Founder Thesis

How can founders fund growth without losing equity? In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, host Akshay Datt sits down with Abhiroop Medhekar, Co-founder and CEO of Velocity, to explore how revenue based financing is changing the way startups scale in India’s booming D2C and SaaS economy. Abhiroop’s journey spans IIT Bombay, IIM Ahmedabad, five years at McKinsey, co-founding Taskbob, a stin...

How did Akshay Singhal turn Log9 from a dorm-room nanotech experiment into a battery-tech player reshaping India’s EV future? In this Founder Thesis episode, we unpack the science, strategy, and hard lessons behind building tropicalized EV batteries in India’s heat and hustle—where battery packs can be 50% of an EV’s cost. From IIT Roorkee labs to Bengaluru’s IISc ecosystem, Akshay charts the shif...

One of the pioneering fintechs in the wealth management space, Scripbox started over a decade ago. Atul talks about his journey of building two highly impactful startups in the last decade. He built up Scripbox as the leading HNI wealth management fintech in India, and Probe Information as a leading B2B SaaS tool used by most banks and NBFCs in India. Know about:- Report writing on private compani...

"It's easy to give money away; the most difficult thing is getting it back."  This is the fundamental, hard-learned lesson from a 30-year veteran of the lending industry. Prashant A. Bhonsle explains that the real art of building a sustainable financial institution lies not in aggressive loan disbursement but in mastering the underrated science of collections. Prashant A. Bhonsle is a 30-year...

"India is a data-poor country." Most founders would see this as an insurmountable hurdle. In this episode, Devashish Fuloria explains how he saw it as the ultimate business opportunity—building a formidable competitive moat not despite, but because of the chaos of Indian data. Devashish Fuloria is the Co-founder and CEO of GeoIQ, a location intelligence startup recently acquired by Lenskart in a d...

"Success is an 'and' condition, whereas failure is an 'or' condition." This profound insight from Satya Prabhakar captures the brutal reality of entrepreneurship: for a startup to succeed, everything from the team and timing to the business model and funding must align perfectly. However, failure can occur if just one of these critical links breaks. Satya Prabhakar is the Founder & CEO of Sule...

"Even though conceptually there's a degree of product market fit, there are still very few people in the world who understand how to deal with misinformation and disinformation." In this episode, Lyric Jain discusses the complexities of combating misinformation in the digital age. He emphasizes that while the need for solutions is evident, the expertise and understanding required to effectively ad...

Saurav Kumar’s journey with Euler Motors is a powerful story of scrappy, first-principles execution. In this conversation with Akshay Datt, Saurav Kumar, the Founder & CEO of Euler Motors, shares his incredible founder journey. A serial entrepreneur whose previous company Cube26 was acquired by Paytm , Saurav has now raised over $206 million for Euler Motors and is building a manufacturing cap...

How did Manish Gupta turn Indegene into a global pharma powerhouse from scratch in India’s toughest startup era? In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, we explore the journey of building a billion-dollar digital-first life sciences commercialization leader. From starting Indegene in 2000 with just $350K of seed funding, to battling cash crunches and eventually scaling into a full-stack par...

"In a startup, sometimes the most pragmatic decision is also the hardest."  This was the reality Byas Nambisan faced when he decided to shut down Ezetap's in-house hardware manufacturing. While the hardware was a source of pride and emotional attachment for the company, he made the dispassionate call that it "stopped making economic sense," a tough decision that ultimately stabilized the busi...

"The order of your customers can oftentimes make or break your company." This crucial insight from Bhavin Shah highlights a key lesson for founders: choosing your initial customers strategically is paramount. It's not just about finding anyone interested, but finding the right partners whose problems you can solve effectively now , setting the stage for sustainable growth. Bhavin Shah is the CEO &...

The Retail-as-a-Service platform, Daalchini helps micro-entrepreneurs set up smart vending machines and begin earning revenue within months. They are also a strong distribution network for cloud kitchens and direct-to-consumer food and beverage brands. Prerna shares how she found the right business strategy and their method of growing over 1000 vending machines now. Know about:- Birth of the idea...

