India segments have been created based on income levels, but income does not explain the consumption story.

How India Works and Consumes

Income segments in India are deeply tied to how households earn, the stability of that income, and how that translates into spending behaviour. Consumption is not just a function of earning power — it is shaped by identity, confidence, risk appetite, and exposure.

The same household can show “value logic” in essentials and “aspirational logic” in lifestyle categories. This variability is not an anomaly — it is a defining feature of how India spends.

What Connects These Five Indias: Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)

Even though they behave differently, these Indias now operate on shared rails:

• Aadhaar

• UPI

• DigiLocker

• Account Aggregator

• ONDC

• ONEST (logistics interoperability)

As the EkStep Foundation described it:

“India Stack helped people transact. ONEST will help businesses operate.”

This matters because rails collapse onboarding friction.
Infrastructure creates markets before brands do. Few countries have built rails before markets — and fewer have built rails that reduce operational friction for both citizens and businesses.

India is now shifting from digital payments infrastructure to digital operating infrastructure.

Where This Goes Next

Three forces will accelerate upward movement:

• Lower friction (DPI)

• Cheaper last-mile logistics

• Better access to structured credit

But one force slows complete convergence:

• Disproportionate income growth

So India isn’t merging into one segment — it is splitting further, but scaling faster.

Conclusion: What Founders Must Ask

India is not one market — it is five parallel economies shaped by income, identity, trust, digital rails and aspiration.

For me, this shift isn’t just academic — it has shaped how we now look at founders, products, and markets. At SamVed, we don’t look at “India” as one uniform demand curve anymore. We look at emerging behaviours across these five Indias — where aspiration is forming, where affordability meets access, and where infrastructure unlocks new categories.

Because the opportunity ahead isn’t in building for a billion consumers.
It’s in understanding which India moves first — and which India follows.

If you are a founder building in India, the real question now is:

This report has been summarised to simplify the messaging to readers. If you are a founder building for one of the Indias and want a more detailed analysis, drop me a comment with what you are looking for. I am happy to share notes.

Wishing all my friends a great start to the new year! We should all collectively pray for a safer, happier and more abundant world for us in 2026.

Signing off with much love for 2026

This year also marked almost three years since I lost my mother. And this year, I lost a close friend as well. Alongside, I planned a Bangalore city immersion trip for my teachers at MyPragati. I attended a friend’s book writing retreat in the mountains near Pauri, that worked as the catalyst to get me into writing. I started the year at the Maha Kumbh and closed it in Thiruvannamalai. The year was marked with travel - across the globe, and across India - making new friends and deepening existing friendships. None of these experiences were connected on the surface, but together they changed how I was thinking about time, people, and what really matters.

There is something about the finality of life that sharpens your lens. It is not dramatic or philosophical. It is very practical. You stop assuming time is abundant. You become more careful about what you carry forward, and what you let go of.

These are the three learnings that emerged from that place.

Learning 1: Clarity comes from stepping away, not pushing harder

For a long time, my instinct when things felt unclear was to lean in — more conversations, more context, more engagement. I assumed clarity came from staying close to everything. Sometimes we also talk because we want to make the other person comfortable. Silence is always uncomfortable, for everyone!

This year made me question that assumption.

What helped was stepping away completely, without trying to stay half-connected. Short breaks rarely work for me. What works is distance — real distance from noise, opinions, and constant inputs.

I experienced this most clearly during my trek to North Sikkim.

When you are walking for hours, often without connectivity, something shifts. You stop processing other people’s thoughts and start hearing your own more clearly. Problems do not disappear, but they lose their clutter. Decisions that earlier felt layered begin to simplify, not because they become easy, but because the unnecessary noise falls away.

Alongside this, I became more intentional about stillness in everyday life — meditation, even when it is imperfect, and creating a small sacred space that signals pause rather than productivity. None of this is dramatic, but over time it changes how you show up.

What stood out to me was how closely energy and judgment are linked. When energy drops, decision-making is usually the first casualty, even if everything else looks fine on the surface. Protecting energy, I realised, is not indulgence. It is basic hygiene for clarity.

