“Can you imagine how primitive that sounds today?” Mitesh laughs.

“But the requirement was that you had to hand-code everything. You couldn’t use tools because there were a lot of accessibility and other restrictions they had in place and no tool at the time was mature enough to accommodate this need.”

Seventeen years later, InfoBeans operates at the heart of that company’s operating system—the equivalent of Windows for the enterprise storage world. They’ve progressed from basic HTML to developing multiple releases of the core product that powers over 100,000 enterprise customers.

The account has generated multiple tens of millions of dollars over eighteen years. But that’s not the important thing.

“The important thing really is how we have progressed in terms of level of complexity,” Mitesh explains.

“They came to us in 2015, and the VP was like, ‘I know you don’t have this capability. It requires a whole bunch of C++ expertise. But I trust you guys so much that I want you to put together a 17-person team in two months.’”

By 2017, InfoBeans owned the entire product dev and support. And then the VP of Engineering—who has since become CEO—said something that the founders carry in their hearts to this day:

“If you want work done, go to InfoBeans.”

This wasn’t just a compliment. It was recognition of something that large Fortune 500 companies struggle with: institutional memory. Every two or three years, these organizations go through reorgs. People shift departments. Knowledge gets lost.

“They come to us because we provide that stability and longevity to them,” Mitesh says.

“New teams came on board who had no idea what they were getting into, even though the company owns these products. And they’re like, ‘Go talk to InfoBeans, they’ll know.’”

The same playbook worked even more dramatically with a global logistics giant.

Finding a Wedge

A leading logistics company headquartered in Germany provides logistics, courier, package delivery, and express mail services globally—it is a leading player in its market. It had an interesting problem with its ServiceNow bill—25% of its invoice amount was spent on its storage.

With time, the ballooning data was causing unbudgeted cost surprises. Even the archived data continues to add to the storage size. Large datasets negatively affect instance performance. The need for external platforms to access live ServiceNow data adds to the challenge.

Every enterprise running ServiceNow faces the same invisible problem: their database is growing, and so is their bill.

Audit logs. Email archives. Attachment histories. Years of accumulated data that nobody deletes because nobody knows what’s safe to delete.

ServiceNow charges by storage. The more data you accumulate, the more you pay. And for large enterprises running complex implementations, this “storage tax” can balloon into hundreds of thousands of dollars annually—money spent not on innovation, not on new features, but simply on keeping old data warm.

InfoBeans saw this pattern across their ServiceNow client base and asked a different question: What if you didn’t have to choose between keeping your data and controlling your costs?

The answer was Spacewarp.

Spacewarp is deceptively simple in concept: it offloads data from your ServiceNow instance to your preferred storage while keeping that data accessible with a single click. No complex migrations. No data loss. No conflict with your existing ServiceNow configuration.

A smart scheduler handles the rest, freeing up ServiceNow instance data in just a few clicks.

But here’s what makes it remarkable: the offloaded data doesn’t disappear into a cold archive. It remains accessible through ServiceNow’s native interface. Users don’t even know the difference. They click, they get their data, they move on.

The Head of ServiceNow at the aforementioned logistics company said:

“Spacewarp helped us reduce incremental YoY database growth by ~70% and the initial data offload led to a significant cost offset, leading to less than 10 months of ROI on Spacewarp. The storage cost itself went down by 85%.”

“Its native ServiceNow UI and ability to plug into our highly customized instance with limited effort have enabled us to start reaping the benefits of database offloading very early after the license purchase.”

Spacewarp also illustrates InfoBeans’ broader strategy with platform technologies like ServiceNow and Salesforce. These aren’t just implementation services—they’re opportunities to build proprietary tools that solve universal problems.

ServiceNow has over 7,700 enterprise customers worldwide. Every single one of them has a growing database. Every single one of them is paying a storage tax. Spacewarp turns a common pain point into a wedge that opens doors.

“Newer technologies are client acquisition engines,” Siddharth explains.

“The bulk of the business comes when we custom-develop products with these organizations. But you need that entry point.”

An 80% cost reduction gets you in the room. What you build together with the client afterwards keeps you there.

ServiceNow was the entry point — simple IT service management support work that led to setting up a service desk. The logistics company wanted to expand its India presence and wanted a partner close to them. InfoBeans took an office in the same building, two floors apart.

“These days they (team members of the logistics company) actually end up utilizing some of our office space for themselves,” Mitesh notes.

“They just walk in as if it’s their own office, and that gives us immense joy.”

That service desk went from zero to 100 people in Chennai working solely on logistics company projects. Then came the expansion: SAP integration work. Product engineering. UX design with their design team sitting in Prague. Aviation services. Cargo divisions.

The numbers tell the story: 1000% revenue growth in roughly six years for this one client.

“That’s why when I say compounding effect,” Mitesh explains, “I talk about building a foundation that we built over all these years.”

This year, they cracked the company’s USA operations. Costa Rica is talking to them. The potential within just this one global enterprise is immense.

These two stories—one in Silicon Valley, one in Germany—illustrate InfoBeans’ land-and-expand strategy in action. Enter small, build trust, follow the customer wherever they want to go, and never let them down.

InfoBeans Technologies (NSE: INFOBEAN, BSE: 543644) was founded in 2000 as a passion project by three childhood friends working in the United States, who yearned for Indore, their hometown.

It went public in 2017 at a market cap of approximately ₹140 crores.

Today, the company is on track to surpass the ₹500 crore revenue mark with a PAT of 18%+. And the market cap is approximately ₹2,000+ crores. They have grown their revenue by 10x every 8 years.

But the most remarkable metric in their story? The founders have been together for 37 years, 25 of which have been spent building InfoBeans.

Indore, 1991

Five hundred students would gather every morning at 7 AM for coaching classes to prepare for state engineering entrance exams. There were no chairs. Everyone sat on the floor in a massive hall, while a single teacher taught all three subjects from a raised platform.

Avinash and Mitesh had known each other since ninth grade at The Digamber School. When their school didn’t offer PCM (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics) for eleventh grade, both transferred to Tilokchand Jain High Secondary School. They lived about one and a half kilometers apart.

They would commute together—one bike, two people, sometimes two bikes, four people. In the mornings, Avinash would grab his father’s scooter and pick up Mitesh. They’d share rides to the coaching class, share notes, share anxieties about the future.

In 1992, all three cracked the state engineering entrance exam and got admitted to SGSITS, the only engineering college in Indore at the time. It was a year filled with social unrest in India, and their college exams were preponed—they got only two and a half months for their first semester.

But something else happened that year that would define their next three decades.

During ragging week, freshers were divided into two groups: Day Scholars and Hostlers. They were herded into a room on the top floor of the college building, asked their names, and their branches. When Avinash introduced himself—“Avinash Sethi, Electrical Engineering”—a senior noticed something.

“Wait. Siddharth Sethi from the Electrical Engineering was just here. Are you brothers?”

They weren’t related. Siddharth had studied at Daly College, a princely school. Avinash came from a more modest background. But from that moment on, they were known throughout engineering college as the “Sethi Brothers.”

By the third year, all three of them had made a decision that would shape their futures: they would prepare for the CAT exam together.

“We realized that with technology, we don’t need a lot of resources,” Avinash explains.

“We wanted to do business management. IIMs appealed to us.”

So began the morning ritual. 7 AM coaching class for CAT preparation. Then, because they couldn’t go home for lunch and didn’t want to carry tiffins to college (a “young fad,” Avinash admits), they found a bhojnalaya—a simple establishment serving fresh thalis—where they would eat at 9:30 AM before heading to college.

All three of them. Every day. Together.

“We used to learn from each other. Siddharth used to guide us on the grammar part. When we struggled, we discovered things and found solutions together. That is the process where you bond.”

Siddharth had lived in the UK until fourth grade. His English was impeccable, his math sharp. He had originally prepared for IIT—he even cleared BHU Varanasi while in college—but chose to stay in Indore with his friends.

For CAT, there were no testing centers in Indore. The three friends would travel to Bhopal together, take the exam together, come back together, and discuss every problem they solved and every mistake they made.

In 1996, none of them got through the MBA programs. All three received interview calls but couldn’t convert. All three felt devastated.

But they also felt something else: they couldn’t keep asking their parents for money.

“We were 21 years old,” Siddharth remembers.

“For the MBA preparation, we didn’t attempt any campus interviews. We started introspecting—where can we get a job?”

The IT industry was booming. Infosys had just gone public. Big companies were coming to their college, hiring in bulk. The entrance tests required reasoning and analytical skills—exactly what they had prepared for CAT.

Avinash cleared TCS. Mitesh cleared Tata Infotech. Siddharth had joined Tata Motors at Jamshedpur straight from campus and later transferred to their Mumbai IT division.

All three ended up in Mumbai. All three ended up in the Tata companies. None of it was planned.

Maximum City

Mumbai changed everything.

Avinash’s training was in Borivali East. Mitesh was in Andheri SEEPZ. They took an apartment together in Borivali West with some college friends—four people in a small space. After training, Avinash was posted in Cuffe Parade, a two-hour commute each way.

But in a stroke of what Avinash calls “destiny,” Siddharth’s office after his transfer was also in Cuffe Parade—directly across from Avinash’s building.

“I was in Maker Towers. Siddharth was in the World Trade Centre. We used to have lunch together every day at the Kamat’s.”

“Mitesh was with me in the apartment, sharing dinner. Siddharth was with me at work, sharing lunch. The common element never separated.”

They would meet every weekend at a park in Andheri West and sit on the same bench every time, dreaming about what the future would look like together. They didn’t know what or how, they just knew it had to be done.

‘Life mein kuch karna hai yaar.’ (We have to do something meaningful with our lives) was always the primary thought that they would brood over at that bench for hours. They would carry those thoughts as they went back home on Mumbai local trains in two different directions.

They were earning approximately ₹5,500 a month. Avinash paid ₹2,400 for rent and ₹450 for a first-class train pass. After food and other expenses, savings were negligible.

They didn’t care.

What Mumbai gave them was something their engineering college in Indore never could: confidence.

“Before Mumbai, I couldn’t even speak in English properly,” Avinash admits.

“Mumbai made me talk confidently. Mumbai changed all three of us.”

Getting to the office was a daily struggle. Missing a train meant losing a big chunk of time. Their apartment was on the fourth floor with no lift. If you forgot something while leaving, you couldn’t go back.

“You have to plan ahead. You have to think. Living in Mumbai builds these habits.”

The Gujarati tiffin service they subscribed to made everything too sweet. So they found a bhojnalaya at Borivali Railway Station and would eat there every evening before climbing those four flights of stairs.

It was during these Mumbai years that Avinash discovered Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

“I used to read one chapter and see how I could apply it. I really found it miraculous—it really works. It changed me.”

But something else was brewing. They would calculate: TCS was charging $30 per hour for their services. They were being paid ₹5,500 per month. The math was not mathing.

And they were tracking Infosys—the only listed IT company at the time. Every morning, before leaving for the office, they would check the stock price in the Times of India.

“We used to track the story behind Infosys. We were in the same industry. There was so much excitement around that company.”

Then Mitesh discovered something. On one of his monthly trips to Indore—they were so homesick they went back every month, taking the Friday night train and returning Sunday night—he found a company that would train you in newer technologies and ship you to the US on an H1B visa.

The company was called Suvi Information Systems, a body-shopping IT firm based in Indore that was also trying to build a product for jewelry manufacturers.

All three quit their Tata jobs. They went back to Indore for training. Mitesh learned Microsoft Visual Basic. Avinash and Siddharth learned PowerBuilder.

In April 1998, Mitesh went to the US. Three months later, Avinash followed. One month after that, Siddharth arrived.

They landed in three different corners of America: Mitesh in New Jersey, Avinash in Los Angeles, Siddharth in Jacksonville, Florida.

“Our exposure, living and working in the US—that set some pretty strong work culture and work ethics for us,” Mitesh recalls.

“And having worked in different Tata companies, there is this degree of fairness and ethics that you carry. And then you come to America and you see how dedicated people are and how committed people are to their work. Timelines actually mean something.”

“We really thought we should bring a lot of these learnings to India. We thought we will inculcate some of these elements around passion, a sense of ownership, that whatever you deliver, you own. Something goes wrong, it’s your neck on the line. Something goes right, you let the team receive all the kudos.”

But they weren’t done being together. That Thanksgiving, Mitesh, his wife Priyanka, and Avinash flew to Florida. They met Siddharth and his wife Meghna—both Mitesh and Siddharth had gotten married just before leaving India, pressured by their families who worried about them surviving alone in America.

Five people. One road trip. Ten days. Orlando, Disney World, Miami, Key West.

“That is when we thought it’s time to build something together, remembering our moments on the bench in Andheri,” Siddharth says.

aapkaindore.com

“We all happened to be from Indore. We were missing Indore partly,” Avinash recalls.

“And we were also trying to look around people in the neighborhood who also belonged to Indore.”

The browser had just arrived. The internet was transforming from a text-based curiosity into something visual, something you could build things on. And in November 1998, somewhere between Disney World and Key West, an idea crystallized.

“We said okay, let’s do something together. For Indore. Not from Indore, but for Indore.”

The three engineers-turned-consultants taught themselves HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript on weekends. Meghna, Siddharth’s wife, who had just completed a graphic design course, created the visuals. They scraped the early internet for addresses and phone numbers of people from Madhya Pradesh, building a directory of 500-1,000 names—the first “friend search” for the Indori diaspora.

But they didn’t stop there.

They hired Priyanka’s cousin, Paridhi, in Indore. Her job was unusual: she would go to famous stores across the city, photograph their products, and upload them to the website. Bouquets. Chocolates. Greeting cards. Suddenly, an NRI in New Jersey could send a birthday gift to their mother in Indore with a few clicks.

“We created a free postal service. You write an email to us, we’ll print it and courier it the same day. It reaches your relatives or friends within 24 hours.”

The business model was unique in 1999. They were paying 9% per credit card transaction to CCNow—there was no PayPal yet, no Stripe, no infrastructure for what they were attempting. But people paid anyway.

“We used to get letters from them,” Siddharth says.

“They would write: ‘We have not been able to send Rakhi to our brothers or sisters for years. Because of this platform, we can do that now.’”

March 1999. The platform launched. It became self-sustaining within months.

More importantly, AapkaIndore.com became their showcase. Proof that three friends working weekends from different time zones could build something real, something that worked, something that served a genuine human need.

Birth of InfoBeans

By late 1999, an apkaindore.com user based out of the US called the team to work on a project. But to start something like that, they couldn’t do it while being fully employed in their jobs. They had to set up a development center in India.

The timing was audacious. The Y2K scare had made IT services incredibly lucrative. Everyone was making money hand over fist. Walking away from the US just as the party was getting started seemed insane.

But Avinash was never really at the party. He was in Portland, working with Intel Corporation by then, watching the dot-com boom from a distance. The entrepreneurial itch had become unbearable.

In November 1999, he returned to Indore.

“I came back, and we started InfoBeans from my home garage,” he says simply.

The initial capital was $9,000—$3,000 each from the three founders. At that time, there was no formal partnership. Mitesh and Siddharth were still in the US, working their jobs, contributing capital and moral support.

The aforementioned Aapkaindore.com user gave them their first project: a simple website development job for a company called Ship Methods for for $1000.

First year revenue: ₹15 lakhs. First year profit: ₹5 lakhs.

“So we almost made back the $9,000 we invested,” Avinash notes.

“That money was never consumed—we reinvested it.”

“From that day onwards, we have always chosen to reinvest the money in the business. We have not taken a very hefty dividend at any point in time.”

Then the dot-com crash happened. March 2001. The NASDAQ collapsed. The Y2K party was over.

But InfoBeans was a micro player. The crash that devastated Silicon Valley barely touched them.

Avinash attempted to expand into the UK, establishing InfoBeans Limited there and applying for his work permit.

He flew to London on September 10th, 2001.

On September 11th, he watched the Twin Towers fall on television.

“That was another wipe-off,” he says quietly.

However, during the same flight from Delhi to London, Avinash met a Sri Lankan lawyer who mentioned that his son worked in IT. Would Avinash like to connect?

The son’s name was Kevin Rochey. He was based in London. He liked what InfoBeans was doing. He became a client.

“Just a chance meeting on a flight got us work,” Avinash marvels.

“Services are all about trust. There has to be a certain amount of trust created for you to get work.”

This would become the core philosophy of InfoBeans.

Growth Momentum

The job market in the US became quite unstable following the September 11 attacks. Siddharth returned to India in 2002, having been laid off from his startup in the US. By 2004, Mitesh had returned to India from the US for good. Now, all three founders were working full-time on building InfoBeans.

By then, InfoBeans had begun facing a problem that would have been unthinkable in Bangalore: they couldn't find talent in Indore. Their solution was counterintuitive. They started InfoBeans Education Services, training people in Java and Microsoft .NET, then handpicking the best graduates to join the company.

“We had education services in Indore, Pune, and Bhopal,” Siddharth recalls.

“Interestingly, in 2005, we were making more money in education than in IT services.”

But the education business had a fatal flaw: it wasn’t scalable. Unless the founders personally delivered the training, quality suffered. By 2006, they shut it down and focused everything on IT services.

The first million dollars (₹4 crores back then) in revenue came in 2008. By 2015, the company had managed to hit ₹43 crores.

InfoBeans went public in 2017.

“We raised 37 crores, but we already had 33 crores in the bank,” Siddharth explains.

“So post-IPO, we had ₹70 crores. The whole idea was to invest in growth—organic and inorganic.”

After the IPO, InfoBeans expanded from the US to two new geographies: Germany and the Middle East. They also started building capabilities in ServiceNow and Robotic Process Automation.

The company is on track to cross the ₹500 crores mark in FY26.

One thing that defined InfoBeans from early on was their approach to team member ownership. The founders had been following Infosys closely, and one thing impressed them: before going public, Infosys gave out stock options to its people.

“We’ve been following Infosys quite closely,” Mitesh explains.

“One of the things that inspired us quite a bit was that, before going IPO, they actually ended up giving out stock options to people. We did the same.”

The question now became: how do they go from ₹400 crores to ₹4,000 crores?

Path to ₹4,000 crores

The strategy that would define their next phase is already clear: use platform technologies as a wedge to enter large enterprises, then expand through custom development.

“Newer technologies are client acquisition engines,” Siddharth explains.

“Even today, when you look at ServiceNow, Salesforce—we have a platform which allows us to go inside the larger organizations. The bulk of the business comes when we custom-develop products with these organizations.”

An iPhone app might be small, short-lived, and limited in scope. But InfoBeans used it as an entry point.

“We got a client through an iPhone app development project, back when iOS was still in beta testing mode, and that client is still with us. We ended up doing about a million dollars every year with them in the last 10 years of our 15-year-relationship.”

The involvement of Phaneesh Murthy as advisor has brought a new layer of rigor to how InfoBeans thinks about market opportunity. Rather than thinking about the Target Addressable Market (TAM) in aggregate, he introduced a different framework: the TAM per customer.

“What is your addressable market? Every startup looks at the addressable market,” Mitesh explains.

“Phaneesh told us, why are you looking at the addressable market in aggregate? At the end of the day, you will be working with a customer. A team is going to work with a customer. That team’s job should be to look at the TAM that the customer has to offer.”

“When you’re going out there and looking at account expansion, the job of the account manager is to expand the TAM. Everything else will take care of itself.”

The math becomes tangible: if a VP has a five-million-dollar budget, you either need 20 such VPs to get to a hundred-million-dollar TAM, or you need to go to that VP’s boss, who might have a $50 million budget. Then you look at working with two such bosses instead.

“That’s how you grow your account penetration and reach,” Mitesh says.

“His anecdotes, directly from the horse’s mouth: from $2 million to $700 million in 10 years. And then after that, iGate was another massive success story with a billion-dollar Patni acquisition.”

In 2019, InfoBeans made its first US acquisition: Philosophie Group Inc., a design engineering company based in Los Angeles, which had clients such as Google.

The logic was simple—Philosophie did the early validation work (user research, prototyping, testing), then recommended clients for full-scale development. InfoBeans handled the development. The top of the funnel fed the bottom.