"Gold is money. Everything else is credit." This provocative quote by a historic JP Morgan banker is the foundation of Gaurav Mathur's audacious long-term vision. In this episode, he reveals how SafeGold's accessible digital gold platform in India is just the first step toward building a global, gold-backed digital currency designed to be a more credible and stable alternative to the traditional f...

"My first two attempts were my biggest failures... they were stepping stones." This is the core of Vivek Goyal's founder thesis. He believes that for a founder, failure isn't the end; it's the most valuable data you can collect. In this episode of Founder thesis hosted by Akshay Datt, he explains how the lessons from his "deadpooled" startup were directly responsible for building PlayShifu's globa...

"In a gold rush, the best business you can do is selling shovels to the gold diggers".  In this episode, Nageen Kommu explains how his company, Digitap, provides the essential tools for India's fintech lenders, helping them analyze data to make smarter decisions in a booming market. Nageen Kommu is the Founder and CEO of Digitap.ai, a bootstrapped and profitable B2B fintech company. In just f...

About The Guest Nikhil Aggarwal is the Founder & Group CEO of Grip Invest , an investment platform he has scaled to a gross AUM of ₹250 crores, with a monthly new investment rate of ₹30 crores. He has set a target to enable half a billion dollars ($500M) in total investments by March 2024. Prior to this, Nikhil co-founded the mobility tech company Chalo , served as a Vice President at Morgan S...

How do you track an entire city’s bus fleet without any hardware? You pay the conductors to turn on their phone's GPS. This was the scrappy, ingenious first step Chalo took to solve India's public transport problem. It perfectly captures the on-the-ground hustle required to build a business that now powers millions of journeys daily. In this episode of Founder Thesis, your host Akshay Datt sits do...

"In India, 35% of all Indian cities are fully planned, but 75% is all on its own... that's not where 70% live. 70% of urban is in those areas, which have all on their own lanes and by lanes." This powerful insight from Vivek Raina highlights the vast, often overlooked market that Excitel Broadband chose to serve. Instead of focusing only on the structured, planned parts of cities, Excitel ventured...

This episode is a fascinating story of the classic startup journey - you start with an idea, which works to an extent, and then you pivot and discover the much bigger idea. Disruptive mobility startup founder, Kapil shares insights about finding product market fit, building with a data-driven mindset, and scaling with capital efficiency. Know about:- Building a product for train travelers Problems...

IndiaLends brings efficiencies in the lending process by aggregating multiple lenders on one platform so that every customer can find a lender that meets their needs. Gaurav is a lending industry veteran, having worked with global lending companies. He talks about the 7 year-long journey of building IndiaLends, surviving the pandemic, and the Saas opportunities they are chasing in the lending spac...

Abhay started India’s first pure play e-commerce website called malamall.com way back in 1998, at a time when the internet ecosystem in India was non-existent and not even 1% of India’s population was online.  This episode is a candid and honest story of the struggles of entrepreneurship and proves how grit can make you successful, even if it takes decades. Know about:- Building malamall.com,...

"It was clear to me all along that this is how we were going to transact in the future." Sanjay Swamy shares this profound early conviction about mobile payments, a vision he pursued with mChek, attempting to build what resembled "Apple Pay on the SIM card" years before its time. This foresight into India's digital transformation underpins his entire entrepreneurial and investment journey. Sanjay...

Imagine a world where a standard health checkup was more sophisticated than what your doctor can do for you today. Kiran’s venture, Ekincare is doing just that. Kiran talks about the challenges of finding the right business model, of raising funds, and the insights he got along the way about how to solve healthcare challenges for India. This episode is really a masterclass in finding product-marke...

Did you know that only 4% of Indians have a Demat account? Compared to that, 40% of Americans have a Demat account. This is the massive opportunity that Raghu Kumar is chasing with his second venture - Rain Platforms. The goal is to make the intimidating world of trading more comfortable. Raghu talks about some of the innovative platforms that Rain is building to help more Indians become active in...

"After raising millions of dollars, the first thing we did was shut down our most profitable division." This was the pivotal, contrarian decision that put Upstox on the path to becoming a unicorn. In this episode, co-founder Raghu Kumar reveals why killing their "golden goose"—the proprietary trading desk that funded the company's early days—was the secret to building a trustworthy, scalable finte...