Learning 2: We misunderstand growth, and we underestimate the cost of that misunderstanding

This learning came very clearly from managing teams.

As founders, we often assume that growth means moving people into larger roles, broader responsibilities, or managerial positions. It feels like the natural way to reward strong performance. Over time, I saw how often this assumption creates friction.

People who were excellent in one role struggled in another, not because they lacked ability, but because the role did not play to their strengths. In trying to help them “grow”, we sometimes made them less effective and more uncertain. A strong asset quietly turns into a struggling one.

What became clearer to me is that growth does not always mean expansion. Sometimes it means depth. Staying close to what someone does well, allowing them to compound quietly rather than stretching them into roles that look impressive on paper but feel misaligned in practice.

This applies just as much to employees as it does to founders. There is pressure to keep moving up or sideways, to accumulate titles and scope. But especially in a world where technology is reshaping roles quickly, depth, judgment, and context matter more than hierarchy.

The cost of misunderstanding growth is not just poor performance. It is disengagement — the slow kind that is hard to spot until it has already taken hold.

Learning 3: Giving is easier than we think

Losing someone close — and living with that loss over time — changes how you think about impact.

When you have experienced that kind of finality, the idea of impact stops being abstract. You realise how little of what matters is visible, and how much of it happens quietly, without structure, acknowledgement, or permanence.

I found myself thinking about how often we postpone giving — assuming it needs readiness, time, money, or a clear plan. In reality, most meaningful giving I have seen begins without any of that. It starts simply, through presence, attention, or small acts done consistently over time.

Giving does not always look like charity or initiative. Sometimes it is just showing up. Sometimes it is listening. Sometimes it is making space for others to grow, or helping without needing to name it as help.

What struck me was how little effort it actually takes once you stop overthinking it. The hesitation before giving is often heavier than the act itself. And once you begin, even imperfectly, the path usually becomes clearer on its own.

I usually do not make resolutions, but if 2026 has a theme for me, it would be investing more intentionally in my personal space — the kind that supports clarity, not productivity. For someone who is very outcome driven, this will not come naturally, which is perhaps exactly why it feels important.

Wishing all my friends a Happy and Joyous Christmas celebration ahead.

Coming up next: My professional and market learnings from 2025.

This experience brought back a popular argument: we see public trash and bad behavior because people lack empathy for fellow Indians, assuming someone else will clean up. The exact viral post does not matter. The idea does.

My time at Tiruvannamalai suggested the truth is more complex than a simple “empathy deficit.” We cannot use one brush to define who we are.

The Deepam: Fire and the Test of Ego

For context, Tiruvannamalai, the spiritual heart of the Deepam, is a town located in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, near Chennai. It is a town where many Indian masters attained enlightenment, notably Ramana Maharishi. Karthigai Deepam is celebrated as an immensely powerful day. It marks the moment Lord Shiva appeared as an infinite column of fire, a Jyotirlinga.

The goal of visiting the place on this day is spiritual: to witness the divine light and destroy ego and ignorance.

The spiritual goal is high, but the path to it is full of human actions that seem to contradict the devotion we carry.

Contradiction 1: The Civic Switch

There is Empathy Deficit: The argument says we lack empathy when we litter.

But this question struck me: if it is only a lack of empathy, why does the same person often follow rules the moment they step into a foreign country?

The difference may not be in our hearts alone. It is also about systemic clarity and certainty of consequence.

• Abroad: consequences (a fine, clear public disapproval) are immediate and predictable.

• At home: consequences are often unclear or inconsistently enforced. Systems learn to absorb the chaos. When rules are blurred, people default to self-preservation.

Contradiction 2: Anger in the Pursuit of Peace

The deepest test was watching people push and fight with police officers just to enter the temple. One angry outburst added to the chaos.

How do we carry such anger while seeking a space of peace and devotion?

This is the Scarcity Trap. The anger isn’t directed at the police; it’s aimed at the perceived scarcity of the divine moment.

People focus so intensely on achieving the goal (getting darshan) that they sacrifice the process (patience and respect) needed to reach it. They lose their peace while aggressively trying to find it.