In 2021, they acquired Eternus Solutions, a Pune-based Salesforce platinum consulting partner, in an all-cash deal. This expanded their Salesforce capabilities from about 100 people to a much larger practice of about 400 people.

Today, InfoBeans has over 1,500 employees serving 42 large enterprise clients (among the 80-odd in total) across the US (56% of revenue), Europe (31%), the UAE (8%), and India (5%). They are a Microsoft Gold Partner, Salesforce Summit Partner, and ServiceNow Premier Partner.

These numbers tell the story:

“80% of our revenue was coming from the top 10 customers when we went public. Now we have diversified—55% comes from the top 10.”

Geographic Strategy

InfoBeans’ geographic strategy is more nuanced than simple market expansion. Each region has developed its own character based on the industries and services that naturally evolved there.

“If you were to really bifurcate our three big offerings in three big geographies,” Siddharth explains.

“The Middle East is a lot of Salesforce. Europe is a lot of ServiceNow.And US is a lot of core engineering work, though ServiceNow has definitely been growing pretty rapidly here in the US as well.”

The Middle East book is heavily weighted toward real estate clients; companies like Emaar. It wasn’t planned; it just happened naturally, given Dubai’s economy.

“You take aside the brick and mortar work, the customer interaction part is largely marketing-driven, sales-driven. Therefore, you see a lot of Sales Cloud implementation, Marketing Cloud implementation on the Salesforce side.”

The company has developed a methodical framework for identifying ideal clients. Tech companies in the $250 million to $1 billion revenue range have enough tech spend to become a large customer potential. For manufacturing in Europe, the minimum bar starts at $1 billion. Life sciences and real estate follow similar one-to-five or one-to-ten billion dollar customer profiles.

“The most interesting part to us was looking at a lower segment on the tech company side because their spend is significantly higher on tech,” Siddharth notes.

“They’ll probably spend roughly 40 to 50 percent of that money. And that’s your $100 million TAM client.”

The Competitive Landscape

InfoBeans operates in one of the most competitive industries on the planet: IT services.

The Indian IT services industry is dominated by giants—TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Tech—companies with revenues in the tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of employees, and decades of institutional relationships with Fortune 500 clients.

So how does a company from Indore compete?

“We always focused on building relationships with large companies, project-based work, no body shopping, no sub-contracting business,” Avinash says.

“Value-added work is where we want to build our business with our clients.”

The wedge strategy has proven remarkably effective.

ServiceNow and Salesforce aren’t just technologies—they’re Trojan horses that get InfoBeans inside enterprise accounts. Once inside, the expansion happens through custom development, integration, and ongoing support.

“If with one customer I’m only doing ServiceNow. Can I do Salesforce there? Can I do AI there? Can I do automation?”

Currently, the ServiceNow practice has about 300+ employees and is growing fastest. Salesforce has about 400 people. Together, these platform businesses represent the entry points for most new enterprise relationships.

But the real differentiation isn’t technology—it’s something harder to replicate.

“The differentiation for us till date is the fact that humans do business with humans,” Mitesh says.

“That requires sitting in front of them, seeing them in the eye, and shaking hands with them. And whatever you can provide at that point in time, what kind of credibility you can generate, and then back it up with whatever you deliver.”

The pattern is consistent across successful accounts: trust compounds over time.

“It might sound like a cliché, but trust is the only differentiator that sustains. Price, you can always find somebody cheaper. Skills, you can always find somebody smarter. And you need all of that, by the way. There’s a baseline plus a lot more that you have to bring to the table.”

“But when the question becomes of competition, competition will potentially put in similar type of expertise. Bigger companies might actually have a whole showcase of things to show them. What they don’t carry is the attitude. What they don’t carry is the passion to deliver.”

Mitesh distills the input to generating trust into one word: attitude.

“When things go wrong, standing right next to them, trying to figure out what went wrong and how we can prevent it from happening — that’s solidarity. Doesn’t matter whose fault it is.”

“A lot of times, these problems and challenges come from many different corners. And they come to us and say, ‘Thank you for helping us out. This wasn’t even your problem.’ That’s a virtuous cycle of trust that you’re constantly building.”

This explains one of InfoBeans’ most unusual investments: their world-class office facility in Indore’s Special Economic Zone, and the upcoming IT park they’re building.

“A lot of people who visit the current facility, which is actually a world-class facility are really happy,” Siddharth explains.

“We’ve seen that they start to give you more work. A physical visit to the Indore office increases our business size and, wallet size of that client.”

The new IT park is even more ambitious. Built on government land, it will serve as InfoBeans’ campus while leasing excess space to other companies.

“The government said, ‘Why don’t you build your own campus and give the remaining space to people for lease? If you create an ecosystem, it will bring more multinational companies to the city.’”

“It’s a long-term call option for us to grow inorganically as well. If we incrementally grow, we can always recover those spaces anyway.”

The competitors InfoBeans faces aren’t the Tier-1 giants—those companies operate at a different scale with different client expectations. InfoBeans competes with mid-tier players like Happiest Minds, Persistent Systems, and Globant, as well as specialized boutiques in specific technology domains.

Their edge? Longevity of relationships (9+ years on average), depth of domain expertise in specific verticals like insurance, and the ability to move fast without the bureaucracy of larger organizations.

Margin Protection Through Value Creation

The approach to margins at InfoBeans is fundamentally different from the commodity mindset that dominates much of IT services.

“One of the things we are constantly thinking of is how we can create additional value on which a premium can be commanded?” Mitesh explains.

“Because when you are in a rat race of hourly rates, then you are a commodity.”

A banking client provides a concrete example. Procurement keeps coming back asking why InfoBeans charges $40 an hour when others quote $30. The conversation continues about value delivery.

Recently, InfoBeans went to this bank’s CIO with an unsolicited demonstration of how they could utilize AI and automation together to improve outcomes. The client hadn’t asked for it.

“The CIO was so happy and so impressed. He made us meet 10 of his direct reports, made us do 10 different demos to each one of them, and said, ‘Whenever the bank is ready to take on AI, because a lot of banks are actually still not open to AI, you will be the ones we will be asking for.’”

That CIO is the one who protects the premium pricing from procurement pressure.

“He’s the guy who’s been helping us keep procurement at bay. He’s the guy who’s saying this is a premium provider. Don’t go after them.”

The AI Market Opportunity

Avinash points out an exciting prospect for InfoBeans:

“We see AI as a big opportunity. IT firms that were merely focused on bodyshopping are going to struggle at their already large scale because the goalpost has shifted—AI will almost certainly commoditize tasks such as writing code—this shifts the value towards designing solutions which unlock revenue or reduce costs for clients. This is where we come in.”

The pattern is familiar—it’s the same wedge strategy, now applied to AI. Get in with an AI proof-of-concept, expand through implementation and integration.

“People have to upgrade their abilities via AI and focus on delivering solutions to customer problems,” Avinash points out.

“Those who cannot use AI tools and focus on designing solutions will be left behind. Whether you increase your headcount or not, the quality of people needs to improve.”

InfoBeans has a dedicated team focused on AI, including their proprietary accelerator called Expona. In 2025, the company achieved CMMI Level 5 certification and launched multiple generative AI initiatives.

“Every customer is looking forward to AI. They are so excited about it. They want to do it. Quite a few of them try to do it themselves.”

“We continue to build those prototypes at our end. At some point, they are looking at us because they don’t have enough capability.”

“Whatever capability you build, if you don’t have a customer, it’s going to die. It needs to fuel its own growth.”

Siddharth invokes Jevons Paradox—the observation that when technological progress increases the efficiency of resource use, overall consumption of that resource actually increases rather than decreases.

“Every time such a major revolution happens, like what we are seeing in terms of AI, there was a lot of apprehension. But when has the work stopped or reduced? It actually has grown. Since calculators came, since computers came, since the internet came. And now AI.”

The practical reality is more nuanced than apocalyptic predictions suggest. Siddharth recounts a recent lunch meeting with someone doing extensive AI work.

“His point is roughly about 30 to 40 percent of the skeleton gets put together in a very rapid fashion, for which whatever number of engineering talent you need to carry, you may not need that. But from that 40 percent to 100 percent journey, you can’t do it with AI. At least not now or for the next year or two years.”

“Because the nuances and the context of the business are so deep and so complex that if you were to do this with AI, you’re going to burn through whatever tokens you have available or you’re going to have such a high bill that a human might actually be cheaper than AI.”

Companies are already discovering this reality. They’re limiting AI usage for developers because token costs are spiraling.

“Suddenly, if you have such a massive AI cost running, at some point you would start to question how much of it is worth it.”

The Leadership Transformation

In the last 18-20 months, InfoBeans has undergone significant maturing at the leadership, advisory, and operational levels.

Harmeet Bhatia joined as Chief Revenue Officer for the Americas in January 2025, bringing 30 years of experience in sales and marketing. Phaneesh Murthy, the legendary former Infosys executive, joined as an advisor to the Board in June 2024. Opal Perry, Chief Data & Technology Officer at easyJet, joined as an Independent Director.

The operational restructuring is equally significant. Previously, salespeople were specialized—a ServiceNow person would sell only ServiceNow. Now, each customer success person is assigned three top clients and is expected to know everything InfoBeans offers.

“Salespersons should know everything. So that restructuring is happening on the client side right now.”

“We are clearly moving in that direction. We’re making every effort. We’re leaving no stone unturned.”

There’s also a new focus on acquiring clients rather than just growing existing accounts.

“Our pace of getting new clients was much lower. We were mostly reliant on repeat business from our existing clients until a couple of years ago. But we realized that something needs to be done aggressively.”

The target: 20% organic growth in new client acquisition annually.

The approach to leadership development at InfoBeans is distinctive. Rather than importing talent from larger organizations, the company has found more success with homegrown leaders.

“Our efforts to bring in outside knowledge actually failed,” Mitesh admits candidly.

“Majority, I would say, is homegrown. And that largely comes from people who continue to stay with us, continue to carry that sense of ownership, and continue to develop and build that program.”

The mandate for every leader is simple but powerful: find your own replacement.

“That’s the only way you’re going to grow. If somebody else cannot do your job, you will be stuck in that job. And that resonated, at least with a lot of leaders who chose to stay, who chose to grow.”

The philosophy extends to how people identify with the organization. Mitesh explains a framework from their 2022 leadership retreat:

“Either you are working for InfoBeans, or you are working with InfoBeans, or InfoBeans is your company, or you say, ‘I am InfoBeans.’”

Each level means something different. Working “for” InfoBeans is a job. Working “with” InfoBeans is a partnership. But “I am InfoBeans” comes out when someone’s personal reputation becomes bound to everything that gets done at InfoBeans.

“If somebody works as if ‘I’m working for InfoBeans,’ they are in a job. Everybody has a place. All four categories have a place in the company. But the longevity gradient is actually exponential as you go towards ‘I am InfoBeans.’”

The Micro P&L Structure

One of the more distinctive operational innovations at InfoBeans is how it pushes P&L ownership deep into the organization.

“At different levels of leadership—take an engineering director who’s in charge of delivery for a client—every single project in that client’s purview will be looked at as a P&L,” Siddharth explains.

“That P&L will be managed by the individual project managers or the leaders who are running the show on the projects.”

All of that rolls up to the engineering director as a client P&L. The structure is deliberately simplified: revenue (billing), direct cost, gross margins. No complex overhead allocations or ambiguous cost centers.

“Every engineering director and their subsequent leaders have gross margin targets. And these gross margin targets are tied to incentive compensation, above and beyond what they get on their base pay.”

The result: leaders at multiple levels are making real tradeoffs between preserving gross margin and investing for future growth. These aren’t theoretical exercises—they’re daily operational decisions with personal compensation implications.

“This is not namesake leadership at that level,” Mitesh notes.

“These are tough problems to solve.”

The company also sponsors management education for promising leaders—four have attended IIM Indore’s executive programs, with others at different institutions. The investment in human capital is systematic, not episodic.

After 25 years of building the company hands-on, the three founders are now focused on guidance rather than getting into execution themselves.

“I think what we realized is that we need self-starters. We need people who can drive. Even if they make mistakes, that’s okay. We don’t want people who are followers.”

Saying No

The commitment to values isn’t just rhetoric. InfoBeans has walked away from potentially lucrative opportunities when they conflicted with company principles.

“We were approached by a gun manufacturer to do work for them,” Mitesh reveals.

“We point-blank said no. Imagine the amount of money they carry and the kind of projects inside. This could have been a massive account for us, but we didn’t take it. We walked away.”

The philosophy Mitesh articulates for his team captures the ethos:

“Don’t try to win, just win them over. Do you want to win or do you want to win hearts?”

For InfoBeans, winning is an outcome. Winning hearts is the method.

The three founders also live by a different standard than might be expected of entrepreneurs who’ve built a company approaching ₹2,000 crores in market cap.

“We live a very normal type of lifestyle,” Mitesh says.

“I wouldn’t say frugal, but nothing outlandish, nothing fancy. Because we realize at the end of the day, what good is money if you can’t put it to good use?”

Metrics

• Enterprise clients (₹1 crore+ annually): 80

• The top 20 clients generate 70% of revenue

• Average large enterprise relationship duration: 9+ years

• Repeat business: 95%

Geographic Distribution:

• USA: 56%

• Europe: 31%

• UAE: 8%

• India/APAC: 5%

Business Mix:

• InfoBeans Digital Transformation: 60%

• InfoBeans Salesforce/ServiceNow practice: 40%

Stock Performance

The stock has delivered approximately 44.7% returns over the last 12 months, significantly outperforming both the broader market and many IT sector peers. Over 3 years, the return stands at around 14.8%.

The company has completed two buybacks—in 2021 and 2025—demonstrating confidence in the stock and commitment to returning value to shareholders.

Notably, the founders never participated in the buybacks; instead, they themselves bought back approximately 3.5 lakh shares from the market.

The founders point out:

“Since the IPO, we (founders) never sold any shares. We have always bought back historically. We intend to sell 3% between the three of us in the near future to fund a few personal expenses for our families. Other than that, we are not planning to dilute any more stake from our holdings.”

“The idea is we wanted to be transparent about it. I actually asked around, but it seems India doesn’t have anything like the calendar that US companies publish ahead of the year. But being transparent is a good idea. It doesn’t hurt.”

The Vision

The direction is clear. InfoBeans wants to hit ₹4,000 crores by around 2033. The investments in leadership, AI capabilities, new geographies, and the IT park are all aligned toward this trajectory.

Avinash says, “Before we hang our boots, we want InfoBeans to at least get to the next level. And that next level, which will keep us happy, would be the 10x level.”

For the founders, the path from $50 million to $500 million requires maintaining the fundamentals while upgrading the systems. Siddharth concludes:

“We still think at the very core of this, you would still need people who carry this burning desire in their heart to do good, to do something which creates long-term value, to do something that is meaningful.”

“Once we get to the half a billion revenue mark, we may look like a different company, we may look like a more mature company. But it is truly my hope that at the very foundation of it, that same burning desire to create long-term value remains.”

What makes InfoBeans different from the hundreds of IT services companies?

Perhaps it’s the discipline of reinvesting profits instead of taking money out of the system. Perhaps it’s the Jain philosophy of simple living that they grew up with—frugality not as a strategy but as a way of life.

Or perhaps it’s something more fundamental: the understanding that in a business built on trust, the most valuable asset is time.

Thirty-seven years. Three friends. One company. InfoBeans.

Safe Harbor Statement: This article contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those projected.

This article was prepared based on interviews conducted with the founders of InfoBeans Technologies Limited. This is NOT a paid article.

If you want to discuss an opportunity with InfoBeans Technologies Limited, please reach out to us at banjan@tal64.com.

“There is no theme. It’s just first principle thinking with strong founders.”

When Mohit Kumar came to Sameer Brij Verma in March 2020 with plans to build a fitness platform for Ironman competitors, there was no wearables market in India. Consumer electronics from India meant assembly operations for global brands, not innovation. The idea of competing with Fitbit or Apple seemed preposterous.

When Gaurav Munjal wanted to democratize test preparation through online video courses, edtech barely existed as a category, and monetization was always a challenge. The dominant model was Byju’s—expensive tablet-based content sold through aggressive sales teams. Free YouTube videos as the acquisition model? Not as common.

When Vijay Shekhar Sharma was running a mobile recharge business called One97 Communications, digital payments in India were a fantasy. Credit card penetration was in single digits. Smartphone adoption was nascent. Building a payments ecosystem in that environment? Impossible.

Yet Sameer Brij Verma backed all three. All three created markets that initially didn’t exist.

This is Verma’s pattern: finding founders solving problems that don’t yet have markets.

The absence of a market doesn’t deter Verma—it energizes him. Because where consensus sees impossibility, he sees a better entry point. Where others see risk, he sees inefficiency in capital deployment. Where the crowd demands proof, he operates on conviction.

“To be non-consensus and right is the best thing an investor can do,” he says, channeling Peter Thiel’s philosophy from Zero to One.

“Non-consensus bets mean that they’re capital efficient because nobody else believes in it. So the founder has more room to innovate and solve the problem. And more importantly, once you solve the problem, money will come because…you solved the problem.”

The logic is simple:

If you’re the only investor who believes, valuations are reasonable. The founder has breathing room to build without constant pressure to hit arbitrary metrics. There’s no competitive pressure from other VCs flooding the space with capital. The company can develop at its natural pace until product-market fit emerges. And when it does emerge—when the market validates what the founder was building—capital rushes in at much higher valuations.

Five-Star Education in First Principles

To understand why Sameer Brij Verma thinks the way he does, you have to go back to the beginning—to five-star hotels in pre-liberalization India, to a childhood spent moving from city to city, to a front-row seat to India’s economic transformation.

Verma’s father worked as a hotelier for ITC and Oberoi, managing properties across India during the socialist era of the 1980s. For the first 18 years of his life, Verma lived in different five-star hotels—luxurious cocoons that exposed him to operational excellence, service quality, and human dynamics even as India struggled through license raj and economic stagnation.

“I had the opportunity to obviously change a lot of schools, and grew up in different cities. I pretty much had a fairly privileged life from that standpoint. I wouldn’t say that we were very well off or anything, but we were very well taken care of. Ended up staying in hotels. Hotels, as you can imagine, in the pre-liberalization era were very luxurious places to live, especially five-star hotels. So 11 out of 18 years kind of been in five-star hotels, living and growing up there.”

The experience shaped him in ways that weren’t immediately obvious. He saw world-class operations in a third-rate economy. He experienced excellence in service while the country languished in mediocrity. He watched his father manage complex businesses—coordinating hundreds of employees, maintaining standards, delighting guests, turning around properties—in an environment of scarcity and constraint.

And he saw India wake up.

He was ten in 1991 when economic liberalization hit. Old enough to understand the national conversation, young enough to be shaped by it.

“I do remember it because there was a lot of chatter at that time. I was about 10 years old when that happened. They were saying things like — the country was broke. We didn’t have any dignity. The country was surviving on loans. I think our hand was forced to open up the economy, but the good news is that it was done thoughtfully.”

The transformation was immediate and dramatic. Foreign brands entered. Consumer goods proliferated. Telecom networks expanded. The middle class started to grow. Within a decade, India went from socialist stagnation to capitalist acceleration.

Verma absorbed the lesson: ideology bends to reality. Markets work when given room to operate. Constraints force innovation. And fortunes are made by those who see change coming before it arrives.

His first encounter with the internet came in 1995, at a cyber cafe in ITC Maurya, where his father worked.

“They opened up a cyber cafe, and there were these machines, which are Silicon Graphics machines, and they opened up a cyber cafe. It was one of the first in the country. Pages used to take forever to load, but it was just like a very, very fascinating thing to see. Yahoo and Excite, and all these websites. I used to sneak in there and try and use the internet as much as I could. We were staying in the hotel, so it was easier.”

That early exposure to the internet—before most Indians had even heard of it—planted a seed. This technology would change everything. Communication would be instant. Information would be free. Businesses would be built in ways that were impossible before.

