Founder Thesis

Siddharth spills the beans on starting up Bijnis while still in college. He talks about finding product market fit, raising funds without having an IIT or IIM pedigree, and how they continue to scale Bijnis profitably despite facing competition from extremely well-funded competitors like Udaan and Ajio B2B. Additional links:- 1.India’s Bijnis lands $30 million to help manufacturers build digital i...

Mayank wanted to make healthcare as easy as pie by offering health insurance solutions to companies for their employees. But finding product-market fit became tough. Not one to give up easily, Mayank’s hard work paid off and Loop became the most well-funded startup in the space. He shares his journey of building Loop. Additional links:- 1. Mayank Kale and Amrit Singh's Loop is filling the gaps in...

Insurance is an industry where people used to rely on agents to buy policies. But then came PolicyBazaar, which went the Silicon Valley way and got rid of agents. Enter RenewBuy, which took the "Made for Bharat" approach and respected the agents' spirit of entrepreneurship by empowering them. In this conversation, Balachander talks about his decades-long journey in the insurance industry and the u...

"We are doubling down on our investment in continuing to be the best or 10x better than anyone else on the market." Adit Jain's unwavering commitment to market leadership and continuous innovation reflects his ambitious vision for Leena AI and his drive to revolutionize enterprise operations. Adit Jain is the Co-Founder & CEO of Leena AI, an Autonomous Agent designed for modern workplaces. Und...

Ankit struggled for years to build AdPushup, pivoting multiple times and struggling to attract investors. The company had only raised $2.5 mn before its recent phenomenal acquisition of 70 mn dollars. In this conversation, Ankit shares the ups and downs of building a global martech SaaS company and the lessons he learned along the way. Additional links:- 1.The AdPushup Story: From Fighting To Surv...

"Thank God we didn't have the luxury of venture capital." In an era where startups burn millions before seeing a single rupee of revenue, Rajendra S. Pawar, founder of NIIT, explains how the necessity of being profitable from the start forced a level of creativity and sustainability that has allowed NIIT to thrive for over four decades. In this episode, your host Akshay Datt sits down with Rajendr...

The pandemic has impacted the edtech industry worldwide, and India's edtech giants have been no exception. Adda247 has emerged as a unique player in this space, catering to the bottom of the pyramid with affordable online courses. Anil talks about his mission-driven approach and how it has helped build a successful business. Additional links:- 1.Bullish on Bharat: here’s how adda247 is helping Ind...

With the deluge of saas tools available today, and the decentralized nature of work, managing these saas subscriptions becomes an administrative nightmare. This is where a company like Zluri comes in. And while this may sound like a trivial problem, by the end of this episode, you will be convinced that this is a massive opportunity. Additional links:- How Zluri is revolutionising SaaS app managem...

If you search the top 10 advertising agencies in India, you'll find that they're all subsidiaries of international companies. There isn't a single agency on the list that is entirely owned by Indians. Zoo Media is on a mission to change that narrative. Pratik shares his decade and half long journey of building a marketing agency from scratch and how they are now on track to build a global ad agenc...

Akshay Munjal shares his first-hand experience of watching the Hero Group founder Brijmohan Lall Munjal build up Hero into a truly remarkable business. He shares his personal journey of first running the corporate training venture Hero Mindmine, then setting up the BML Munjal University, and finally creating Hero Vired as an ed-tech platform to train the youth on next-generation skills at scale. A...

"The First Law of Fintech: No amount of capital is enough to burn if your unit economics are broken." Sandeep Patil stresses that while tech startups might get away with a "grow now, profit later" model, fintech is different. Because you are dealing with a balance sheet, having a clear line of sight to profitability on a per-customer or per-transaction basis is the absolute first filter for securi...

Market leader and one of the most well-funded startups- Axio is creating ripples across the lending ecosystem. But the journey of reaching the top has been full of highs and lows, and Gaurav candidly shares his lessons from a decade of building and scaling India’s pioneering lending fintech. Additional links:- 1.Decoding Fintech Startup axio’s Growth Playbook For Serving 6 Mn Users And Beyond 2.Me...