The queue is the final exam. It’s the moment the ego—the very thing the Deepam fire is meant to burn away—flares up right before the moment of spiritual connection.

Contradiction 3: Systemic Chaos vs. Individual Kindness

The most powerful surprise was the human factor. Amid the pushing, my friend and I decided to leave the temple. Twice, police officers stopped us. They did not just let us go; they went out of their way to ensure we were safe and comfortable. They offered us water and biscuits and even promised we would have a better divine experience when the final lighting took place.

With 16,000 people inside, this extraordinary individual care felt like a profound contradiction to the public chaos we had witnessed moments earlier.

The lesson is this:

Chaos is not the whole picture. The “empathy deficit” is not total. It exists in the unmanaged crowd (the litter, the aggression), but individual empathy flourishes when the system pauses to deliver care.

I believe we cannot define our culture by its lowest common denominator (the trash); we must also recognize the highest forms of individual service.

The journey to the Deepam is a mirror. I saw our civic shortcomings, our impatience, and, gratefully, our capacity for unexpected human kindness.

A Thought for the New Year

As I reflect on the gap between our high spiritual intention and our public actions, I feel this misalignment is one of our most important challenges. How do we ensure inner purpose translates into disciplined, ethical action in the real world?

The key learning is this:

Life is full of contradictions. We cannot define human behaviour with one broad stroke. Faith shapes the inner life. Systems shape the shared life. We need both to rise together

Why I Built The Canvas

I am a visual person. I like things to be made simple (we have enough complexity in our lives!) especially when it comes to topics like money and investing. Honestly, this journey of breaking down the basics has been immensely rewarding for me. One question I asked - what would it take to now simplify all that we learnt into one place? When I started LVX, I was motivated to create a platform that would simplify information gathering in one place for founders. Back then, I was inspired by the Lean Canvas by Ash Maurya (linked here for those who want to know more). I found the canvas incredibly useful to bring all my thoughts into one page.

This Angel Canvas is inspired by the same methodology. This is the 1-page mental model: The Angel Investing Canvas.

What It Helps You Do

Use it during or after a pitch to break down any early-stage startup into 4 blocks:

Opportunity – Problem clarity, Market size, the first product wedge and competition. How is the solution different, to differentiate itself in the market?
People – Founder’s energy, learnability, and team-building signals
You as an Angel – Your bias, strengths, and the kind of investor role you want to play
Thesis Fit – Does the startup align with your investing lens or just your FOMO?

Watch the video on how to use the canvas

Download the Angel Investing Canvas (PDF)

This is free to download. It’s designed for use on tablets, printouts, or as a fillable format. This is open only to my subscribed members.

Download the Angel Investing Canvas pdf here.

How to Use It

• Fill this during or after a pitch

• Use 1–5 confidence scores in each quadrant

• Track patterns across deals

• Helps you move from feeling right → thinking clearly

✅ Attribution Request
If you use or share this canvas, please credit:
LVXSchool - Angel Investing Canvas
Tag: [@lvxventures] [@shantimohan] or mention us in your decks/posts

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If I met these founders during their first cheque stage, what would I have needed to confidently invest?

That question led to this post.

Deep tech is becoming one of the most exciting (and misunderstood) parts of India’s startup ecosystem. But evaluating these companies is not the same as evaluating SaaS, fintech, or D2C.

There is no:

• “Ship fast and iterate”

• “Let’s test pricing with a landing page”

• Or “What’s your CAC?”

Instead, you are evaluating:

• An invention

• A researcher or military professional turned founder

• And a market that may exist years later

• Commercial viability of the solution and if this is a better, cheaper replacement to an existing solution

Yet — when it works, deep tech builds companies that power nations, not just apps. Think defence systems, semiconductor design, new materials, climate tech, aerospace, and synthetic biology.

So the real question becomes:

How do you evaluate something still forming — before the world sees its usefulness?

This is the framework I use as an investor.

Deep Tech: What it really means

Deep tech startups build hard technology, not interfaces.