His parents reinforced the tech exposure by buying the family a desktop computer in 1992—a PC with no internet connection, just floppy disks and basic software.

“It wasn’t that we had a lot of money, but my parents did go out of their way to buy a computer in the early 1990s. You look back at life and say that there’s so much that you have to be grateful for.”

By the time Verma went to Illinois Institute of Technology in 1999 for electrical and computer engineering, he was already primed to recognize technological inflection points. The dotcom boom was reaching its peak. Chicago, where he studied, was a hotbed of telecom and computer networks innovation—Motorola, Lucent, and the infrastructure companies building the backbone of the internet.

“It was a very different experience to see what the US and India was. US was far ahead. You could see the dotcom boom taking place in the ground central. Illinois Tech is a very strong school on the telecoms and computer networks side. A lot of activity was happening across Chicago because you had Motorola, Tellabs and Lucent there.”

He learned networking, RF planning, and systems architecture. He saw Cisco become the hottest company in the world as everyone raced to build internet infrastructure. He watched capacity get massively overbuilt, only to be utilized years later when applications finally caught up to infrastructure.

“Cisco was the hottest thing on earth in the early 2000s. It was seen to be the thing that will connect everything. Now you look at Cisco, it’s a shade of itself because people overbuilt capacity, which only got used by 2020 or 2018-19. Use cases and the internet just caught up much later.”

The future always takes longer to arrive than predicted, but it arrives with more force than anticipated.

He graduated in 2003, right as the dotcom bust was bottoming out. His first job was as a network architect for American Wireless Broadband in Chicago, designing wireless networks using Motorola’s Canopy platform—a precursor to WiMAX. From there, he moved to UTStarcom, working on triple play technology that combined voice, video, and data over a single network.

When he returned to India in 2005, telecom was exploding. Wireless adoption was accelerating. Airtel was expanding. Reliance was entering.

The country was leapfrogging developed markets by going straight to mobile, skipping the wireline infrastructure phase that had dominated the West.

Verma joined UTStarcom’s India operations, then moved to Ericsson in Gurgaon. At age 25, he became one of the youngest solutions architects at the company—the Swedish giant that was the Goldman Sachs equivalent of telecom.

“The first mobile phone I ever saw was an Ericsson. So I always thought I wanted to work with Ericsson.”

As a Solutions Architect, he was responsible for stitching together complex systems—combining products from multiple vendors to solve telecom operators’ problems. It was puzzle-solving at scale, requiring deep technical knowledge combined with business acumen and client management.

And it exposed him to venture capital.

Our telecom customers kept asking: Are these startups that you are partnering with for your solution venture-backed? Are they stable?

“That’s when I began developing a fascination with people investing in these companies. I understood the technology, but I also started learning about business and finance. That’s when I kind of began leaning toward wanting to get into venture capital.”

This was 2006-2007. Venture capital barely existed in India. There were only four or five active funds. Teams were small—three to five people. They all wanted McKinsey consultants or B-school graduates with years of strategy experience.

Verma had none of that. He had telecom expertise and technical chops. But he wanted in.

“Nobody teaches you the venture capital business. I had no people to get me in. I just applied to a few places. Nobody was wanting to look at this. There were only five, four or five funds at that point of time. The big funds all wanted people who had done their B school, had been in McKinsey for a few years and then wanted to get into VC.”

His entry point came through Reliance Ventures, the venture arm of Reliance Capital. He knew them from his telecom work—Reliance had been a client at both UTStarcom and Ericsson. When they started looking for people to join the venture team in early 2007, Verma applied.

“I joined as the second person on the venture team. We were doing proprietery balance sheet investing in startups.”

It was 2007. The global financial crisis was one year away. Telecom was still hot. And Verma was about to learn the venture business from the ground up.

His first deal tells you everything about his technical foundation: E-Band Communications, a San Diego-based company building wireless backhaul technology. Instead of running expensive fiber optic cables to cell towers, E-Band used millimeter wave frequencies to wirelessly transmit gigabits per second of data.

“They were connecting different cell sites so that you didn’t need to run fiber optics to them. Instead of running optic fiber from site to site, you could just wirelessly backhaul all the traffic from one side to the core. It’s a San Diego-based company. We put in $3 million, it was about a $7 million round.”

The deal combined everything Verma knew—wireless technology, telecom infrastructure, capital efficiency, and technical risk assessment. It validated his ability to evaluate early-stage companies in complex technical domains.

2008

Then the world collapsed.

The 2008 financial crisis led to a decline in telecom investing for years. Credit dried up. Operators stopped deploying. Equipment vendors struggled, and EBand’s first customer, Clearwire, declared bankruptcy. Reliance Ventures had to completely pivot away from telecom.

“Once 2007-2008, the global financial crisis happened, we had to completely change our focus from only telecom investing to investing in other spaces.”

The constraint forced generalization. Verma couldn’t just do telecom deals anymore. He had to learn consumer internet, ecommerce, software, fintech—everything.

The crash course in cross-sector evaluation shaped Verma’s philosophy. He learned that domain expertise matters less than you think. That understanding founders matters more than understanding markets. That first-principles thinking works across sectors.

Paytm

Paytm’s journey was long and volatile. Verma invested at Series B in late 2009 when the company was doing ₹260 crore in revenue with ₹32 crore in EBITDA as a value-added services business. The payments thesis was speculative—mobile broadband was nascent, smartphone adoption was low, and digital payments infrastructure barely existed.

But Vijay Shekhar Sharma had a vision:

“He wanted to do things like gaming eventually. But he said those things will not transact until you do not have payments. And then he had a thought process on how he will build payments and how he will build a wallet for doing that.”

Paytm went from a recharge utility to a payments giant. The company raised at increasingly high valuations, eventually going public in 2021 at ₹1.5 lakh crore market cap.

Between 2008 and 2010, Reliance backed Yatra, Paytm, Tessolve Semiconductor, GreenDust, Pelago (Sam Altman’s first company), Suvidha, and Scalable Display.

And he learned it fast. Because in early 2010, Reliance itself hit financial trouble. The parent company’s balance sheet came under strain. The venture business contracted. Verma had to look for his next move.

Building the Non-Consensus Portfolio

The call came in mid-2011.

Nexus Venture Partners was looking to expand the team. Founded by Naren Gupta, Suvir Sujan, and Sandeep Singhal, Nexus was small, entrepreneurial, and doing something different—cross-border investing, backing Indian companies that could operate globally.

Verma knew Reliance was contracting. He’d spent four years learning the business but needed a real platform. When he met the Nexus team, it felt right immediately.

“They were doing cross-border, which was something that I was doing at Reliance, and they were doing India consumption. Those were two broad things that I was very excited about, and it was a small team. I like working in small teams.”

He joined in August 2011. He would spend the next 13 years and two months there—long enough to build multiple fund cycles, long enough to see companies go from zero to unicorn, long enough to develop a reputation as the investor who would write checks when no one else would.

The Paytm bet at Reliance had already demonstrated his contrarian instincts. Now at Nexus, with more autonomy and a mandate to find the next generation of Indian startups, Verma would refine his approach into something systematic.

The methodology wasn’t complicated. Find exceptional founders. Understand what they’re trying to build. Assess whether the market will eventually pay for it. Determine if this specific person can execute and win. Ignore TAM calculations that assume static markets. Ignore sector themes that constrain thinking. Focus on first principles and founder quality.

This is the core of Verma’s methodology: back people who have demonstrated the capacity to execute, adapt, and win. Give them room to iterate. Don’t panic when plans change. Trust them to figure it out.

The alternative—waiting for proof, demanding traction, requiring revenue before investing—yields safer investments but lower returns.

“I’m investing in companies when there is no PMF. There’s no product even in some cases and several of them weren’t even incorporated at the time of deciding to invest. You look at the thought process of the founder. And then you work with the founder. You don’t try to impose your will there.”

His role is to ask questions, not give answers.

“Building a company is exceptionally hard,” he says simply.

“Who am I to tell a founder what to do? Founders are much smarter than most people. Many people do that because they think that, because they’re giving them money, they tell them what to do. My job is not to tell them what to do. My job is to ask the right questions. And my job is to get them to think and to be reactive 20% of the time. And otherwise sit back and let them do what they have to do if they are doing the right things.”

The 20% reactive, 80% hands-off ratio is revealing. Most VCs invert this—constantly advising, steering, and constantly trying to add value through intervention. Verma’s approach is different. He tries to back founders who don’t need babysitting. He asks strategic questions that force founders to think through critical decisions. But he trusts them to execute.

Postman

How many developers in 2014 would have paid for an API testing tool?

Ask any venture capitalist back then to calculate the TAM for an API testing tool—total addressable market—and you’d be told that there is no TAM. APIs were infrastructure, invisible plumbing that developers dealt with as part of their jobs. The idea that someone would pay specifically to test and document them seemed absurd.

Yet a young founder named Abhinav Asthana was building exactly that—a simple tool that made it easier to test APIs without writing complex curl scripts. The product was free. A simple Chrome extension. Nothing fancy. But every month, almost 250,000 developers were downloading it.

Most investors saw a nice developer tool with no monetization path. Sameer Brij Verma saw something entirely different.

“I did some work on XML when I was in college. I knew it was buggy and bulky. This whole framework of REST was coming up — and it was elegant, and it was going to be the future. It was very clear. There were early talks about microservices, and here was a tool that was getting adopted every month. It was a free tool, but it was very clear that there was an opportunity for a new development process to become commonplace because APIs are by their very nature the way in which software talks to each other.”

The technical insight mattered, but what mattered more was the founder.

“And here was a very young founder doing that and getting enormous amount of traction around it and he was thinking about a product. Abhinav was (and is) just a phenomenal founder—very ‘first principles’ guy.”

The question wasn’t whether developers (or their employers) would pay. The question was whether Asthana could figure out a way to monetize the value he was already creating. The usage validated the need. The founder validated execution. The market didn’t exist yet, but Verma bet it would.

He led Postman’s seed round in mid-2014, making Nexus Venture Partners its first institutional investor.

Today, at over $5.6 billion in valuation, Postman is essential infrastructure for millions of developers globally. The market Verma bet on in 2014 is now worth over $1.3 billion, and his firm’s early stake is worth exponentially more than the entry investment.

Licious

Verma’s respect for founders is shaped by how obsessed they can be with the problem statement they choose.

Verma invested in Licious, the fresh meat delivery platform, in July 2015. The founders—Abhay Hanjura from insurance and Vivek Gupta from finance—had zero meat industry background but were obsessed with transforming India’s meat market.

“I could see that consumption patterns would change and there would be a need to create a platform which would take this deeply unorganized business of meat selling and make it more convenient and organized,” Verma recalls.

Licious built a supply chain-first business. They sourced meat directly, processed it in ISO-certified facilities, and delivered it fresh within 90 minutes. The obsession with quality led them to become the second company in India to receive ISO certification for meat processing.

The key question: Why would someone pay Rs 180 per kilo for chicken when they could get it for Rs 110 from a local butcher?

The answer was trust.

Licious built retention rates of 65-70%. Today, the company does approximately Rs 500 crores in annual revenue and is on track to hit Rs 2,000 crores and go public within 15-18 months.

Jumbotail

This philosophy stems from witnessing journeys like Jumbotail, where Verma led the first $2 million investment in March 2016.

At the time, India’s Kirana market was massive but deeply unorganized. Kiranas serve 93-94% of retail, but the supply chain was labyrinthine—brands to wholesalers to distributors to stores. Co-founder Ashish Jhina, a third-generation farmer whose family exported apples, had worked at BCG on supply chain projects. His co-founder, Karthik Venkateswaran, had served as a major in the Indian Army before Stanford GSB.

“There was no company when we met them,” Verma remembers.

“Their very first hire was somebody we recommended to them, and they only got into business in July 2016 for all practical purposes.”

The strategy tested investor patience. For five years, Jumbotail focused exclusively on one city and category. No multi-city expansion until 2021. Meanwhile, Udaan raised massive capital, expanded to multiple cities, and got into 10-15 categories simultaneously.

“It wasn’t easy for them to raise money,” Verma admits.

“But the founders are a force of nature in many ways. They just dug in and fought every single day.”

While Udaan became a $3 billion company, Jumbotail stayed focused. They built the lowest-cost, most efficient supply chain in the country for Kirana distribution.

Today, Jumbotail serves over 500,000 Kirana stores across 50+ cities with 250,000-300,000 active customers. GMV is around $500-600 million. They recently became a unicorn. Several cities are already EBITDA profitable.

“It’s not been an easy journey,” Verma reflects.

“It was one of the toughest journeys I’ve personally seen for any company. But all the credit goes to the founders in terms of how they fought.”

Infra.Market

This pattern of betting on “impossible” businesses extends beyond the obvious.

In November 2019, when Verma met the founders of InfraMarket, most VCs recoiled at the pitch: a B2B platform for construction materials targeting infrastructure projects.

The company was doing just Rs. 5-6 crores per month. The industry was notorious—cement cartels, unorganized middlemen, government bureaucracy. When Verma brought the deal to Nexus’s investment committee, the response was predictable.

“They didn’t have an easy time raising money,” Verma recalls. “This is a very strange space. It’s a very difficult and deeply unorganised business.”

But Verma saw what others missed. Aaditya Sharda and Souvik Sengupta—25 and 26 years old then—brought deep domain expertise from working in construction. One was strong in finance; the other excelled in operations and sales. Their insight was that every building material operated as an independent value chain, and they could aggregate it all.

“They wanted to start with a few products and build a multi-product platform selling their own brands, which the large companies in the world were doing. But nobody in India was doing it,” Verma explains.

“Other companies started off as a single brand. These guys started off more as an aggregator and then basically going backwards in the value chain and actually manufacturing these products themselves as private labels.”

InfraMarket started with ready-mixed concrete and sand—unglamorous products forming the backbone of infrastructure developers. They became the single supply partner for infrastructure projects, aggregating demand and owning the end-to-end supply chain.

Today, InfraMarket is on track to do Rs 25,000 crores in revenue by 2027. FY26, they are on track to generate Rs 500+ crores in profits. They’re preparing to go public in early 2026. They’ve become the second-largest ready-mixed concrete player in India, the largest AAC block company, and the top-3 tile manufacturers.

From Rs 6-7 crores a month to Rs 25,000 crores annually—all while remaining profitable through almost their entire journey. The company lost money for exactly two months during COVID, then went right back to profitability.

“There’s nothing fancy about them,” Verma says about what makes B2B marketplaces work.

“It’s day-in, day-out execution. Relentless grind is the moat. Every single day, you need to get up and execute. Your supply chain has to be really efficient, your manufacturing has to be really efficient. And you have to use technology in the process really deeply and understand how credit works.”

Ultrahuman

Consider Ultrahuman’s improbable trajectory.

Mohit Kumar started with a concept for an Ironman-style fitness platform. Then COVID happened. The company pivoted to go online. Then pivoted again. And again. Eventually, Kumar landed on continuous glucose monitoring wearables for metabolic health, then expanded to smart rings for sleep and activity tracking.

Today, the company sells globally in 50+ countries, with India representing just a small fraction of revenue. From zero to north of ₹1,400-1,500 crore in annual revenue and profitable in approximately 5 years. The product competes directly with Oura Ring, one of the hottest consumer wearables in the West, and holds its own on features, design, and pricing.

The journey wasn’t linear. It was chaotic, messy, full of dead ends and restarts. But that’s precisely what Verma backs—not plans, but the capacity to navigate chaos.

“Mohit Kumar is, simply, an exceptional execution person,” Verma explains, breaking down what he saw.

“He built a company before this called Runnr, which I had seeded. It didn’t work out because it was a hyperlocal B2B logistics business. When you’re a B2B business, you need healthy enterprises doing business with you. Unfortunately, all the customers died once the hyperlocal crash happened in late 2015/early 2016. So Runnr eventually suffered. Mohit went and merged the company with Zomato for 5% equity, giving all of us investors a very good exit. And then he joind Zomato as part of the process, which was a classified business back then, and got it transform into a transaction-led business. And he came from much behind in November 2017 and beat out Swiggy in under 24 months.”

Pause on that history.

Kumar built a hyperlocal logistics company that failed due to market dynamics beyond his control. Instead of walking away, he manufactured an exit that returned capital to investors. Then he joined the company that acquired his business and helped transform it from a restaurant listing site into India’s dominant food delivery platform, beating a much better-capitalized and entrenched competitor in the process.

Those aren’t business outcomes. Those are character indicators.

This is what Verma backs: not business plans, but the capacity to execute under fire, to pivot without panic, to build when others would fold.

“The characteristics of building, of executing at scale, of coming from behind—those remain. Those are the attributes that you have to back.”

When Kumar left Zomato to start Ultrahuman, the initial concept was fitness for serious athletes. It wasn’t a massive market, but it was interesting. Then the pandemic hit, and everything changed. Kumar iterated. He tried multiple directions—home fitness, corporate wellness, and health tracking.

Nothing immediately worked.

But he kept moving. He explored continuous glucose monitors for tracking metabolic health. The Indian market was too small. He went global. He iterated on wearables, eventually landing on smart rings.

He got the timing right on a category that was just emerging. He built the product, the brand, and the distribution. Today, Ultrahuman operates in 50+ countries and has revenue approaching ₹1,500 crore while being profitable.

“Unless you know, and unless you can feel it, there’s no way to gauge it in the early days,” Verma reflects.

“People used to think this was a junk company. And everybody in the media used to say all these things. That’s fine. Everybody has their own prerogative.”

The media skepticism was real. When Ultrahuman first launched, tech journalists dismissed it as another wannabe fitness app. When the company pivoted to wearables, critics pointed to Apple and Fitbit as incumbents that couldn’t be beaten. Oura had already defined the category when they launched the ring and had a years-long head start.

Every rational analysis suggested Ultrahuman would fail. Verma ignored all of it. He had conviction in the founder’s ability to figure it out. And Gupta did.

This is the pattern that defines Verma’s portfolio. Find people with demonstrated capacity to execute, to adapt, to win against the odds. Back them when the idea is non-consensus. Give them room to iterate. Win massively when they crack it.

The alternative approach—waiting for product-market fit before investing, demanding TAM analyses that prove markets exist, requiring traction that validates business models—yields safer investments but lower returns. You’re buying into consensus at consensus prices. The investor has less ownership. The outcome, even if positive, is incremental rather than exponential.

Verma’s approach inverts this. High risk. High ownership early. Asymmetric returns.

Over 13 years at Nexus, this approach generated exceptional returns. The portfolio included some of the biggest outcomes in Indian venture capital. But the relationship with the platform was coming to an end.

Building Northpoint Capital

By 2024, Verma had spent 13 years and two months at Nexus Venture Partners. He’d invested across multiple fund cycles. He’d seen companies go from zero to several unicorns like Postman, Hasura, Infra.market, Unacademy, Jumbotail, and early leaders like Ultrahuman, Liquidnitro, and Rocketlane. He’d developed a reputation as the investor who would write the first check when everyone else passed.

While at Nexus, Verma had helped build one of the most contrarian portfolios in Indian venture capital—Postman, Ultrahuman, and dozens of other bets that started non-consensus and became inevitable.

“Was there a payment TAM in 2009? There was none. What is the TAM for API development? None, right? What was the fitness wearable TAM out of India? There was none.”

Now he wanted to do it again. From scratch. With his own vision. Or as Verma puts it:

“I want to build the Founders Fund of India.”

Founders Fund, started by PayPal mafia members including Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek, became famous for contrarian bets on seemingly impossible companies: SpaceX (private space travel), Palantir (government-scale data analysis), Airbnb (sleeping in strangers’ homes), and dozens of others that were ridiculed before becoming inevitable.

The throughline wasn’t sector—it was audacity. Founders Fund backed people attempting things that conventional wisdom said were impossible. They wrote checks when everyone else laughed. They stayed convinced through years of skepticism. And they won massively when reality caught up to vision.

More importantly, both understand the concept that became central to Thiel’s philosophy and Verma’s practice:

“Competition is for losers.”