UptimeAI is a plug-and-play solution helping manufacturers solve glitches before they manifest by ingesting data generated from the production process. Jagadish talks about how he identified problems in traditional manufacturing and built the venture that’s powering smart manufacturing across the world. Additional links:- 1. UptimeAI: AI-based virtual expert to bring enhance efficiency and predict...

Entropik is solving a truly hard problem of how to read the mind of a consumer. They have built an AI-powered platform that helps companies decode the emotional state of consumers by using neuroscience and machine learning. This conversation is a masterclass in building deep-tech products and scaling them globally. Additional links:- 1.StartUp Central: Can AI gauge what you feel? Emotion AI provid...

Tanay talks about his amazing journey of overcoming odds multiple times - be it in getting a job with Microsoft and building the Microsoft Teams product or in the way Invact is disrupting how we are preparing the next generation for meaningful employment.  Invact is a truly original edtech platform that aims to help millions of young Indians who live in tier 2,3 and 4 towns and have almost no...

In the shadows of large payments companies exists a startup that is building with the reverse philosophy- ftcash first acquires customers for loans and then gives them payment processing services. Vaibhav talks about how his unique background helped him build ftCash using first principles thinking. Insights shared:- Managing risks in the payments business The merchant lending ecosystem Keeping you...

It is of no doubt that technology is a crucial driver of financial inclusion. Avanti Finance is building an ecosystem around tech to empower India’s unbanked sector. Backed by stalwarts Ratan Tata and Nandan Nilekani, this startup sees the promise of making India poverty-free. Rahul shares his learnings from his long experience inside GE and the fundamental principles of scaling up a lending busin...

News and journalism are shifting their strategy from being free for consumption to going behind paywalls. ConScent is building a full-stack revenue solution for publishers, and in this episode, Sunny talks about the publishing landscape and the various ways to monetize content through smart user journeys and better intelligence. Insights shared:- The business case of subscriptions How to customize...

GoQii is a leader in the health-tech space, having raised more than 100 mn dollars till date from top VCs. Vishal leveraged his understanding of gaming to make gamification the heart of Goqii. He recollects his journey of building GoQii as a second-time founder. Insights shared:- GTM and pricing of health tech products and services How healthcare management differs from insurance Metrics of a heal...

If we were to write a history of tech startups in India, then surely there would be a pretty big chapter dedicated to Vishal Gondal. From becoming a tech entrepreneur while still in college to selling Indiagames to Disney for almost a hundred mn dollars - Vishal recounts his fascinating story. Insights shared:- Early days of Indian internet gaming How to engage customers with adware gaming Using b...

Dhruva Space is in the business of making space accessible to businesses. Sanjay and Chaitanya talk about low earth orbit satellites, why satellites are a big business, and how they are building the full stack for enterprises to take advantage of satellite technology. Additional links:- Dhruva Space launches nano-satellites onboard ISRO's PSLV C54 Dhruva Space was launched to establish India as a...

"I think being naive sometimes helps you to innovate or do things differently." Gaurav Khatri's counterintuitive take on entrepreneurship reveals how not being a traditional tech insider allowed him to sidestep industry dogma. His "naivety" let him focus on a simple question: could he find a market gap and fill it? This approach, unburdened by preconceived limitations, was the catalyst for creatin...

Pickrr has built an asset-light logistics platform that aggregates logistics service providers and companies seeking logistics services. Gaurav is a serial entrepreneur whose first venture was in the B2B Saas space. He talks about the lessons from his decade-long journey as an entrepreneur and about selling Pickrr to the logistics unicorn Shiprocket for a cool $200 mn. Insights shared:- Building A...

The world of cryptocurrency is currently going through the transition from being something for hardcore enthusiasts to being a mass market technology, and one of the companies aiding that transition is GuardianLink. Ramkumar has been an early participant in the cryptocurrency revolution, having entered this space 7 years ago, and in this fascinating conversation, we learn about how the space has e...

How did Varun Sadana go from building India’s most loved meat brand Licious to disrupting the fast-growing pet care industry with Supertails? In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, we uncover the bold bets behind India’s first digital-native pet health and commerce platform. Varun Sadana, co-founder of Supertails and ex-co-founder of Licious, shares his fascinating journey from corporate r...