All of us in India will remember this decade in our life as this decade is going to be full of opportunities and growth and will turbocharge India into a $10tn economy. Kapil, Pratik and Nishchal (all friends) have started this firm together to enable and support driven and ambitious founders in achieving their goals and build large profitable businesses.
All of us are ex-entrepreneurs ourselves and bring in a collective experience of >35 years across investment bank, hedge funds, consulting, early stage start-ups and have worked in Companies like Uber, Shuttl, Avendus, Snapdeal, Futures first.
Some of the emerging trends we observe in India currently are –
1. Full stack solutions will lead the way – The last decade was mostly built on creating platforms for enabling internet commerce businesses – e-commerce (Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal), Payments (Paytm, Phonepe), Insurance (Policybazaar), Food delivery (Zomato, Swiggy). All these sectors which have led tech investments in the last decade, will centre around full stack solutions in this decade. We already are seeing some players trying to do this at scale. Digit Insurance (Insurance), Navi (Mutual funds), Slice (Credit cards). Rebel Foods (Food delivery), Licious (Meat delivery), Cult (Fitness), Ola EV (Electric vehicles), Thrasio model e-comm companies (e-commerce), Byju (ed-tech), Zetwerk (manufacturing), Pristyn Care (Healthcare) all are trying to do full stack solutions with complete control over product development, pricing, quality and consumer experience.
2. Consumer Brands will become more important than ever – In the last decade in India, a lot of building blocks have been created in terms of logistics, payments, advertising so today any person can easily open a D2C business and reach a certain scale. However, with such an ease in launch and go to market, all of us will have hundreds of options for each product and we will start having a problem of plenty. Normally, in such a case, consumers automatically gravitate towards their trusted / reliable brand. What it means is that whichever player creates a stronger brand equity compared to its competitors, will win the game and will have an outsized reward.
3. Creators democratize the access to knowledge – In the last decade, Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok produced lakhs of creators and prompt them produce engaging content to create their huge followership but these creators often gained little from their effort while majority of the revenues went to platforms in form of ad revenues. The next decade will bring in start-ups who will launch products & tools to help such creators acquire, manage and monetise their own customer base without relying on bigger platforms.
4. Tier 2 and 3 cities will see differentiated approach than the metros – Some very big companies like Indigo paints (listed), Mankind Pharma (listed), Pratap Snacks (listed), Ghadi detergent (at par with Surf excel) have become big just on the back of a differentiated product offering, affordable yet good products. As new wave of internet shoppers emerges from these areas, they are looking for affordable but high quality products & services. Education, healthcare and consumer goods will see faster traction than others.
Based on these observations and underlying thesis, our aim is to identify high quality entrepreneurs across the sectors which can create large profitable companies.
Nishchal is a CA and an entrepreneur. He has worked with Shuttl in building from scratch to $300m valuation and led Corporate Strategy and Fund raise. He also worked with Snapdeal with Founders (Kunal & Rohit) to shape Snapdeal future growth strategy.
Pratik is a FMS graduate and ex-investment banker from Avendus Capital. He founded his own ethnic wear – Breya and scaled this to $3m ARR.
Kapil is IIT-K alumni and have worked across hedge fund (Futures first) and startups (Uber & Shuttl).
We aim to invest in 10+ startups in the next 12 months across sectors with ~$100k cheque size. We will also help the founders with our large network in business strategy, future fund raises, leadership hiring, creating partnerships etc.
We prefer working with founders –
- Repeat Founders or founders with high perseverance and drive
- Ideas which are not good to have but must to have and create exponential value proposition for the consumers
- Equal focus on growth and economics
All of us are alumni from esteemed colleges (CA, FMS and IIT K) and have a wide alumni and professional network with founders, investors and startups. We will syndicate all our deals using our network.