Areas include:

• Robotics and drones

• Climate tech hardware (batteries, carbon removal, thermal storage)

• Advanced materials and semiconductors

• Space tech

• Biotech and synthetic biology

• AI tools built at the infrastructure level, not “app layer”

A common theme: patents, scientific know-how, and engineering execution matter more than branding or distribution.

The Three Lenses to Evaluate

When we look at a deep tech company, we can evaluate it through three simple lenses:

Technology risk → Market early adopters → Team and execution discipline

Lens 1: Will the technology work at scale?

This is the hardest part.
Many founders can show a simulation or lab demo. Very few can manufacture, deploy, and run the product in the real world without funds.

A useful reference here is Technology Readiness Level (TRL) — used by NASA and now widely used by VCs.

The TRL framework helps to clearly understand the stage at which the startup is operating. Based on your thesis, you can decide which stage you want to invest in.

Two questions to always ask:

• Has an independent expert validated the claims?

• What is the largest unsolved technical risk?

If founders can clearly answer both, it’s a strong signal.

Lens 2: Who needs this enough to pay early?

Deep tech markets don’t start broad — they start with a desperate niche buyer.

Instead of TAM slides, good questions to ask:

• Who is the first paying customer profile?

• What is the pain? (cost, regulation, performance, safety)

• Is there a path to design partnerships with industry?

A climate battery startup doesn’t need 10,000 customers in Year 1 — it needs five industrial partners who are willing to experiment.

That is traction in deep tech.

Lens 3: Can this team cross the “deep tech chasm”?

Deep tech founders are often exceptional scientists — but building a business requires more:

• Regulatory navigation

• Reliability and testing discipline

• Manufacturing partnerships

• Commercial understanding and pricing

• Fundraising patience

• Storytelling

  There is one indicator to look for:

  Learning velocity — how fast they turn uncertainty into clarity.

  Not perfection and Not pitch polish. Just the speed of learning.

A Simple Evaluation Flow

If you are a new angel in this space:

Step 1 — The Quick Filter

• Is the problem real and urgent?

• Is the technical hypothesis testable?

• Is the founder uniquely suited to solve it?

Step 2 — Technical Diligence

Find independent reviewers.
This step is NOT optional.

Step 3 — Pilot Validation

Speak to 2–3 potential design or industry partners yourself.

Step 4 — Milestone-based Investing

Deep tech works best with staged capital tied to technical milestones, not runway comfort.

Where To Look: The India Deal Flow Map

India’s deep tech ecosystem is young but accelerating — and finally, institutions and industry are talking to each other.

If you want to learn or source companies, start here:

• IIT Madras Incubation Cell (semiconductors, mobility, materials)

• IIT Guwahati Deep Tech Cell

• IISc Bengaluru + C-CAMP (biotech + hardware)

• IIT Kanpur SIIC

• T-Hub Hyderabad

• NASSCOM Deep Tech Club

• MeitY Startup Hub cohorts

These are India’s early deal pipelines. (This is not an exhaustive list.)

Our biggest gap?

Pilot and procurement velocity — especially in defence, energy, and manufacturing.

This is where public–private collaboration will shape our trajectory.

Investor Lens - From the trenches

While deep tech evaluation seems simple now, I wanted to get more diverse views. So I spoke to a few investors who have been working with founders in this space, to get their views and create a more complete outline.

Meet Krish Kupathil, a successful exit entrepreneur and now Venture Partner at a growth fund Avataar Ventures, focuses on the “commercial viability of the solution”.

Meet Pranav Mahajani, Public Market to Private Market investor, has led the last 10 deep tech transactions on the LVX platform, talks about “ROI for investors after commercial viability and scale”.

Meet Venkat Raju, Entrepreneur, and Investor in the deep tech ecosystem of India for the last decade. He talks about “Technical Risk Is Not the Hazard -- It’s the Advantage”.

A Closing Thought

Deep tech is slow at the beginning and fast at the end.

Most of the work feels invisible and unglamorous — testing, validation, regulatory filings, supply chain setup.

But when it works, it creates defensibility you cannot copy with marketing budgets.

If you’re an investor entering this space, start small, find domain experts you trust, and build pattern recognition around pilot data and founder mindset.

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room