Founder Thesis

Jiraaf is helping the common man tap into the exclusive investment deals previously reserved for the elite few. Saurav and Vineet talk about how Jiraaf lets you put your money to work directly in corporate debt instruments, bypassing the banks. Additional links:- 1.How Fintech Startup Jiraaf Is Helping Indians Diversify Their Fixed Income Investments 2.Debt mutual funds tweak helps alternate inves...

How do founders scale without giving away equity? In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, Bhavik Vasa, Founder & CEO of GetVantage, reveals how non-dilutive growth capital is changing the game for Indian startups and D2C brands. If you’ve ever wondered whether debt could actually make you richer as a founder, this candid conversation is a must-watch. Bhavik Vasa is a fintech veteran who...

Not fancy pedigrees but grit and determination- Harini's journey is a powerful example of scaling up through these two. It resembles a captivating Hollywood movie, beginning with a homemaker turned accidental entrepreneur, and culminating in the creation of a 100-crore business. Additional links:- 1.How Harini Sivakumar built D2C brand Earth Rhythm to help her specially-abled child 2.How Earth Rhy...

Inspired by the teachings of the Masai tribe in Kenya, Prateek started Masai School to help Indian students bridge the skill gap. He’s been through a rollercoaster ride as a founder and he shares his journey of building Masai School, a journey that began soon after he graduated from IIT Kanpur. Additional links:- 1. Outcome-Based Education! Know How This Platform Prepares Industry-Ready Tech Talen...

Bik helps companies increase the sales of their online stores through AI-powered customer engagement and communication tools. Sonakshi shares the journey of first building up Bikayi as a WhatsApp commerce tool for small businesses before making the pivot to Bik which offers solutions to large global enterprise clients. Additional links:- 1.Strengthening Conversational Commerce Bikayi Plans To Scal...

Recur Club is solving the problem of access to funds for startups with predictable revenue streams. Their secret sauce lies in the deep tech integration that they are able to do with the borrowers. Additional links:- 1. Recur Club allocates $15 million in financing to Indian start-up founders affected by SVB crisis 2.Most Companies Die Because They Don’t Get Capital At Right Point: Recur Club Foun...

Prasad Kompalli embodies the playbook for entrepreneurial success. With a strong technological background and 8 patents under his belt, Prasad had a rewarding tenure at SAP, the German tech giant that honed his skills and expertise. He recounts the challenges faced by Mfine, navigating through a near-death experience that ultimately forged a stronger and more resilient company. Additional links:-...

As an IIM alumnus, Tarun's passion for empowering his fellow batchmates with job opportunities drove him to create IIMJobs. His dedication paid off when Infoedge acquired his venture for a staggering $12mn in 2019. Now, Tarun is taking on his next challenge with Juno School of Business, a game-changing endeavour focused on closing the skill gap in sales and transforming employability. Additional l...

Can an electric ride-hailing startup take on Ola and Uber in India and actually reach profitability? In this episode, we uncover how Anmol Singh Jaggi is building BluSmart Mobility , India’s all-electric cab service, into a potential EV unicorn reshaping urban mobility. Anmol Singh Jaggi’s entrepreneurial journey began in college, scaled with a public IPO at Gensol Engineering , and has now pivote...

Sunstone—an educational disruptor that’s solving India’s unemployability problem with first principle thinking. Ashish is a serial founder and he shares his lessons of finding product market fit, building pricing power, and growth hacking to reach scale. Additional links:- 1.This edtech startup is focusing on employability to help students in tier II, III cities 2.Sunstone partners with NSDC to pr...

A small idea that grew into giant success- Shivkumar Ganesan shares his story of building one of India’s pioneering SaaS companies and the rollercoaster ride of building it into the giant that it is today. Listen on for some amazing nuggets about market sizing, finding product market fit, fundraising and lots more. Additional links:- 1.AI is changing the way businesses interact with customers: Exo...

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...