The phrase comes from Zero to One, Thiel’s book on startups and innovation.

“That’s my favorite part,” Verma says about that chapter. When did he first read it? “When it came out”—2014, right in the middle of his most productive period at Nexus.

The philosophy is simple but radical: companies that succeed create monopolies, not by blocking competition but by building something so valuable that competition becomes irrelevant. If you’re competing on price or features with dozens of similar companies, you’re fighting for scraps. If you’re building something genuinely new, you’re creating a market where you’re the only player.

Markets get created by monopolists who build products so good that they define categories. Postman created the API development tools category. Paytm created India’s digital payments ecosystem. Ultrahuman is creating the metabolic health wearables category.

“To be non-consensus and right is the form of investing I want to do,” Verma says, articulating the core principle.

“Non-consensus bets means that they’re capital efficient because nobody else believes in it. So the founder has more room to innovate and solve the problem. And more importantly, once you solve the problem, money will come because you solve the problem.”

The logic is elegant. Non-consensus means cheap entry, high ownership, and room to build. Consensus arrival means validation, more capital, and higher valuations. The delta between non-consensus entry and consensus exit is where returns live.

But executing this strategy from a new platform is hard. At Nexus, Verma had 13 years of track record, portfolio companies that validated his judgment, and relationships with LPs who understood his approach. At Northpoint, he’s starting fresh.

“I’m a no-name, nobody,” he says with characteristic self-deprecation. “So my work is cut out.”

The assessment is both true and false. True in the sense that Northpoint is a first-time fund without established brand recognition. False in that Verma himself is well-known among India’s startup founders as the investor who backed them when no one else would.

His strategy for the first fund of $155M acknowledges the reality:

“I think the first one, you do it with more sorted companies. You do a mixture of more experienced founders and young founders. De-risk where possible while maintaining the core philosophy.”

The Indian market makes this even harder. Unlike Silicon Valley, where power law outcomes can return entire funds from a single investment, India hasn’t yet produced many hundred-bagger outcomes.

“I don’t think the size of outcomes are still at that power law would work in the traditional sense,” Verma says.

This means quality has to be distributed across more winners. You can’t rely on one SpaceX to carry the entire fund. You need four to six solid outcomes that each return multiples of the fund.

The challenge is finding them. And here Verma’s approach creates an edge. While other funds chase hot sectors with visible TAMs, he looks for founders attempting impossible things.

The Venture Business

Venture capital attracts smart people who are used to being the smartest person in the room. They pattern match, they cite frameworks, they lecture founders on strategy. Verma does the opposite. He recognizes that founders are smarter than investors about their businesses. His job isn’t to tell them what to do—it’s to ask questions that help them think more clearly.

“Who am I to tell a founder what to do? My job is not to tell them what to do. My job is to ask the right questions. And my job is to get them to think and to be reactive 20% of the time. And otherwise sit back and let them do what they have to do. My job is to provide an intellectual honesty framework for effective decision making.”

The 20/80 rule—20% active engagement, 80% trust—inverts how most VCs operate. It requires confidence in founder selection, discipline in intervention, and comfort with uncertainty.

It also requires intellectual honesty about what works.

“Nobody teaches you venture capital, enterprise building. Whatever they teach you doesn’t work. If it did work, Harvard Business School would be able to reinvent itself. They’re out of their depth right now. McKinsey is out of its depth.”

The shots at Harvard and McKinsey aren’t random. Both institutions represent credentialism, pattern matching, and consensus thinking—exactly what Verma rejects. Business schools teach frameworks that worked in the past. Consulting firms apply playbooks from established industries. Neither approach works for zero-to-one innovation.

“The world is working with people who are supremely high-quality generalists and people who understand things, learn very fast with very steep learning curves and can look at things, look at the truth very, very clearly. They understand the truth, but they also are dreamers. So you have to live in a world of contradictions all the time. That’s what venture is. That’s what entrepreneurs are.”

The entrepreneurs he backs can hold two opposing views simultaneously. They’re pragmatic dreamers, grounded visionaries, disciplined risk-takers. They see reality clearly while believing in seemingly impossible futures. They pivot without panicking, iterate without losing conviction, and execute while adapting.

Finding these people is hard. Supporting them through the journey from ridicule to inevitability is harder. But that’s the job Verma has chosen. Again.

What matters more than fund size is deployment discipline.

“I don’t want capital to be a competitive advantage,” Verma insists. “The team and the execution, the platform, the product is great, then money will chase you.”

This philosophy runs counter to the capital arms race that defines modern venture. Funds raise bigger vehicles to write bigger checks to win competitive deals. Verma inverts this—he wants to be in deals where capital isn’t the differentiator, where the founder has room to build without constant pressure to deploy raised capital.

“Non-consensus bets means that they’re capital efficient because nobody else believes in it. So the founder has more room to innovate and solve the problem.”

The LPs backing Northpoint understand this approach.

The fund has raised from global LPs—“leading endowments and foundations and fund-of-funds,” Verma says. They have long-term horizons.

His expected win rate reflects this:

“If you’re a good investor, out of ten, four will work. If you’re a great investor, five will work. If you’re an exceptional investor, six will work. But you will have fatality. You need to have the stomach to absorb losses and take bold risks early.”

In India’s market, that means each winner needs to generate 5-10X to deliver overall fund returns of 3-5X.

It’s achievable but demanding. Unlike Silicon Valley, where one SpaceX can return an entire fund several times over, India requires distributed success across multiple portfolio companies.

“I don’t think the size of outcomes is still at that point where power law would work in the Silicon Valley sense,” Verma notes.

This makes founder selection even more critical.

This is different from Silicon Valley, where one investment can return an entire fund. Facebook returned Accel’s 2005 fund multiple times over. Uber returned Benchmark’s fund a few times over. Airbnb returned Sequoia’s fund a few times over. In India, those mega-outcomes haven’t materialized at the same scale yet.

“Even Sequoia Capital, which is one of the greatest funds in the world, 50% of the companies just don’t work out,” Verma notes.

“People misunderstand the asset class and the media currently does a poor job — like feeding on a founder’s miseries when things go south.”

The media criticism is unusually sharp for Verma. But it reflects a broader frustration with how Indian business journalism covers startups. Every failure gets dissected as a moral failing. Every layoff triggers think pieces about bubble dynamics. Every pivot gets framed as an admission of defeat.

This creates a risk-averse culture antithetical to innovation.

“If you’re just going to criticize every failure, nobody will try anything different.”

The observation is particularly relevant given Verma’s portfolio—companies like Ultrahuman that pivoted multiple times before finding product-market fit would have been written off as failures by media standards.

Supply Chain Moat - On Marketplaces and Brands

The question of brands versus marketplaces is particularly relevant for Verma, considering his experience backing them over the years. But in Verma’s mind, the differentiation boils down to how effectively a company can leverage its supply chain.

When Zepto attempted to launch their own meat business, they shut it down and returned to selling Licious. Why? Because fresh meat requires a supply chain excellence that a horizontal marketplace can’t easily replicate.

“Their business is not going into the supply chain of specific products,” Verma explains about quick commerce platforms.

“They’re trying to be everything for everyone. You have to invest in the brand. Otherwise, people will not buy it.”

The distinction matters: frequent-purchase commodities versus quality-premium planned purchases. Groceries, soap, toothpaste—marketplaces can win on convenience and price. But premium rice, craft spirits, quality meat, and premium luggage—customers want brands they trust.

“A category manager in an e-commerce company cannot invest and do all this stuff at the same level the way a company like Licious can,” Verma says. “The grunt is the moat.”

Therein lies the difference between B2B and B2C marketplaces, Verma explains.

“In B2B, there will be verticalized supply chains. So an Infra.Market can focus on specific products in their supply chain to build their private labels.”

In B2C, a single customer might buy a phone today, groceries tomorrow, and stationery next week. But in B2B, it’s one-to-one mapping. A Kirana doesn’t buy sarees or electronics—they buy food and groceries, and that’s their entire business.

“They’re running their business on you,” Verma says.

“They have a good amount of wallet share. They’re depending on you to sell through. So it’s a different need. And they only buy that one category.”

The AI Opportunity

On AI—the sector consuming infinite investor attention and capital—Verma is bullish on recomposition, skeptical of wrapper companies.

“The big foundational labs are going to win big,” he says bluntly.

“Everybody is competing with them. Everybody is building on top of them. The worst mistake is to be building on top of them in some ways and discovering very large markets. Unless you’re completely recomposing a business by itself end-to-end, just building something on top is just not going to be good enough.”

His focus is on companies using AI to fundamentally transform industries, including legal services, healthcare delivery, physiotherapy, and practice management.

“You take a business, any business in today’s market, and you’re changing that business completely using AI. That is not what OpenAI is going to do. They’re going to become a lowest common denominator platform.”

The example he uses is Harvey, the legal AI platform:

“Potentially taking a legal firm and completely changing how the workflow of a legal firm should work. And they’re using AI for doing that. OpenAI is not going to do that. OpenAI is not going to become an end-to-end legal firm.”

The distinction matters. Building a chatbot that answers legal questions using <insert LLM name> is a feature. Rebuilding how law firms intake clients, manage cases, research precedents, draft documents, and bill clients using AI is a business. One gets commoditized when LLMs launch new features. The other builds defensibility through workflow integration and proprietary data.

“You take a business and you recompose it with AI. You make it completely different and much more efficient with AI. There is an opportunity to transform any business.”

The India opportunity in AI, he believes, is in enterprise customization—taking general AI capabilities and embedding them in specific workflows.

“Every enterprise is different from the other. We Indians are smart people who can take and customize every business with AI. And that’s what we do with IT services. That’s what we’ve done for more than three decades now.”

The reference to India’s $200 billion IT services industry is telling. The country built that sector on exactly this capability: understanding complex business processes, codifying them, and improving them through technology. The AI era demands the same skill set, applied faster and more radically.

The Decade Ahead

Sameer Brij Verma likes zigging while others zag.

“Everybody says they want to back dreamers. What they end up backing is a US copy,” he says, describing the broader market.

The criticism is pointed. Most Indian VCs claim to want contrarian bets but gravitate toward validated models. Uber for X. Airbnb for Y. Netflix for Z.

Verma’s portfolio proves otherwise. There was no US comp for Postman when he invested—the company created a category. There was no Oura Ring playbook for Ultrahuman—they built in parallel. Paytm’s payments play preceded most developed market super-apps. Infra.market is a truly unique platform globally. Jumbotail started the whole eB2B wave globally in 2015.

The question isn’t whether exceptional founders attempting impossible things exist in India. They do. The question is whether Verma can find them before anyone else does, back them with conviction when everyone else laughs, and support them through the years of skepticism before validation arrives.

His track record suggests he can. Now he’s doing it again. From zero. With Northpoint.

“If I do my job well, I need to invest in six solid companies a year,” he says.

“I think there are six companies getting created every year that are exceptional. Am I able to find them and be in business with them? That’s my job. It’s as simple as that.”

If you have an interesting idea and want to connect with Northpoint Capital, reach out to us with your idea at banjan@tal64.com

What have we managed to achieve these last few months?

For me, the core idea of attempting to build a platform of stories around company builders was to check if we could a) create value anew, b) do value addition.

Today, you can buy and sell stocks in a second on a discount brokerage app of your choice. Fund managers are inundated with pitches from hopeful entrepreneurs. Data is available at your fingertips via screens and pitch decks.

While now there is no shortage of outlets publishing data, would stories contextualizing the data be enough of a value add for both the company and its investors beyond just the numbers on a screen/pitch deck?

Some of my core motivations were the following brilliant companies, especially their origin stories:

• Reuters (approx revenue $7B)

• Morningstar (approx revenue $2.5B)

• The Motley Fool (not sure about the revenue)

• Seeking Alpha (not sure about the revenue)

I think it boils down to a couple of ideas: a) new value is created by creating connections, b) value can be added by laying context to the connection.

To that end, I have attempted to do storytelling around sample sizes of a) startups, b) mature private companies, and c) publicly listed companies. I have also attempted to interview a few investors (yet to be published).

Our approximate Gross Transaction Value so far has inched past $2.5M.

In the beginning, I thought it made a lot of sense that we attract all sorts of readers. Last few months, I have tried not to promote the website publicly to avoid attracting a non-investing crowd. Both approaches have resulted in interesting data points that I am deliberating on.

I haven’t started scaling the content output yet. I will wait a bit before investing in talented writers and media professionals. (Open to interviewing, though).

But the learnings so far, dear reader, have been immense. Thank you for the opportunity to serve you.

This is a one-of-its-kind zero-cash transaction, where Wagr’s investors and founding team have joined the FPL group as equity partners, demonstrating their confidence in the company’s vision and commitment to building the next-generation pet care ecosystem.

tal64.com advised Fredun Pharmaceuticals on the transaction.

India’s First Neutral Pet Marketplace

Unlike existing e-commerce platforms that either lack pet-specific focus or promote proprietary brands, the FPL-Wagr platform provides an unbiased marketplace for new-age pet brands and established brands alike.

FPL’s strategic positioning in functional food, wet food, and prescription food categories—with no presence in dry food, biscuits, or other commodity segments—enables the company to maintain complete neutrality while hosting competing brands.

Critically, all sales transacted through the platform, regardless of brand, will be registered under Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited’s revenue, creating a unified commerce ecosystem that benefits the entire pet care industry.

Comprehensive Support System for Pet Parents

The integrated platform addresses the needs of India’s burgeoning community of new pet parents through multiple support channels:

On-Demand Telemedicine (launching within 6-9 months): Through Wagr’s existing app infrastructure, pet parents can access a “Practo-style” veterinary consultation system, selecting from online doctors for 15-minute video consultations. The platform features seamless payment integration and has already facilitated over 11,000 consultations.

Pan-India Doctor Network (launching within 6-9 months): A comprehensive network connecting pet parents with veterinary professionals across the country, complemented by specialized educational programs designed for veterinary professionals to enhance their knowledge and service delivery.

AI-Powered Pet Care: The platform features Toto, the world’s first AI pet care chatbot, which has answered over 10,000 questions, providing personalized, real-time advice to pet parents.

Revolutionary Fitness Technology

Building on Wagr’s pioneering work as India’s first GPS and fitness tracker for dogs (launched in 2019), FPL will reintroduce patented fitness tracking technology for pets in FY 2026-27.

Like human fitness bands and smartwatches, these innovative devices will enable pet parents to monitor their pets’ health metrics, activity levels, and overall wellness in real-time. The hardware has been field-tested with hundreds of pets across India, and the technology has proven reliable in diverse environmental conditions, from urban apartments to rural farmlands.

• Real-time GPS location tracking using 4G SIM connectivity

• Advanced activity monitoring through WiFi and motion sensors

• AI-powered fitness analytics that track resting, active, and playing states

• Compact, pet-friendly design with durable collar attachment system

• Seamless app integration for real-time data visualization

Fredun Medhora, MD of Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited, stated:

“FPL’s long-term vision is that every pet in India should be using a FPL product or service. This strategic acquisition represents a transformative moment for the Indian pet care industry. By combining our deep expertise in pet nutrition with Wagr’s proven technology platform and user base, we’re creating something unprecedented a truly neutral marketplace that serves the entire ecosystem while providing comprehensive support to pet parents. Our vision extends beyond commerce; we’re building a complete support system for India’s growing community of pet parents, with 24/7 veterinary access, AI-powered guidance, and cutting-edge fitness tracking technology.”

“What makes this particularly powerful is our unique positioning. Because FPL doesn’t compete in categories like dry food or biscuits, we can genuinely serve as a neutral platform, hosting all major brands while ensuring that every transaction regardless of brand contributes to our ecosystem’s growth. This is the future of pet care commerce in India.”

Siddharth Darbha, Co-founder, Wagr, commented: “Wagr has always stood for trusted, compassionate pet care. With Fredun Pharma’s decades of expertise and deep commitment to wellness, that promise will now touch many more pet families.”

Advaith Mohan, Co-founder, Wagr, commented: “Building Wagr has been a journey of love for pets and trust from their parents, and seeing it grow under Fredun Pharma feels like sending it off to an even bigger family.”

Transaction Structure

The transaction structure is the first-of-its-kind in India’s pet care industry, featuring a zero-cash acquisition by FPL.

In this strategic arrangement, Wagr’s investors and founding team have joined the FPL group as equity partners, demonstrating their confidence in the company’s vision and commitment to building the next-generation pet care ecosystem.

Rather than taking an exit, Wagr’s original investors and founders have chosen to remain actively involved as long-term partners, reinforcing their belief in the combined potential of FPL and Wagr. FPL, in turn, has structured the deal to channel future investments directly into business expansion, innovation, and technological enhancement, ensuring that the partnership drives sustainable growth in India’s rapidly evolving veterinary and pet wellness sector.

Strategic Rationale

Wagr, after 8 years of R&D, lacked the resources and scalability to sustain independent operations despite having strong technology and market presence.

Rather than liquidation, a strategic restructuring was designed in partnership with Fredun Pharmaceuticals to maximize value for all stakeholders, which had:

• Aligned interests in the pet care sector

• Deep financial resources provided by Fredun Pharmaceuticals

• Robust manufacturing capabilities of Fredun Pharmaceuticals

New Ownership Structure

Following the transaction, the ownership structure of Wagr is as follows:

• Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited (via subsidiary): 78% equity stake.

• Original Wagr Shareholders and Other Investors: 20% equity stake, comprising IvyCap Ventures, IPV Ventures, Wagr Founders, and other investors.

• tal64.com: 2% equity stake.

This structure represents a collaborative and future-focused ownership model, aligning FPL, Wagr’s founders, and investors toward a unified vision of innovation, growth, and long-term value creation in India’s dynamic pet care industry.

Asset Acquisition Details

The acquisition encompasses Wagr’s comprehensive asset portfolio from its founders and investor group, which includes IvyCap Ventures, Inflection Point Ventures, Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs, and prominent angel investors, including Nitin Sharma (Co-head India, Antler, First Principles), Ashish Sharma (CEO, Innoven Capital, ex-President, GE Capital), and others.

Key Assets Acquired:

• Wagr brand, trademark, and intellectual property

• Patented Wagr hardware technologies

• Complete software suite (apps, backend systems, firmware)

• User database of 140,000+ pet parents

• Website (wagr.ai) with 6,000 organic monthly visitors and 10+ million lifetime SEO impressions

• Social media presence with 10,000+ followers

• Established relationships with 70+ pet care product brands

• Existing contracts with 20 veterinarians

Platform Performance Metrics

The combined platform brings impressive operational capabilities:

• 140,000+ registered pet parents

• 4.7/5 app rating

• 16,000+ transactions (veterinary consultations and e-commerce)

• 10,000,000+ organic impressions in 12 months

• 1,000+ products available from 70+ brands

• 11,000+ teleconsultations completed with 76 Net Promoter Score

• 5,000+ orders shipped with a 75 Net Promoter Score

Market Opportunity

India’s pet care industry is experiencing explosive growth, with a 22% CAGR projected from $1 billion (2021) to $6 billion (2030). The market encompasses:

• Products: $900 million (pet food, treats, accessories, supplements, consumables)

• Health: $250 million (veterinary care, diagnostics, pharma, insurance)

• Services: $200 million (grooming, boarding, training, walking, live animal sales)

With 20 million pets in India and the number of new pet parents expected to increase significantly over the next decade, the timing is ideal for a comprehensive, technology-enabled pet care solution.

Awards and Recognition for Wagr

Wagr’s technology platform has received significant industry recognition:

• Winner of Qualcomm Design In India program (selected from 300+ startups, $90,000 in grants)

• World’s first 4G pet wearable

• Featured at CES 2020 in Las Vegas

• Early pioneer of veterinary telehealth in India (2021)

• Launched the world’s first AI pet care chatbot (2023)

• Best Product Debut Award at India’s largest pet festival

Read the story of Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited:

The Fredun Story

Safe Harbor Statement: This story may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those projected.

"The path to profit in India involves identifying your aspirational customer because that’s where a gap exists between your costs and the price the customer pays. You need to position yourself within that zone."

"In India, the purchasing power is still limited. We wanted to make a brand for the aspirational segment."

FY2025 Performance:

• Revenue: ₹721.1 crores (17% growth Y-o-Y)

• EBITDA: ₹205 crores (26% growth Y-o-Y)

• Net Profit: ₹74.8 crores (20% growth Y-o-Y)

• Stores: 600+ across 289 cities in 20 states

• Retail Space: 7.85 lakh+ square feet

• Employees: 5,000+

This is the extraordinary story of Cantabil—a company that survived a 90% stock price crash, emerged debt-free, and continues to grow at 20% annually. But more than a business success story, this is a testament to how traditional values of hard work, honesty, and smart execution can build lasting enterprises in modern India.

It is also a testament to the razor-sharp mind that Vijay is blessed with.

A kirana store

"I belong to Jind, Haryana," Vijay Bansal begins.

"I would come home from school, put my school bag aside, and then go to the shop. I worked there for an hour or two, then come back home. During festivals, I had to spend more time there. This is how I learned."

After completing his B.Com in 1979, Vijay naturally gravitated toward the family business. The family shop was a typical general store in a small district.

"After graduation, naturally, I knew that I had to work in our family shop."

"Jind was not a village—it was a district in Haryana, a small district with a population of one lakh or so at the time. The shop itself was around 700-800 square feet, selling dal, sugar, soap, etc."

But young Vijay had bigger dreams.

"When a person finishes education and becomes young, he sees new dreams. My father made a small workspace for me and told me to work from there. Then I started working on accounts and learned accounting."

Moving up the value chain

What happened next would shape Vijay's entire business philosophy. His approach was methodical and aggressive.

"Gradually, I became interested in agencies and business. Because of our products, I got interested in distribution."

"My entrepreneurial journey began with securing the distribution rights for Haryana Dairy Development. This was soon followed by associations with the National Tobacco Company, Tarzan Bidi, Dalmia Biscuits, Colgate, Amul, and Nirma. Each successive venture deepened my engagement with the distribution ecosystem and gradually nurtured a strong interest in building scalable business operations."

Vijay's growth strategy was simple but relentless.

"I proactively reached out to companies every day, expressing our intent to take on distributorship opportunities in untapped markets," he recalls.

"As our performance began to speak for itself, our ambitions expanded—we saw potential in marketing-led growth. That’s when we pivoted to intensive, city-wide door-to-door retailing, operating tirelessly from 10 AM to 9 PM, determined to build a deeper consumer connect."

This hands-on experience became his business education.

"While doing retailing with these companies, I learned marketing through practical experience. We worked with big companies—Colgate, National Tobacco, Amul, Nirma, Nippo Batteries, Stepan Chemical. We had distribution agencies for 30-40 companies. While working with them, I gained such valuable experience—I don’t think an MBA can teach you that."

Learning vertical integration

The transition from distribution to manufacturing came through relationships built in the agency business. A friend from Dalmia Biscuits suggested that Vijay start manufacturing biscuits.

In 1981, Vijay and his partners acquired one acre of land and applied for financing. But when Haryana Finance Corporation's inspectors arrived, they delivered sobering advice:

"The biscuit factories in Haryana are many. There will be intense competition. We don't recommend setting up a biscuit factory."

Vijay took that as a cue and began to search for other ideas.

"My brother-in-law, our partner, told us to start a cottonseed oil manufacturing business. He had a relative in Yamuna Nagar who knew the business. I decided to take his help and get into it."

The initial venture was a disaster.

"We suffered losses. My father told me to stop the factory. He said, ‘We could pay the loan EMI from our shop income. The shop income was good, and the work was stable. You should stop the factory operations.’"

They shuttered the operation, but Vijay saw an opportunity in seasonal demand a few months later as winter arrived.

"After 4-6 months, winter came. Mustard oil demand comes in winter. We got an idea to try once again. Instead of cottonseed, we manufactured mustard oil in the factory."

"Within that winter, we got a profit of ₹1 lakh in 2-3 months, and this is in 1981."

The results were dramatic.. This was 1981—Rs 1 lakh would be worth Rs 21.5 lakhs today (inflation-adjusted).

Success led to expansion and vertical integration. Vijay started understanding the compounding that occurs via value addition.

"I started learning the method of value addition and moving further up the value chain. We started trading oil. People used to buy oil in drums. We had large storage tanks for oil. Using big tankers with 15,000 kg capacity, we started selling to oil mills and refineries. So we started with oil manufacturing, and now we were into oil trading as well."

Having a business-oriented family certainly helped.

"We were two brothers. My elder brother, Suresh Bansal, used to look after the oil business more. I used to look after the distribution agency and retailing business more."

Building partnerships

In 1986, another opportunity emerged.

"My brother's friend, Chaudhary, already had a Liberty Agency in Jind. He was in touch with the company. He proposed the Delhi opportunity to the company—at Connaught Place."

The investment was significant.

"He said there would be an investment of ₹2 lakh. Our income was so good that ₹2 lakh was manageable. We thought that for ₹2 lakh, we could get a shoe shop in Connaught Place, which is a very prestigious location."

Vijay also thought partnering with someone who understands this business better made sense.

"We became partners with Chaudhary—we got 60%, he got 40%."

"I divided my 60% share as well — I gave 30% of our 60% to my brother-in-law. He had completed his MA and was available. I brought him to Delhi."

The showroom's financials were modest but stable.

"We didn’t earn very high income from that showroom, but it did provide me with a profit of about ₹1 lakh per year, while my brother-in-law also earned ₹1 lakh. During that time, we were able to rent a house, maintain a car, and manage our yearly expenses of around ₹1–2 lakh."

Zips and Buttons

The entry into garment accessories came through a chance conversation.

"A relative of my brother-in-law had come from Kolkata. During our conversation, he said that the Jindals have started a factory making fasteners that are used in pants."

Intrigued, Vijay investigated. The meeting with the Jindal family was initially discouraging. The Jindals had good reason for skepticism.

"Mr. Shiv Ram Jindal, along with Mr. Ravindra Jindal, had started this factory. They called us for a meeting. We went to see them. I told them I wanted to become a distributor in Delhi.

They said, ‘You are a small business, not suitable for you. You won't be able to make it work.’"

"They had another distributor in Sadar Bazaar in Delhi who had a family business of selling zip buttons. They had a network. We were new here."

But Vijay's confidence from his distribution experience was unshakeable.

"I had confidence from my distribution agency experience that I could sell any product. I assured them I would pay money in advance. If we sell the product, fine. If we don't sell it, we won't return it. Even if we have to throw the product away, it won't be your responsibility."

His bold guarantee worked.

"He loved it. He said, ‘You don't have to give me any money in advance. I am making you a distributor’."

How to sell: Sell to the customer’s customer

"In our initial efforts to enter the garment accessories market, we began by approaching wholesalers in Sadar Bazar to sell zippers. We expanded our outreach to other leading wholesale hubs such as Ahmedabad, Surat, Mumbai, and Baroda."

"While the early response from wholesalers was tepid, these interactions provided valuable insights into market dynamics and helped us better understand the needs of the supply chain."

"Despite our persistent efforts, the business strategy failed to gain the expected momentum, and the venture ultimately did not succeed. This initial setback, though disheartening, offered critical lessons and deeper exposure to the operational intricacies of the industry."

Amid early setbacks, Vijay’s brother-in-law contemplated exiting the venture. But Vijay, drawing upon his prior experience in tobacco distribution, arrived at a pivotal insight.

"I recalled how, during my time with National Tobacco, we would introduce new cigarette brands by offering complimentary packets to pan shop owners. Once customers began purchasing them, the demand naturally compelled wholesalers to come on board,” he explains."

This reflection led to a strategic shift:

“I realized that in the case of zippers, the actual demand drivers were not wholesalers, but tailors—the true end users."

"So, instead of waiting for wholesalers to show interest, we decided to engage directly with tailors, allowing market demand to pull wholesalers into the supply chain organically."

The solution was elegantly simple.

"I provided a zip to a salesman, created a route plan for him, and directed him to approach the tailors. The zip was sold at ₹50 each, and by the end of the day, he had sold 10 pieces — earning a total of ₹500."

Success with one salesman led to immediate scaling.

"The next day, I made route plans for 5 other salesmen. First, I gave samples. Then they took zips to tailors and gave them zips and took cash payment."

The results were spectacular.

"With 10 salesmen each earning ₹500 from zip sales, I made ₹5,000 in one day. All the remaining zip inventory was cleared in one day. That's incredibly fast inventory turnover."

Vijay immediately expanded the model across cities by working with his family members.

"I also helped relatives who were in Jaipur, Lucknow, Bombay. I told them the same pattern. I told them to sell to tailors, and they succeeded."

"We had sales of ₹30,000 per day. The production of the company was not sufficient for us. Then we realized that the more volume we sell, the more profit we made. I used to sell for ₹30,000 per day. In a month, we earned ₹1.5-2 lakhs in profits."

When the Jindals introduced polyester buttons, Vijay promptly added them to his distribution portfolio.

"When the polyester button was introduced, it was sold as a Taiwanese product. In India, it used to be called the Urea button. Normally, the shirt button used to break. But the quality of polyester buttons is higher—they are also dyeable, look shiny, and don't break."

The same pattern repeated with the buttons business. Vijay's low-margin, high-volume strategy was deliberate.

"My theory was: once you generate volume, profit will automatically follow. Since we were new, we had to create volume first and establish our market presence."

By this time, Vijay had substantial profits from the zips and buttons business.

"I had zip business worth ₹2-3 lakhs in annual profits. I had a button business worth ₹3-4 lakhs in annual profits. In this way, I started earning a profit of ₹6-7 lakhs. In those days, the value of ₹6-7 lakhs was substantial." (Editor: It is worth approximately Rs 1.6 crores today)

More value addition to move further up the value chain

A friend's introduction led to his entry into garment retail.

"My friend's uncle told me he could get me a distributorship for TNG, which was a garment brand. He took me there. Initially, my conversation with Mr. Dwarka didn't go well. Two days later, he suddenly called me and said, 'Vijay, you are a very dynamic person. You should become a garment distributor in Delhi."

Vijay saw this as an opportunity to diversify while maintaining his core business. Working with TNG for several years gave him crucial insights into the garment retail business.

"I liked this business of garments. I thought that it had a good margin. At that time, we used to put MRP of 2.5-3 times the cost."

The birth of Cantabil

In the year 2000, Vijay secured a retail space in Delhi’s prominent Rajouri Garden locality, envisioning it as a premium outlet for TNG garments, for which he was already a distributor in the region. Wasting no time, he contacted the TNG & to his surprise, the brand declined his proposal, stating that the retail rights for that area would be granted to another party.

"I had entered into the lease with full conviction,” he recalls.

"When they declined permission to retail TNG products at the location, I respectfully conveyed that the store would open regardless, and I would find a way forward."

It was at that crossroads that inspiration struck.

Flipping through a dictionary one evening, he unexpectedly landed on an Italian page. A particular word caught his eye: Cantabile—meaning "suitable for singing."

"The word had a lyrical quality and a distinctly global resonance,” he reflects. "I felt it carried both elegance and universality."

With a slight modification—dropping the final 'e'—the name Cantabil was born, marking the beginning of what would soon become a pan-India fashion brand.

In the early days, the Rajouri Garden showroom showcased a curated mix of popular fashion labels such as Dash, Nadiya, Kairo, and Vans. Notably, there was no apparel bearing the name Cantabil.

"I began to question—why not create and retail garments under our own brand? We initiated the production of apparel under the Cantabil label and gradually phased out all third-party brands from the store. We made a deliberate decision to build our own identity—complete control over design, quality, and customer experience."

"By 2007-08, there were 300 Cantabil stores. We launched another brand called Lafenso and scaled this new brand to 200 stores. Together, the two brands accounted for a robust retail network of 500 stores and an impressive revenue of ₹200 crore. This growth trajectory culminated in a successful IPO, with shares priced at ₹135, raising ₹105 crore and establishing a market capitalization of approximately ₹210 crore."

When Everything Collapsed

The post-IPO honeymoon was short-lived and brutal.

"In 2012, retail in India started declining. Our share price started going down. It became ₹15 from ₹135. More than 90% fall. It was brutal."

The market conditions were devastating for mid-segment retail brands.

"In those days, no mid-segment companies survived. Like Lilliput, Cottons, Vishal, TNG—all retail brands were shut down."

"In 3 years, we had losses of ₹70 crores. In 2013, 2014, 2015."

Public perception was that the company would not survive.

"At that time, the whole world was thinking the company would close. Coming out of that and surviving the headwinds was a big challenge. At that time, our own people were saying that if the company were in the loss, then it would be destroyed. It would be closed."

Confidence

During the most financially challenging period of his entrepreneurial journey, Vijay chose transparency and accessibility over evasion—a rare trait in times of crisis, displaying grace under pressure.

“Those were difficult days,” he reflects.

“Cash flow was constrained, liabilities were mounting, and payment commitments were pending. The pressure was intense, and the phone calls relentless. Yet, I made it a point to answer every call. I listened patiently, acknowledged the concerns, and assured them of repayment. The conversations were honest, and that honesty often gave people reassurance.”

Unlike many who retreat into silence during such times, Vijay faced the situation head-on.

“If someone came to collect dues, I met them personally and communicated with clarity. I wanted to ensure that no one ever felt I had vanished or was avoiding responsibility.”

Even amid immense stress, his belief in the eventual turnaround remained unshaken.

“I had an inner conviction that I would steer the business back on track. I put my faith in persistent effort, and with divine grace, I emerged stronger.”

"We put the company in correction mode. We understood our mistakes and made the required corrections.. We enhanced product quality, enhanced the visual appeal of showrooms, stopped loss-making showrooms, and controlled discount strategies."

"We consolidated our stores and reduced them from 500 to 150—all Cantabil only stores."

Focus on Quality

The challenges of the downturn prompted a critical re-evaluation of Cantabil’s business philosophy.

"We learned an important lesson," Vijay reflects.

"In earlier phases, the business leaned heavily on aggressive discounting—product quality and brand positioning often took a back seat. But we came to realize that long-term value creation required us to build aspiration, not just affordability."

This shift in thinking coincided with a broader transformation in consumer behavior.

"The Indian middle class was evolving—becoming more discerning, ambitious, and style-conscious,” Vijay observed. “Tastes were maturing, and expectations around quality and design were rising steadily."

In response, Cantabil undertook a focused repositioning strategy. The brand prioritized product quality, refined its aesthetics, rationalized discounting, and optimized retail operations.

"We retained only profitable stores or brought them to breakeven. Visual merchandising was enhanced, and operational inefficiencies were systematically addressed. The result was encouraging—customers responded positively, and profitability returned."

This phase marked a new beginning—a strategic reboot that laid the foundation for sustained growth.

"Gradually," Vijay says, "the business stabilized, and momentum returned."

The financial turnaround was remarkable.

"For the past 7 years, my growth is 20% CAGR. In March 2021, we became 100% debt-free."

"This year (FY24-25), our sales is ₹720+ crores. Last year it was ₹616 crores. Last year our profit was ₹63 crores. This year our profit is ₹75 crores."

"Net profit is approximately 11%. EBITDA is 28%."

Product-Channel Fit

Cantabil has shrewdly chosen to focus on owning the customer experience and customer service part of the value chain. Vijay lists some numbers out:

"Right now, we have 600 stores. Approximately 50% customers are repeat customers, 50% are new customers. About 1.5 lakh bills per month across all stores—this translates to daily sales of ₹2 crores approximately at the moment."

"35% is the retailing cost—rent, salary, electricity, all together plus GST. My gross profit is 57%."

"We have no debt, no debtors. Cash is deposited from each store the next day, or at least in the same week. I have only inventory where our cash is invested for working capital."

"22-23% of stores of the 600 stores are franchises. The rest are company-owned stores. For us, considering our market and our experiences so far, I believe having a very good control over the customer experience and service quality via our own stores makes a lot more sense."

Cantabil's retail model has inherent cash flow advantages that Vijay leverages effectively.

The franchise model is tightly controlled.

"Even if I have a franchise, the stock they have is on consignment. The stock is mine. I have taken security from them. The amount that was sold today will be deposited in the bank the next day."

Digital sales are growing.

"This year, digital will be ₹45 crores out of ₹720+ crores. Last year it was ₹34 crores. 50% is on Myntra, then Flipkart, Amazon, and our own site."

However, Vijay is wary of over-relying on online marketplace economics.

"These sites are taking such a big commission that online is becoming more expensive than offline. If I add their commission and returns, it comes to 37%. Offline is 35%. So there's no advantage really, and in comparison, I get to engage my customer better offline and deliver excellent service which builds brand equity."

Operational Metrics

• Average Basket Value: ₹4,014

• Average Selling Price: ₹1,051

• Same Store Sales Growth: 3.97% (FY25)

• Customer Repeat Rate: ~50%

• Online Sales: 6.2% of total revenue, targeting 8-10%

Position in the Market <> Profit Pools

The eye-opening aspect of Vijay Bansal’s experience of learning the retail business is the following insight that he shared about how to construct a profitable value proposition.

"The path to profit in India involves identifying your aspirational customer because that’s where a gap exists between your costs and the price the customer pays. You need to position yourself within that zone."

"We wanted to make a brand for the aspirational segment. My initial stores opened in premium markets like Connaught Place, Greater Kailash, South Ex, Ajmal Khan, and Rajouri Garden. We launched the brand in the top 5 markets of Delhi. We made products according to that customer base."

Cantabil positions itself carefully in the mid-premium segment.

"We right in the middle. In the segment below us, the basic average price is ₹400-500—this is standard offering in Tier-2 and Tier-3. Our average price is ₹1,100-1,200—this price point is aspirational for Tier-2 and Tier-3. Premium is ₹1,800-2,000, which is aspirational for Tier-1 and to some extent Tier-2 (where they are not always available). And then you have the non-Indian owned brands of the world above, which is aspirational for Tier-1."

On the other side of the story is the costing aspect of it, especially the rental cost for the store.

"Around 50% of turnover comes from Tier 3 cities, while around 40% of our sales are from Tier-2 cities. We focus on this with intent. Tier 2 and 3 are good—rent is reasonable/low, and the youth is aspirational and is moving toward brands."

The spread between the price an aspirational customer is willing to pay and the cost of retailing in Tier 2+3 cities of India is where Cantabil is focused.

"Awareness is increasing due to social media. The spread between lower costs in rentals and aspirational pricing-driven purchases by the Tier-3 consumer is a perfect market segment for us, and we want to focus on serving it."

"Tier 1 is just 10%. It helps us build a brand by being aspirational as we are located in some of these premium places—but they aren’t our core drivers."

Then, there are other factors at play, too. In addition to the rental costs, temperature, seasons, and festivals also influence Cantabil’s growth.

"We haven't entered South India yet because the profit in winter wear is not there in summer areas. Winter products have good margins in the North. We are opening 70-80 stores annually. In the next 2-3 years, we will think about South India."

"In Tier 1, like Delhi, we started from Delhi NCR. My showrooms have opened in every market. Bombay is very expensive—shops are small and rent is very high. So selection is difficult, and there's no sale of winter wear. In Bombay, you have to be very choosy and careful."

"When I opened the first store in Karol Bagh in Delhi (non-Cantabil), I gave rent of ₹2 lakh per month. This was in 1998 for 1,200 square feet. Today I am giving ₹25 lakh for the same store. The square footage has increased a little to 2,100 square feet, but the cost per squre foot has become 10x."

"In contrast, the rental market in Kolkata is very cheap. The seasonal Durga Pooja market is big. There, 70% sales come during Durga Pooja. Everyone buys there during that period."

Then there is the question of competitive forces directly affecting a company’s profit pools.

"New competitors play a different game—mostly in fast fashion model. They go to different types of customers than us. In big malls, their format is also big. The average size of stores we opened this year is 1,700 square feet. Their store size is 4,000-5,000 square feet."

"Our focus is less on fast fashion, more on formal and basic garments that any age group can wear. Today, you can wear my clothes, and your father can wear them. We work more in formals and basics, less in fashion."

The product mix is well-balanced across categories:

"20% I sell suits, blazers, and formal trousers—approximately worth ₹140+ crores. Casual and formal shirts together: 27%. Denim and casual pants: 18-20%. Knitwear (T-shirts, sweatshirts, woolens, hoodies, jackets): 22-23%. Ladies wear: 10%. Kids: 3-4%. Accessories: 5%."

"I have 50 exclusive stores for ladies’ wear. I have to work hard on that model too. If my model becomes more profitable, there is margin but less than Cantabil men's. So I have to bring it to an equal level. With the same speed, I can open 400-500 ladies exclusive stores if there is the same margin."

"We started focusing on brand building in 2017. We focused on visual appeal, advertising, showroom furniture—world-class furniture, and product improvement. If you go to a store and compare it with any international brand, you won't see any difference. Product quality, showroom ambiance—world class."

Category Extensions enabling Horizontal Integration

The retail model and the product channel fit that Cantabil has there enables the company to conduct rapid product experimentation and real-time market feedback.

"Since we operate our own customer-facing stores, we’re uniquely positioned to test new product lines swiftly," Vijay explains.

"If a product doesn’t resonate with consumers, we withdraw it immediately. If it performs well, we quickly scale production and expand its availability across locations. This agility keeps us closely aligned with evolving consumer preferences."

This dynamic feedback loop has paved the way for Cantabil’s foray into new product categories.

"In 2010, we introduced a range of accessories and innerwear segments, which received a strong initial response. Perfumes were introduced in 2021."

"We’ve also ventured into the range of footwear in the year 2024—including casual shoes, sports shoes, walking shoes, and sneakers—all under the Cantabil brand," he notes.

Cantabil continues expanding into new categories.

"This year, we went live with formal shoes, sports shoes, walking shoes, sneakers, all under the Cantabil brand. Now we have started with undergarments. They are getting a good response. Then we will have perfumes."

Category-wise Revenue Split

• Men's Wear: 81%

• Women's Wear: 11%

• Accessories: 5%

• Kids Wear: 3%

Manufacturing Excellence

Cantabil’s in-house manufacturing infrastructure is a great example of Cantabil’s focus on vertical integration—ensuring quality, operational control, and long-term value creation.

Located on a 3-acre industrial site, the state-of-the-art facility spans over 200,000 square feet and employs more than 1,700 skilled manpower. Outfitted with advanced German and Italian machinery—particularly for suit manufacturing—the plant meets global standards of craftsmanship.

“There are only a handful of facilities in India—perhaps five or six—that can produce suits at this level of precision and finish,” notes Vijay.

What makes this more remarkable is the capital efficiency behind it. The entire facility was developed with a modest ₹5–6 crore loan, fully repaid through internal accruals—underscoring the company’s disciplined financial management.

Vijay notes the potential to grow:

"Right now we're making 1.5 lakh garments per month. Our production is 25% of our total market requirements. The rest are sourced from fabricators and vendors—75% is purchased from dedicated units and direct vendors."

Hiring, Delegation, and Focus

Vijay’s approach to talent acquisition departs from conventional playbooks. Rooted in experience and emotional intelligence, his hiring process is deeply intuitive.

"When I interview a candidate, it usually takes just 15 to 20 minutes to understand their essence," he explains.

"I observe their tone, speech pattern, body language, and the authenticity in their words. If I sense a genuine, grounded energy—a positive instinct—I proceed with confidence. On the other hand, when someone seems to speak without depth or conviction, that becomes evident very quickly. Years of engaging with people have sharpened that instinct, and in over 95% of cases, my judgment has held true."

While credentials and experience are acknowledged, they are not the deciding factors in his assessments.

"I certainly do a keen review of a person's background and résumé, but what matters more is their communication style, their ability to present ideas clearly, persuade constructively, and carry themselves with composure and respect."

For Vijay, leadership potential is substantially measured by academic degrees, but defined by interpersonal intelligence & leadership.

"An individual’s career progression is ultimately driven by their working style, their ability to align with a team, and how effectively they engage with colleagues—both subordinates and superiors. These are the attributes that build strong organizations."

The Support System

At every critical juncture of his entrepreneurial journey, Vijay credits his family as an unwavering pillar of strength.

"My wife has been a constant source of encouragement,” he shares. “Her belief in me never wavered. She always urged me to give my best to building Cantabil, even in the most testing times."

In 2006, Vijay’s son, Deepak, entered the business at the age of 20, taking charge of front-end operations.

"From day one, Deepak demonstrated clarity, initiative, and a sharp understanding of customer-facing dynamics," Vijay recalls.

"Over time, he evolved into a capable leader, growing alongside the company and playing an integral role in shaping its future."

Measured Ambition

Vijay's vision for the future is ambitious yet grounded.

"I think my growth is in the next 7-8 years. I want to reach ₹2,500 crores in sales."

"₹2,500 crores means 3.5 times the current size. This is a very manageable goal. 3.5 times means we will have to increase stores from 600 to almost 2,000-2,500 stores."

Reflecting on his journey, Vijay offers practical advice for young entrepreneurs.

"Once your education is complete, whatever opportunity lies ahead—whether it’s a family business or a job—embrace it fully. Don’t wait for the ‘perfect’ beginning. If you apply yourself sincerely, you can shape that opportunity into something far greater. Ultimately, it is your thinking and vision that determine the direction your journey takes."

His core principles are simple but powerful.

"The most important things are honesty, hard work, and transparency. The more clearly you speak—to the point, without double-talk—and the harder you work with focus, the more successful you'll be."

He warns against the modern obsession with rapid scaling.

"The biggest problem is that people want to grow too fast. We should remember there's no shortcut. You have to keep working in the right direction consistently. If you keep working in the right direction, you will grow."

Vijay shares an interesting insight for manufacturing luck.

"Look, luck works, but you have to work first. Luck will work later. If you put in effort and don’t stop putting in effort despite not getting any growth immediately, you will eventually grow. I believe that luck can be manufactured. People make their own destiny. Luck doesn't work alone. It works when you put effort."

Final Reflections

Today, at 65, Vijay Bansal represents a unique breed of entrepreneur.

"My father worked till 84 years. He went to his shop on the last day. So I have a vision of 10-15 years. There is a lot of scope in everything. There is no limit to anything."

The company he has built stands as a testament to fundamental business principles executed with discipline and persistence.

Looking back at the complete journey—from a small general store in Jind to a ₹721 crore revenue business—Vijay's story proves that in business, as in life, there are no shortcuts to lasting success. Only hard work, honesty, smart execution, and the courage to persist when everyone else thinks you should quit.

"In my life, whatever work I do, I do it with complete transparency and hard work. Be far-sighted and stick to your decisions," he concludes, the wisdom of four decades in business condensed into a simple truth.

Safe Harbor Statement: This story may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those projected.

This story is based on extensive interviews with Mr Vijay Bansal, Founder, Chairperson, and Managing Director of Cantabil Retail India Limited (NSE: CANTABIL), a publicly listed company with over 600 retail stores across India and annual revenues of ₹720+ crores (FY25).

This interview was originally conducted in March 2025 in Hindi and has been translated for our reader-investors.

For providing feedback, please write to us at banjan@tal64.com

Notable investors, including tal64 syndicate members, are participating in the preferential issue.

Investor Participation

The preferential issue attracted participation from prominent investors such as Alchemy Capital Management led by Lasith Sanghvi, SI Investments led by Karthik Iyer, NAV Capital Emerging Star Fund led by Vineet Arora, Capri Global Holdings, well-known families, and the company’s promoters, demonstrating strong confidence in FPL’s long-term vision. Read the BSE update and full list here.

Strategic Capital Deployment

The funds raised will support FPL’s aggressive expansion across its consumer brands portfolio. The company projects reaching ₹900 crores within four years. Fredun commented:

“We are at a critical juncture—we are approaching that moment where our scale economies will truly be shared with all stakeholders, and I felt this was the appropriate time to infuse our balance sheet with serious capital to compound hereon.”

Building Dependencies, Not Just Sales

Fredun, who joined the business at age 20 when revenues were ₹3 crores, has transformed FPL into an almost 400,000 square feet manufacturing-first company.

The company’s philosophy centers on creating deep market dependencies rather than transactional relationships. Fredun explains:

“Our strategy has always been about leveraging economies of scale—building infrastructure that makes clients reliant on our capabilities while keeping prices competitive enough that switching becomes economically impractical.”

“We’ve willingly sacrificed short-term profits to establish these dependencies. Once you reach true scale, the economics change significantly. We’re now at the point where our investments in manufacturing capacity, R&D, and market development are starting to compound.”

Diversified Growth Strategy

The capital infusion will accelerate key initiatives:

• Consumer Brand Growth: After spending more than a decade purely focused on building manufacturing capabilities and research, FPL finally decided to launch its own brands in the last couple of years. The capital raised will be invested in building markets for these brands—marketing, distribution, sales, and team.

• Clinical Innovation: The company maintains 39 research scientists and is the only Indian company with double-blinded nutraceutical studies.

Manufacturing Excellence

FPL’s current capacity enables the simultaneous production of:

• 4 crore tablets per day

• 1 crore capsules per day

• 22 tons of DC granules per day

• 250,000 tubes of ointment per day

• 160,000 lotion/liquid bottles per day

• 1,700 SKUs across 27 therapeutic ranges

“We’ve built something that cannot be replicated easily—not just in infrastructure, but in time invested and relationships cultivated over three decades,” Fredun noted.

“While others can copy our products or facilities, they cannot replicate the compound effect of time.”

About Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited

Founded in 1994, Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited is an integrated pharmaceutical-to-consumer company. With operations across 52 countries, FPL combines three decades of manufacturing expertise with innovative R&D to deliver high-quality healthcare solutions.

Read the story of Fredun Pharmaceuticals here:

Read The Fredun Story

Safe Harbor Statement: This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those projected.

If you want to discuss an opportunity with Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited, please write to banjan@tal64.com

How many times does one need to fold a piece of paper for its thickness to reach the moon? A standard sheet of paper is about 0.1 mm—so 42 folds would give us 0.1 * 2⁴² = 439,80,46,51,110 mm.

Math, Fredun Medhora insists, is inevitable. He says:

"For the first 24 folds, you are still a few meters above the earth. And then you hit the inflection point. By the time you do the 42nd fold, you are going past the moon."

"In my view, today Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited (FPL) is somewhere between its 23rd and 24th fold."

Scaling laws only permit any scale efficiencies to kick in after a period of flatlining. It is not possible any other way. Especially when you are building a manufacturing-first company like Fredun is building—one that his parents named after him, no less.

He joined the company that his research scientist parents had founded as a 20-year-old boy, barely out of college in 2007.

The revenue of the company that year was approximately ₹3 crores. Today, FPL is crossing a turnover of ₹500 crores.

"As you can imagine, I have been—quietly and diligently—folding my sheet of paper for a very long time."

At 38 years old today, Fredun has built a plant with 163,000 square feet of manufacturing alone, with an additional 215,000 square feet of warehousing to go with it.

FPL has also commercialized a separate 18,000 square feet facility focused on manufacturing prescription pet food—India’s first pharma-grade functional pet food plant.

It has become a ₹500 crore revenue company spanning 52 countries, at the moment. And the forward investments made by FPL into its manufacturing infrastructure in the last five years are already good enough to double the revenue in the next five.

History

Nariman Medhora was 50 years old when he quit Sarabhai Chemicals to start a small pharmaceuticals trading firm.

By 1989, he had saved enough to buy a piece of land in Palghar to start constructing a pharmaceuticals plant there—what would become Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited. The plant went live in 1994.

"He had balls of steel," Fredun Medhora tells me.

Fredun's father had worked at Sarabhai Chemicals for 27 years before taking this leap.

While he worked there, he'd eaten food only thrice a week, walked 10 kilometers daily to save money, and had a portion of his intestine removed due to malnutrition—all while supporting his separated parents' families.

At 46, he met Fredun's mother—Dr Daulat Medhora—a freelance research scientist who used to consult with brands such as Sanofi, etc. At 51, he became a father. At 54, they mortgaged everything to start a pharmaceutical company in Palghar, which was still just a village on the outskirts of Bombay.

"My childhood went by like a forest fire," Fredun recalls.

"In every business photo from that era, there's a small child in the corner—that is me. After school, I'd go straight to the office. I remember my parents calming down the creditors, nudging the debtors for money, and all of us running pillar to post."

This turned into an education of sorts for Fredun. While he ended up racking up a stellar academic record, through his bachelor’s in the US and master’s in the UK, nothing compares to the education the beatdown market can hammer one with.

It was those early experiences working for his parents in Bombay of the 1990s and 2000s that truly shaped him.

"I had no benchmark to compare my parents’ experiences and what I was experiencing while working for them. It was part of life. I felt that this is how it is in business and I thought all this is normal. For a long time, I had no idea about any other way."

When Fredun joined the company in 2007 at age 20, the "plant" was 22,000 square feet in size. FPL had two packing lines. The company could make 900 kg of granulation per day.

But even this modest operation was built on a foundation of thorns.

Within two years of starting production in 1994, their CA had attempted a hostile takeover. Then came Baddi—the North India excise-free zone.

"Suddenly, within a matter of a few months, we lost 90% of business because everyone shifted to the North," Fredun explains.

His parents couldn't afford to set up a new plant there. His father was already past 60.

In 2002-2003, new regulations prohibited beta-lactam and non-beta-lactam production in the same facility.

Ninety percent of FPL’s business was beta-lactam. His father chose to bet on the long term instead of taking a short-term win and decided to focus the manufacturing efforts on non-beta-lactam, losing almost everything again.

By 2007, they were essentially starting from zero for the third time.

"I used to do everything," Fredun remembers of his early days.

"I used to lift goods. I used to do the security job. I used to clean up after the housekeeping. I used to stand on the machines and run the machines myself. I think I must have walked at least 40 kilometers per day in just the factory."

In 2007, someone in the plant sabotaged a production line—they had sabotaged the products and sent them over to the client. For six months after that, Fredun would himself pack every single pack that came out of the packing line.

While Fredun gained stellar business education, he started developing his vision of how the company could grow. But that came with its own set of challenges.

"Nobody would want to talk to a 20-year-old," he says.

"When they are dealing with someone in the business, they would want the decisions coming from someone else, someone older than me."

Building Dependencies on FPL

Fredun instinctively understood that his survival depended on making clients dependent on the company and its manufacturing capabilities.

"Back then, I would work for free also sometimes," Fredun admits.

"They started becoming dependent on me. I thought, let them exploit my offerings to the fullest now—allow them to in fact—and let me give such good quality products at such an unbeatable price that they have no other way out after they achieve scale themselves."

This wasn't about selling. This was about creating dependencies. For years, he executed this strategy instinctively.

He would tell clients he'd work at any cost, any price. He'd let creditors abuse him on calls and still demanded more supplies. Workers who were owed salaries would abuse him. The electricity guy would come to cut the wire.

"Many times that guy would turn up. I used to cajole and request him to give us two more days."

Meanwhile, he watched entrepreneurs—his peers across India—raise millions for half-baked products or no products at all.

"I felt like utter shit," he admits.

"The sad part is that all the investors I met—most of them cannot run a paan-tapri if their life depended on it. And I had to prove to them that I could build a company."

By 2011, things began to shift. The company that had been growing invisibly, painfully, suddenly started gaining momentum. Ten years later, cost efficiencies started hitting.

"I knew that once we crossed Rs 50 crores of quarterly revenue, cost efficiencies will start hitting."

"We eventually did that—in 2021—and our profitability started becoming visible."

The numbers tell the story: From 2 packing lines to 32. From 900 kg of daily granulation to 22 tons. Overall capacity increased by 1,600% between 2013 and 2021, then another 35% by 2025. The 22,000 square foot facility became 3,78,000 square feet of manufacturing+warehousing.

At 60% augmented capacity today, they can manufacture 4 crore tablets, 1 crore capsules, 250,000 tubes, 160,000 lotions, 22 tons of DC granules, and 1.5 tons of pellets—per day, simultaneously.

While the company started as a contract manufacturer for global brands, Fredun never intended to remain one.

Consumer Brands

Fredun reveals a strategic decision made years ago.

FPL’s Nutraceuticals—for humans as well as pets—weren't just developed—they were clinically validated with a unique distinction in the Indian market.

"We are the only company to have double-blinded nutraceutical studies in India. And we had them ready a decade ago," Fredun states.

"But again, we did not have the right bandwidth to launch the products back then."

"I did not supply them to other companies because I knew that these products are gold mines, they are kept within the company."

After spending more than a decade purely focused on building manufacturing capabilities and research, FPL finally decided to launch its own brands.

Building brands requires more than just manufacturing capabilities. It requires working capital to give credit terms to the market, infrastructure to handle returns, teams to manage distribution, and, most importantly, the ability to survive while customers take 90, 120, sometimes 180 days to pay.

"The plan was to launch FPL owned consumer brands throughout," he says.

"But I did not have the resources to start with. So I had no choice but wait until I had a strong enough infrastructure and balance sheet."

"Usually, in typical pharma companies in the West, the philosophy is to have a few star products around which the company gets built."

"In the beginning, I did not have enough capital to develop star products."

"So we took the opposite route. We have 1,700 products across 27 therapeutic ranges, and our products reach 52 countries."

Does it not make it difficult for management to focus?

"All this diversification is actually just line extension for us. We are already doing it for our existing clients as OEM. We took those products and launched them into the market."

"But when we launched a particular product, like in pet care, I cannot do with one product. Nobody will shelf my product only in the market. Nobody will shelf my distributors."

"So we have to have a product basket. We have to have multiple products, and we have to have a variety and inventory."

Fredun explained a few interesting examples that illuminate his and the company management’s thought process.

Example 1: Dermacosmectics

The dermacosmetics market in India is controlled by companies prescribing ₹4,000 shampoos and ₹2,800 serums—products with 90% gross margins sold directly to dermatologists. It's a closed circle, impossible to break into.

So FPL didn't try to break in.

The company went to these companies and offered to be their OEM manufacturer. They brought special licenses, manufacturing capabilities that no one else had in the country. For two and a half years, they quietly manufactured these premium products.

Then they launched their own line.

"When we first went to the doctors, my team used to turn the product around and say, 'Please check the manufacturing. You have been using my product only for the last 3 years.' The wall instantly shattered. Now they cannot say that it is of poor quality because it is my product. It has been there for the last 3 years."

FY25, they did ₹4 crores in dermacosmetics. With a team of just 4.5 people ("one person is working on two projects"), FPL is now targeting Rs 30-40 crores annually.

Example 2: Chuu Balm

Then there's the ₹5 pain relief balm called "Chuu"—40-50 times more powerful than other balms, targeting daily wage laborers who can't afford paracetamol.

Fredun explains, "The laborers who do manual work, carry loads, and earn daily wages must be experiencing shoulder, head, and overall body pain."

"We have a 5-rupee balm that lasts for two days."

In FY25 alone, Chuu Balm reported sales of Rs 3.5 crores. For FY26, the company is projecting sales of Rs 9 crores.

Editor’s note: If you are wondering why the word ‘Chuu’ sounds strangely familiar, let me clear all your doubts by showing the Vapourub product FPL is preparing to launch:

The Big Bet on Petcare

FPL’s pet care business—named Freossi—which did ₹30 crores in FY25, is built on a doctor-prescribed model that covers the full spectrum of animal health.

"We develop everything under the sun, including antibiotics, liver disease, chronic disease, everything," Fredun explains.

"For dogs and cats and other pets, but predominantly dogs and cats."

This therapeutic focus leverages Fredun's three decades of pharmaceutical expertise.

Even products that could be sold over-the-counter are positioned as doctor-prescribed, building credibility and ensuring proper usage. While competitors focus on kibble and treats, Fredun is building a pharmaceutical approach to pet health, leveraging FPL’s existing strengths in formulation and clinical validation.

"80-90% of the revenue of pet care currently is from allopathic formulations and nutraceuticals," Fredun says.

Fredun’s point of view with respect to pet food is also illuminating:

"How many of us eat 6-month-old roti?" Fredun asks.

"I don’t think we do. Then why are we giving 6-month-old food to our pets?"

"In many countries right now, especially nordic countries, they are banning kibbles. Kibble is 6-9 month-old food you are giving to your son or your daughter—because that's what you call your pet. A lot of the pet food available in the market is produced out of waste materials from poultry and meat industries."

This isn't just about biscuits or kibbles only. It's about a fundamental mismatch between what Indian pets need and what the market offers.

On one end, you have people feeding human food to pets out of necessity. On the other hand, you have premium brands selling what Fredun calls "dead food."

He advocates for home-cooked food for daily feeding but sees the opportunity in specialized diets:

"A home food can be given on a day-to-day basis that can substitute kibble and be good. But when the pet is sick, or the pet is not well, or the pet is growing and needs nutrition, or the pet is old when it needs support—that is the time you require a specific diet."

"I don't want Freossi to be a mass food player. I would rather have a prescription diet," he explains.

"Targeted therapeutic foods for eyes—for retina, for CKD, for liver function disease, for diabetics, for weight management, and so on. FPL wants to serve gaps like that."

"We have right now some products in <redacted>. We will be the first one in Asia to launch it for pets," Fredun reveals.

"These products are for anti-aging for dogs. Enhancing the geriatric dog's life. And improving the dog's life."

"If it enhances a pet's last few months, it is useful. Let's say the pet’s life is 12 years and 6 months—the last 6 months, if he/she is a little lively, then that will be so joyful."

Fredun has been quietly building FPL into the only petcare manufacturing facility in India that can manufacture nutraceuticals, herbals, ayurvedic supplements, allopathic formulations, diagnostics, and bone grafts under the same roof.

"This month (September 2025), FPL is commissioning what will be the first of its kind facility—18000 square feet of manufacturing—to have a pharma-grade facility for functional pet food in India."

This marks an important moment in FPL’s journey. It's the first of its kind facility to have a pharma-grade facility for pet food in India. The implications are significant

"That way we will be able to grow the OEM business also for other brands and also for our own products."

"Soft food, targeted therapeutic food, prescription diets." No "kibble or anything like Drools or Pedigree. That is not the kind of market that I want to enter into."

The new plant alone is projected to generate ₹150 crores in revenue over the next four years, with about half coming from their own brands and half from OEM manufacturing for others.

Insights on Petcare

Fredun’s central thesis is that the petcare market will mature and reach an inflection point, and when it does, FPL will be ready.

"Who are your first-line influencers? Not the doctors. It is the breeder you meet first. It is the dog trainer you meet twice a week. It is the dog walker you meet once a day. It is the dog groomer you meet twice a month. Those are your first line influencers. We are building relationships with them, making them dependent on FPL."

The psychology of pet food purchase by the pet parent is also crucial. He gives an example:

"I know so many people who give their dogs ghar-ka-khana (home food). Many times, because they have a vegetarian home, they don't want to give anything non-vegetarian to the animal."

"You have to realize that your pet does not go out and buy food. It is you who are going and buying for the pet. So the companies have to sell to you and not your pet. Your pet is just going to eat."

"You think your dog or cat wants to go and try a new treat every time? No. Because you are seeing a different packaging in the store, because you are seeing a different color. You think, 'Let me try this.' Your dog/cat is not asking for it. Maybe they hate it. Maybe they like the previous one much better. But it is you who has thought that we should buy this."

This understanding drives FPL’s approach: educate the human, not market to them.

The vision is clear: prescription diets for specific conditions, pharma-grade manufacturing standards, comprehensive diagnostic services, and products at every price point from ₹5 to ₹5,000.

"Eventually, you as a literate person will definitely know that this is not good, let's buy what is good quality food," he says about the evolution of Indian pet parents.

"Just like dalda—everyone used to eat dalda. Suddenly everyone realized that dalda is not good. That time will come. In 2-10 years everyone will realize that kibbles are not good."

When that realization hits, Fredun Pharmaceuticals plans to be there with an alternative for every need, at every price point, for every moment of a pet's life.

"Our goal for pet care is very simple," Fredun says.

"By 2032, no pet in India should be able to be born or die without using a Freossi product or service."

Given the infrastructure FPL is building, the dependencies the company is creating, and the fundamental shifts it is driving in the market, it might not be as audacious as it sounds.

Vet Diagnostics

FPL launched India’s first standalone Vet Diagnostics Center in Worli, Mumbai, at a price point of ₹16,000, with 24-hour report delivery. The response was immediate:

"The only other company which had a CT machine for pets was the Tata Hospital. They had to drop their prices from ₹56,000 to ₹22,000. But they still take a week to deliver the report. We deliver the report in 24 hours."

"We also have CT machine and India’s only Vet CBCT machine in the diasgnostic center."

The infrastructure FPL has built is comprehensive:

"We have 4 ambulances spaced across Mumbai. Someone from Vashi needs a CT scan—an animal needs a CT scan in Vashi, New Bombay. They can get a CT scan done within 38 minutes because we have a full-time 24/7 anaesthetist also at the centre."

The Human Architecture

What makes this growth sustainable isn't just strategy—it's the people.

"We have right now 127 employees who have been working with us since day one, even today, so 31 years. 215 people have been working with us for more than 15 years. We have 27 entire households where the mother, the father, the son, the daughter, the whole family comes to work at the plant."

This loyalty wasn't inherited—it was earned through crisis. The research team has grown from 2-3 people to 39. Each brand now operates like a separate company with its own CEO, operations team, supply chain, and R&D.

"We are overly organized for a company our size," Fredun admits.

His mother, the research scientist who developed MCHC (Microcrystalline Hydroxyapatite Compound) for Sanofi and TTK in India in 1987, still leads R&D at age 70-plus. It was her breakthrough that gave the company its first real product—a calcium supplement.

"It is the most bioavailable product in nature. Because it is made from bones. It has innate phosphorus in it. It has type 1 and type 2 collagen. It has glucosamine and glycogen. So it doesn't cause gastric discomfort."

"In India, nobody does R&D. Not even big companies. Everyone does F&D—Formulation Development. You develop something which already exists. R&D is when you invent something."

Financials

• 2007: ₹3 crores revenue

• Today: On track to cross ₹500 crores

• 17-year CAGR: 30%

• Products: 1,700 SKUs across 27 therapeutic ranges

• Global reach: 52 countries, 692 registrations, 1,260 in pipeline

The diversification is deliberate:

"No country is more than 18% of my top line, no therapeutic class is more than 12-13%, and no product is more than 6-7%. We diversified so well that no demographic, geographical, or any other hindrance can cause any impedance to our growth."

An oft-repeated question that Fredun gets asked by his shareholders stems from FPL’s working capital debt, negative cash flows, its inventory days, and debtor days.

"Imagine you are starting ITC today and building your first hotel. Won’t you have to make 400 rooms first? Obviously, on the first day, you will have 400 times the inventory. Obvioulsy you will have negative cash flows in the beginning."

"We have 1,700 SKUs that we have. To make a product today, we need at least 30-40 ingredients. Because there are common ingredients, there are around 29,000 separate SKUs in the stock. Those inventories we have to build up because we have to hold a couple of months stock at the raw material level. We have to have at least a month, month and a half stock at the WIP level."

"The actual number of inventory might be higher later on but the ratios will improve in the next 7-8 quarters. You are seeing the trend from 320 days to now 210 days to 187 days, the trend is improving."

"Inventory is a belt you have to tie in your neck if you want to survive and grow."

What about FPL’s debtor days?

"Look at the growth trajectory - we went from ₹345 crores to ₹456 crores in revenue year-over-year. Yes, our debtors increased from ₹66 crores to ₹170 odd crores, but that's because we're growing so rapidly that each quarter's sales are massive compared to the previous one. In our last quarter of FY25 alone, we had ₹167 crores sales out of ₹177 crores debtors—that's essentially an entire quarter's sales still showing as receivables on the books."

"When you're building market distribution and creating dependencies with distributors, you have to offer competitive credit terms. That's how you establish yourself. In July we recovered ₹116 crores of debtors, but then in August we extended similar credit again because the business keeps growing. Someone looking at August in isolation might say we're back where we started, but they're missing the point—the absolute numbers keep growing because the business keeps growing."

On debt, Fredun clarified:

"Debt will temporarily increase maybe by 5-6%. We are already at peak level. It looks high optically but it is not because we have ₹230 crores of stock in hand. We have about ₹100 crores of debtors. And if you remove about ₹80-90 crores of creditors, we are almost net debt free."

And finally, Fredun comments on FPL’s cashflows:

"Cash flow will always be negative in this phase, right? I mean compare FPL to any venture funded startup, for example. If money goes into inventory, and if we have to give credit to debtors—does that mean that the business is not making money? How then is the check being cleared every day for 1.5 to 2 crores?"

"The cash flows are negative right now because there is working capital deployed in terms of stock and in debtors. Within 6 to 7 quarters, that numbers, that will change once the cost efficiencies start coming in to the new brands and the penetration phase begins to mature."

"You can't judge our working capital by absolute numbers when we're growing at this pace. We're essentially financing the market's adoption of our products, and once the penetration phase starts maturing, in 6-7 quarters, these metrics will normalize."

"We have happily sacrificed temporary profits by keeping the prices low for our customers because we want to build that dependency. That is our strategy."

Looking forward, Fredun projects:

• Next 4 years: ₹900 crores revenue

• Pet care alone: ₹250 crores (₹150 crores branded + ₹100 crores OEM)

• By 2030-31: 51% revenue from new age brands

"In the next 10 years, we are aiming that we will have a few brands that are about ₹1000+ crores by revenue, each," he states.

"I think the market cap will take care of itself, eventually."

The ultimate vision is to split Fredun Pharmaceuticals into separate companies for each brand, with the parent as a holding company.

Each brand—Freossi, Fredun Nutrition, Fredun Mobility, Beauty Fred, etc.—already operates independently with its own CEO and complete team.

"The day they are able to stand on their own as a company and produce substantial revenue and profits, we will spin them out separately to unlock more value for our shareholders."

The Simple Secret

The company that started with 2 packing lines now runs 32, manufacturing 1,700 SKUs.

"We are cockroaches by definition," Fredun says.

"Pour cold water, pour hot water, we survive. We went through a lot of shit again and again, many times, we have seen the whole cycle."

"We are one of the largest plants in the country right now. Within the next 18 to 24 months, we should be in the top 2 or 3 pharmaceuticals plants for a single location in terms of size and output in the country. That will be my 24th fold."

"People can of course replicate everything we do but how will they replicate the time we have invested?"

After hours of conversation about strategy, dependencies, and market penetration, Fredun reveals what might be the simplest business insight I've heard:

"I think if you are an entrepreneur, you need to get mainly two things right. a) You need a good product, and b) you should not take money out of the system. That's it."

"If you are not removing money from the system and your product is good, there is absolutely nothing that can stop the company from growing eventually. In fact, in the beginning you may not even know where most of your future revenue/profits will come from. You just have to ensure the company doesn’t go out of business."

"Good things take time and time tells all tales."

For a company built on making people dependent on it rather than just selling to them, it might just be inevitable.

"All I have to do," Fredun says, "is stay alive."

If you want to discuss an opportunity with Fredun Pharmaceuticals Limited, please write to banjan@tal64.com

"Why are we carrying 200 kg passengers in 2000 kg cars?"

In early 2021, Gagan Agarwal and Prakhar Agarwal, both ex-ISRO Rocket Scientists, sat across from their mentor, Sunand Sharma, the former chairman of Alstom South Asia, when Mr Sunand asked them this question.

They began to wonder. Gagan says:

"So many industries have lightweighted. Rockets, planes, boats, racing cars, turbines—we've lightweighted everything. Why can't we do automobiles?"

"Why are automotives still stuck with steel? We haven't changed it much over the last 100 years," he observes.

While at one end of the paradox, you have a situation where steel is ‘perceived’ to be stronger and safer by the general public, the other end of the paradox is the narrative that we want to control carbon emissions and ‘save the planet’.

Gagan says:

"We all talk about going electric and sustainability. But what about the dead mass you've been carrying all along, wasting diesel and battery."

Could you replace steel with a better material? Is that even a question worth daring to ask? Gagan and Prakhar were curious—and they got to work.

But replacing steel isn't just about finding lighter materials—it requires solving multiple constraints simultaneously. Gagan explains:

"A structure needs to take the vertical weight of the cargo. It needs to handle all dynamic loading from roads, whether potholes or bumps. It needs to manage acceleration and braking loads. Nothing should fail for 12-15 years minimum. You need crash safety—the person sitting in front during a crash needs to be safe."

Four years later:

This raw footage doesn’t have audio, but you get to see how a vehicle made with Planet’s Silica Composite looks.

The Tata Ace EV has a kerb weight of 1,240 kg and offers a 600 kg payload capacity, while Planet Electric's version managed to achieve a kerb weight of 720 kg and a 750 kg payload capacity.

This by itself is remarkable.

But before we explain what Planet’s Silica Composite is, let us explain who the people are who invented it.

The Heritage of India’s Missile Man

For Prakhar, growing up in Lucknow, the inspiration came early.

"I was in 3rd or 4th class in 1993 and I saw the PSLV launch. That's when it was clear to me that I would be a rocket scientist."

Gagan's path was more philosophical.

"I was always thinking about the concept of time. I did not like that time was infinite. I got into astrophysics, cosmology, star formation, big bang—everything. I had no doubts that I wanted to study something to do with space technology."

Both qualified for IIST through the JEE, joining an elite cohort — Prakhar was in the first-ever batch of the newly established IIST in 2007, while Gagan joined in the second batch the next year.

With just 150 students per batch and direct placement into ISRO upon graduation, it was an unprecedented opportunity.

"He gave us lectures, he interacted with us. We received our degrees from him," Prakhar recalls.

Gagan adds, "You get a sense of humility once you see him in person. I have not seen anyone as humble as him."

What was Dr Kalam’s key lesson to them?

Gagan says, "He told us to think in generations and be ambitious. And that is exactly what we did."

Prakhar and Gagan decided to do just that. They decided to build and launch an actual rocket while still in college.

No group of students in India had done it before, and nobody has since. The group led by Gagan and Prakhar has been the only one to date.

"Basically, a bunch of us wanted to build a rocket and fly," Gagan explains.

"We had no idea how to do it. We didn't know how small it would be, but somehow we wanted to make a professional rocket."

Wikipedia:

VYOM ('sky' in Sanskrit) is the sounding rocket designed by the BTech students of IIST. Vyom had its maiden flight on 11 May 2012 when it took to the sky from TERLS and the mission was a success. The objective of the launch was to flight-test the solid rocket motor and the accelerometer payload developed for the project. Vyom is the first student made sounding rocket in Asia.

The project required true systems engineering across multiple disciplines. With unprecedented access to VSSC through their director, they dove into decades of rocket science knowledge.

"We used to go to VSSC libraries. I have read NACA articles — when NASA was NACA—since 1932. We read in the first year what we would typically learn in the third year, just because we wanted to build a rocket."

After navigating 153 range clearances, their rocket launched on May 11, 2012, reaching 16 kilometers into the stratosphere.

"Commercial airliners fly at 10 kilometers. Although we weren’t suborbital, but we were very proud. It is higher than Mount Everest—double."

"We were the first ones to do it in Asia," Prakhar notes with justifiable pride.

After graduation, both entered ISRO's professional ranks. Gagan joined the Reusable Launch Vehicle project, India's space shuttle program.

"I worked on reusable launch vehicles for three years. We had to fly above Mach 5, re-enter, and land. Much harder challenge than our college project."

Prakhar spent a decade in composites and structural engineering, gaining comprehensive experience.

"Right from the beginning till the end. I got the opportunity to look at the entire detailed life cycle. Not just 'I've designed it, done, my role is over.' I had to look into every detail."

In 2021, they founded Planet.

Problem Statements

"We invent new materials using space technology to secure the future of our species," says Gagan.

It's an audacious claim that would sound woozy coming from anyone, but strangely, totally believable coming from two former ISRO scientists who have spent the last four years developing composite materials that could fundamentally transform the automotive industry.

Beyond material properties, manufacturing presented its challenges.

Traditional composites manufacturing takes hours per part—acceptable for aerospace, where volume is low, but impossible for automotive scale.

"If they need high strength, typically it takes 4 hours per part. Why? Because they were made for aerospace. No one managed to recalibrate the manufacturing process according to high volume," Gagan explains.

And then there is the challenge of safety. The crash safety standards are particularly demanding:

"The typical norm is to make a crumple zone. About 400mm will be crushed in 700 milliseconds with resultant G-force between 24-32G on the passenger's neck. This is NCAP 4 rating."

Previous attempts with aluminum failed on multiple fronts.

"Aluminum has two or three major problems. Number one, cost—it's typically $4 per kg versus steel at less than $1."

Carbon fiber, while strong, is prohibitively expensive.

"CFRP (Carbon Fiber) is 25-30 times more expensive than steel. It's out of the question. Even glass fiber reinforced plastic (FRP), commonly used in industrial applications, lacks the strength for automotive structures."

Planet’s Silica Composite

The technical innovation centers on what they call "silica composites"—E-glass fiber combined with specific resins and fillers.

"A composite is basically two or more materials combined. Metal has micrometer-level defects. To cure that, we bond fiber and resin so the strength increases automatically."

But creating automotive-grade composites required solving the manufacturing equation.

"We looked at 12 manufacturing processes prevalent in aerospace. None would work. But then we understood there are other manufacturing processes we can learn from."

They studied compression molding used for electrical insulation panels and pultruded beams for cooling towers.

"We took compression molding machines, went from 100 tons to 3000 tons pressure. We heated the material to 210-250 degrees. After heating, compression, and curing, we achieved properties that were never achieved from these fiber materials."

The breakthrough wasn't just material composition but manufacturing speed.

"After a lot of heating, compression, and curing, we were able to achieve those properties in 5 minutes instead of 4 hours."

Gagan and Prakhar explain:

"Our ‘right to exist’ is this: replace steel in vehicles with advanced composite materials that are 75% lighter while maintaining superior strength. Our US patent pending silica composites have a flexural strength of 440 MPa—double that of steel's 220 MPa—while weighing just 1.7 grams per cubic centimeter compared to steel's 7.8 grams."

Manufacturing was only half the challenge. Integration into existing automotive systems required a strategic constraint.

"The most important thing we said: we won't change anything. The axle, wheel, steering, motor, battery—everything should be the same. You can't change the supply chain. You are changing the structure."

This limitation became an advantage, allowing integration into existing automotive ecosystems without wholesale changes. But it required solving connection problems. The design philosophy leveraged composites' directional strength properties.

"There is no welding. We use composite-metal joints, adhesives and rivets. These are processes usually done in aerospace that we're adapting for automobiles."

"These materials are fibers. You give strength in the direction you want and remove material where you don't need strength. This is precise engineering that enables almost 75% weight reduction."

Their approach to scaling reflects their engineering background—staged and systematic.

"Prototype—>on-ramp—>scale. Prototype is our design technology. We have reached this stage. On-ramp, we will invest Rs 7-10 crores and put up a small facility in Gurgaon for 1000 boxes per month."

"No one knows composite handling well enough, so we can't afford to compromise on quality. Even OEMs don't have this expertise. For the first 2 years, we need to maintain the highest quality standards."

"This is my proof to the industry that we can do this, customers have accepted it, we can scale, and we can give all of this to suppliers to go to 10,000 boxes."

"We have filed two patents covering design and integration procedues. We will also patent a one-min manufacturing process soon."

"Material formulation we have not disclosed as they are our trade secrets."

This creates defensive moats while enabling licensing opportunities.

"In the long run, everything will be outsourced to suppliers and outside partners who we will train and vet. We will certify them, do R&D, and license technology. We will not manufacture everything ourselves."

"These are not just better materials," Gagan explains.

"We're talking about reducing vehicle weight by 40%, cutting battery consumption by 25%, and enabling 7% diesel savings per vehicle per month."

Finding the right investors

The curse of being a pure technology founder in India is that you have to grow despite the system and not because of it. Case in point is the following email from a respectable fund in India, an offshoot of a well-known publicly listed financial services outfit.

As luck would have it, Gagan and Prakhar found the right partnership through an angel who introduced them to Mirik Gogri.

Planet has raised a seed round of Rs. 6.5 crores, led by Mirik, which allowed the company to carry out its R&D and reach this stage.

Investors who are also entrepreneurs tend to seek absolute returns, not IRR. This allows them to fund businesses with longer development cycles.

Gagan comments:

"Mirik understood the technology from first principles. He knows that this has been done successfully in aircraft. And he knows that someone will do this eventually in automobiles."

Mirik commented:

"We like the fact that they've shown tremendous grit. They've also shown tremendous flexibility. While they have a product, there are different business ideas that they have played with. They have been open to taking feedback and trying to mold to that feedback to see what's the best journey for the company to take."

As part of tal64 reseach’s work, we did our own testing! Here is how it went:

In the first 5 seconds, a drop test on Steel is shown, in the next few seconds, a drop test on Planet’s Silica Composite.

Customer Development and Market Entry

Rather than building in isolation, they adopted a customer-driven approach.

"I said I won't make it generically. I need a customer. The customer will tell me what to make."

The first customer conversation was telling.

"He said, 'My vehicles have poor gradeability, they take too much battery.' We worked for 3 months, came back with simulated results. He gave us the first 1000 pre-orders."

Their go-to-market strategy targeted commercial vehicles first.

"Delivery vans are much better than passenger cars because you don't have charging infrastructure issues—charging happens at hubs, routes are fixed. I can go to the biggest logistics customer and ask how much will you buy? 500 trucks, 1000 trucks?"

"Steel containers weigh 330kg, ours weigh 130kg—200kg saved. In the same fuel consumption, they can carry 200kg extra payload. If you reduce 200kg, you use 7% less diesel."

For electric vehicles, the benefits compound.

"We reduce battery consumption by 25%. That's 25% upfront battery cost savings and lifetime 25% charging cost reduction."

The company has already built functional prototypes for its cargo boxes and signed MOUs worth $7 million specifically for cargo boxes made with Planet’s Silica Composite, and attracted pre-orders from 33 customers spanning logistics giants, OEMs, and new mobility companies.

For example:

"About 43% of our operating budget is diesel costs. A 6-7% diesel savings almost doubles our net profit margin."

— Sachin Haritash, Director, Chetak Logistics

As of early 2025, Planet Electric is moving from prototype to production.

"Within 4 weeks, these are the 2 big customers who will do certification. The cargo boxes' LOIs are committed though not yet signed."

The customer pipeline is substantial:

"<Name redacted> wants 250 boxes per month, <Name redacted> 150 per month, <Name redacted> 100 per month initially scaling to 200. Then we have larger containers for companies like <Name redacted> and <Name redacted>."

"We need a plant for cargo boxes. That's why we're raising capital."

Capital Raise

Current capital requirements are specific and staged.

"We need Rs 13 crores approx for the on-ramp facility, but we will probably need Rs 25-30 crores in total because hardware always has unforeseen costs. Everyone in the hardware space always says double or triple whatever you initially estimate."

The addressable market is immense: automotive structures alone represent a $500 billion global opportunity, while applications span construction, aerospace, marine, and infrastructure sectors where lightweight, non-corrosive materials could revolutionize performance and longevity.

But Planet Electric's ambitions extend far beyond automotive applications.

Gagan notes:

"Anything that moves or anything that corrodes is our market. Materials that corrode significantly reduce product lifespan—these composite materials will work exceptionally well in those applications."

Success in cargo boxes opens multiple expansion paths.

"I can now go to vehicles, bus bodies, shipping containers—so many other things, where I will only do design and technology, not on-scale manufacturing necessarily."

The business model evolution is clear.

"This business gives you guaranteed revenue—you make it. For larger applications, you become a technology partner. We'll control the supply chain and license the technology."

Their long-term vision, though, extends far beyond automotive.

But perhaps most importantly, they see Planet as proving a model for space-to-earth technology transfer.

"Space technology can be used to solve cost problems in multiple industries. Efficiency directly translates into cost savings."

Planet is raising capital to go from prototyping to production. The company is raising $4 million with Mirik Gogri (mentioned above) continuing to participate.

If you want to talk more about the investment opportunity, reach out to us at banjan@tal64.com for more details.

Participants in this round included Prateek Maheshwari, Pradip Todi via O2 Angels, and the tal64 syndicate.

Ashish commented:

“Arun has spent time and effort in understanding unmet customer needs in the 1000-days journey of maternal care.”

“Janitri’s product is compact, full function, and enables cost-effective monitoring of mother and newborn for both hospital and home segment.”

“It is a large market in India and overseas and hopefully, Janitri will identify more such market gaps to build a large and profitable medtech company out of India”

About Janitri

Founded in 2016 by Arun Agarwal, Janitri is revolutionizing maternal and child healthcare through innovative medical devices and technology solutions.

Founder and CEO Arun Agarwal says:

“Janitri is building products focused on the 1000-day pregnancy journey of a mother and child.”

“The goal is to bring joy to the mother, father, and the whole family as they anticipate and prepare for the arrival of their newborn into the world.”

The company's flagship product, Keyar, is an intrapartum monitoring device that tracks vital signs of pregnant women during labor, helping detect complications early and enabling timely interventions.

Janitri addresses a critical gap in healthcare delivery — inadequate vital signs monitoring during labor, which contributes significantly to maternal and child mortality rates.

Their affordable, simple, and medical-grade monitors provide an accessible solution for birthing centers across India and emerging markets.

Business Growth and Impact

The company has demonstrated impressive growth, achieving ₹8.5 crores in revenue for FY 2024-25, representing a more than 2x increase from the previous fiscal year.

Notably, Arun highlighted that the order book for Q1 FY26 is already 2x of Q1 FY25.

Currently, Janitri's devices have monitored the vital signs of over 200,000 pregnant women each month across 800+ hospitals throughout India and 10 more countries.

The company estimates a ₹2,000 crore market opportunity in India alone, with over 200,000 hospitals that could benefit from its solutions.

Entry into the Consumer Segment

While the current funding round is primarily based on Janitri's proven B2B success, a portion of the raised funds will be strategically allocated to enter the consumer segment.

This represents a significant evolution in the company's approach, extending its mission beyond hospital settings to directly serve families during the critical 1000-day journey.

With this new funding, Janitri plans to:

• Expand its sales and support network across India

• Enhance its product suite with new offerings focused on in-home maternal healthcare

• Develop wearable vital signs patches for remote monitoring in the third trimester

• Create neonatal monitoring solutions for high-risk newborns

• Scale operations to reach ₹3 crore monthly revenue in the next 12 months

Furthermore, the consumer-focused expansion aligns with their refreshed positioning of bringing joy to mothers, fathers, and entire families as they anticipate and prepare for their newborn's arrival, making quality maternal care accessible at every touchpoint of the pregnancy journey.

Founder Arun Agarwal commented:

“Each time I hear a story of how our device helped detect a complication early and enabled timely intervention, it gives me goosebumps. This is why we do what we do.”

“The fact that we can quantify our impact, and see it grow with every passing month, is what keeps us going.”

Read our illustrated feature story on Janitri and its founder Arun Agarwal by clicking below:

The Janitri Story

If you desire more information regarding Janitri, its valuation, and investment opportunities in future rounds, do write to us at banjan@tal64.com.

More investing opportunities, check:

• The Sova Health Story

• The DocPharma Story

…unpredictable digestive issues.

What started as occasional digestive discomfort had escalated into a nightmare that controlled every aspect of his life. The constant bloating left him curled up in pain.

It led to underperformance at his job. He was fired. And then his family collapsed.

Tanveer Singh, co-founder and CEO of Sova Health, recalls:

“He lost his job and he lost his wife because he lost his job.”

By the time Arjun found Sova Health, he had been unemployed for two years, living with his parents, and battling severe depression.

Max Kushnir, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Sova Health, says:

“He was in a state of total despair. He was thinking about ending his life. I've had conversations with him because one of the coaches, the nutritionist that was dealing with him said, ‘Max, I think he's suicidal. I think there are problems there.’”

For eight months, the Sova team worked intensively with Arjun, starting with a comprehensive gut microbiome test that revealed significant bacterial imbalances. They provided him with custom-made probiotics tailored specifically to his gut profile, ongoing nutritional counseling, and constant support through WhatsApp.

“And little by little, when the gut got better and he was able to function, we gave him his life back, pretty much," Max explains. "And there are many such examples. This is not an outlier.”

Today, Arjun is employed again. He goes to work without fear. He can sit through meetings without anxiety.

“You know the Maslow Pyramid?” Max asks.

“Pooping is really high up there.”

India's First Precision Health Platform

Stories like Arjun's aren't anomalies at Sova—they're the norm. Sova reaches 390 cities across India and has served thousands of customers today.

With an 85% Net Promoter Score and customers willing to wait 85 days (during the pre-launch period; now it is 10 days) for their customer-made probiotics, Sova has created something differentiated: a healthcare solution that actually transforms lives rather than just managing symptoms.

Max reflects:

“Having a chronic disease is an experience of exclusion. You can't travel because you constantly have to think about where the next toilet is. You can’t go to eat with friends because nothing on the menu suits you... You feel excluded,” Max reflects.

“When I was dealing with diabetes patients, I also had very many touching stories, but when I started doing gut health, it actually hit me. When you have a bad day as a diabetic, it’s a bad number on your glucometer, with no physical issues.”

“But when you can’t pass a motion for 5 days you are in pain.”

This is why Sova exists - not to build another supplement company or health platform, but to fundamentally change what healthcare can achieve when it's truly personalized.

Here is a customer who agreed to share his story on video with us:

Sova Health has built India's most advanced precision health platform, starting with gut health and expanding into a comprehensive ecosystem of personalized wellness solutions.

“I remember when we crossed the 2000 customers milestone, I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, 2,000 people actually finished our program start to finish! And for a very good percentage of them, it was probably life-changing.”

The company's breakthrough innovation is SovaX - truly personalized probiotics that are manufactured automatically in individual batches of 90 days' supply in less than 15 minutes per order (manufacturing time).

This represents a fundamental shift from mass-produced, one-size-fits-all supplements to precision medicine at scale.

At its core, Sova offers three integrated services:

1. Advanced Diagnostic Testing

• India's most comprehensive gut microbiome test, analyzing the unique bacterial ecosystem in each customer's digestive system

• Plans to expand into blood biomarker testing for protein and multivitamins (2025) and skin microbiome testing for dermatological health (2026)

2. Custom-Manufactured Personal Supplements

• SovaX: Custom-made probiotics manufactured individually for each customer based on their unique gut profile

• Over-the-counter supplement line for common deficiencies

• Future precision supplements for protein and skin health

3. Expert-Guided Health Programs

• One-on-one consultations with gut health experts

• Continuous support through WhatsApp-based coaching

• Comprehensive lifestyle and nutrition guidance

The process begins with a comprehensive gut microbiome test (₹7,000), followed by expert consultation, and culminates in custom-made probiotics (₹4,000 per month).

The platform's value proposition is simple but revolutionary: instead of trial-and-error approaches to health, Sova provides objective, data-driven solutions tailored to each individual's unique biology.

An Unlikely Partnership

The story of Sova Health began at the UNLEASH conference in Singapore in 2018, just before both Tanveer and Max started their programs at the design-thinking school at Hasso Plattner Institute in Berlin. HPI Berlin is a sister school of the famous D-School at Stanford University, focused on design thinking.

Tanveer had just moved to Berlin a month before traveling to the conference in Singapore. Meanwhile, Max was relocating to Berlin himself two months later to join the institute.

“Max and I were standing in the same queue on the ladder, and that's how we started talking to each other,” Tanveer recalls.

“Two minutes later, we were going through this obstacle race around the same time.”

Once they had returned to Berlin, they began meeting every Wednesday at each other's homes, conducting design thinking sessions with post-it notes covering the walls.

Tanveer says:

“We did proper design thinking sprints together. It was like a gap year for both of us. Neither of us had a full-time job. So we were actually quite invested in this.”

“One of the first ideas we had was to launch a pre-biotic yogurt brand. We called it YoGut.”

They would eventually name their company ‘Wednesday Health’—a tribute to those formative sessions that shaped their vision for precision healthcare.

Tanveer Singh’s Journey

Tanveer Singh was born in Bhubaneswar to a Sikh family with roots in Myanmar, he was shaped by both athletic discipline and entrepreneurial spirit.

“I grew up in Bhubaneswar, which was a small town in the 90s. There was limited infrastructure for schooling, so my parents made the extra effort to send me to boarding school. I attended The Doon School in Dehradun.”

At Doon, Tanveer excelled at multiple sports, playing tennis at the national level while also competing in hockey, cricket, and football.

“Doon has this system of playing seasonal sports. My school routine would be to get up at 6 am and go play an hour and a half of sports. I would play 4 different sports at 4 different times of the year.”

His transition from sports to entrepreneurship was driven by a data-driven approach to health.

“Once I stopped playing competitive tennis, I understood that health is not just about fitness in terms of physical conditioning. Nutrition has a huge role to play.”

This personal journey sparked a lifelong obsession with health optimization.

“I don't like unsolicited advice. I don't like following things just for the sake of it. I like to be convinced. And data is my conviction. The more data you throw at me, the more logical it is for me to make a decision, and the easier it is to make it a habit.”

Before Sova, Tanveer had co-founded and served as CEO of Efficient Bazaar, a centralized procurement solution for the hospitality industry, from 2015 to 2018.

He was also a founding member of India operations and was Director of Operations at Juvalia & You, a fashion accessories brand, from 2012 to 2015.

Max Kushnir’s Journey

Max brings world-class scientific expertise to the partnership, with a background that reads like an international adventure novel.

Born in 1985 in Chișinău, Moldova, then part of the Soviet Union, Max migrated to Israel with his family at the age of six.

“I grew up poor but came from a very educated family. My mother has a PhD in math, and a master's in engineering. But because of this huge exodus of people that came into Israel in a very short period of time, there were no opportunities.”

Max's path was far from linear.

After military service, he worked in theater doing lighting and stage design, then embarked on a legendary 7,000-kilometer motorcycle journey across India on a Royal Enfield Bullet.

“I started in Manali, went to Ladakh, then to Kashmir, then back to all of Punjab, all of Rajasthan, Varanasi, and ended up in Goa.”

“Then I met my wife, and I decided that I wanted to become someone. Before that, I didn't care to be honest.”

“So, I went and got myself a bachelor's degree in biotechnology and plant science from the Hebrew University. And then I got myself a master's in population genetics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. It is by far the best institution in Israel to do any science. This institute is a world leader in microbiome research.”

After finally getting done with his formal education, Max took his first step towards entrepreneurship.

“I started a personalized infant nutrition company based on microbiome data and Israel's first Community-powered Biohackerspace.”

Max's scientific rigor initially made him skeptical of supplements.

“When Tanveer and I met, Tanveer was like, ‘Let's do supplements.’ And I was like, ‘No, we're not doing supplements. Supplements are evil.’ That was literally my standpoint.”

But his perspective evolved through rigorous research.

“At the time, I believed nutrition and habit changes were far superior solutions. I still believe in this. Now, after 2 years of running a very effective habit and nutrition program for metabolic diseases, I realized supplements definitely have their place in a healthy routine.”

“What I also learned is that supplements are not evil at all. They're helpful if they're done right, if they're clinically validated, if they're safe. If they're evidence-based. you are either getting too much or not enough of what you need. Personalized manufacturing solve both of these issues.”

The Science and Scale of Personalized Medicine

Sova Health has cracked the code on delivering truly customized supplements at scale—a challenge that has stymied healthcare companies for decades.

Their approach combines cutting-edge science, innovative manufacturing, and sophisticated customer experience design.

The Scientific Process

The journey begins with Sova's comprehensive gut microbiome test, which uses genetic sequencing to report over 31,000 micro-organisms, including the complete database of FSSAI-approved bacterial strains, and provides insights into digestive health, immune function, and overall wellness.

Max explains:

“We extract DNA and sequence it. Basically we turn it into text. Every individual piece of DNA can be attributed to a specific organism.”

“The sequenced data is analyzed to produce a detailed gut microbiome report.”

Each test reveals a unique bacterial fingerprint, identifying specific deficiencies and imbalances that affect everything from digestion to mental health.

“70% of chronic diseases originate in the gut,” Max notes, citing research from NIH and Science Direct. “This shows lack of awareness in the market.”

SovaIQ: The Intelligence Engine

At the heart of Sova's platform lies SovaIQ, its proprietary algorithm that processes multiple data streams to generate personalized formulations.

"All the formulations are based on multiple variables," Tanveer explains. "We have one set of diagnostic data points that we get from the test itself. But we also collect a health profile."

The health profile captures comprehensive user information: "customer demographics, name, age, gender, any kind of previous health conditions or symptoms that they are addressing. Do they have any associated metabolic conditions? Do they have any allergies? And finally, what are their health goals?"

The sophistication lies in pattern recognition across user cohorts.

"All of this data essentially is absorbed by the algorithm and is then used to generate a specific formulation for that user. And naturally, with every user that we deal with, the algorithm keeps getting stronger."

SovaIQ's capabilities extend beyond simple formulation.

"This is hundreds, potentially thousands of data points that are kind of coming in on a real-time basis. All of this gets ingested by SovaIQ. And this is where the decoding happens. This is where pattern recognition happens."

Max provides a concrete example of the system's predictive power:

"You can give me a gut microbiome test today. And without asking you, at 82% accuracy, I can tell you whether you have too much gas or not."

Custom Manufacturing at Scale

The real breakthrough came when Sova partnered with a Bangalore-based manufacturer to develop a ‘nano factory’—a modular manufacturing system capable of producing individual formulations at an industrial scale.

“We collaborated on this from the ground up. We brainstormed the concept, they designed the machine, wrote code for the automations, and manufactured a modular setup for us. This is how we started custom-made probiotics,” Tanveer details.

“A supplement is produced in a 90-day micro-batch in less than 15 minutes per order.”

Here is a promotional video by Sova that showcases the personalized manufacturing process:

This represents a fundamental innovation in supplement manufacturing, which traditionally operates on massive batch sizes with standardized formulations. Sova can now produce batches as small as one customer's three-month supply while maintaining cost-effectiveness.

SovaX: The Customer Journey

SovaX has designed an intuitive customer experience that seamlessly guides users from testing to transformation:

Day 0-3: Customer orders gut test, kit arrives

Day 7: Sample collected and received by the lab

Day 21: Detailed report ready, expert consultation scheduled

Day 21: Custom probiotic formulation generated and manufactured

Day 30: Personalized probiotics delivered to customer

Throughout this journey, customers receive constant support through WhatsApp—a strategic choice that meets users where they already spend their time rather than forcing them to adopt new platforms like an app, etc.

“If somebody is opening WhatsApp 50 times a day, we need to build a backend that can service WhatsApp rather than trying to push a customer to change their habit and put themselves onto our app,” Tanveer explains.

Conversion and Results

The results speak for themselves. Sova maintains a 70%+ conversion rate from gut tests to custom probiotics. Their Net Promoter Score of 85% reflects genuine customer satisfaction, not mere product preference.

Quality and Evidence

Every aspect of Sova's process is grounded in scientific evidence.

The company is in the process of publishing clinical studies in partnership with a leading hospital chain in India, demonstrating the efficacy of its approach and maintaining strict quality controls throughout manufacturing.

Max's scientific background ensures that every formulation is clinically validated and safe. He explains:

“Whenever you have an offering, especially in the medical field, that is grounded in evidence—that's an objective measure of what you need—then people are willing to pay a premium for that.”

Traction

The company’s unit economics demonstrate the viability of personalized medicine at scale. These numbers demonstrate that precision medicine isn't only scientifically superior, but also economically sustainable.

SovaX actually seems to have almost no working capital requirements:

All orders of SovaX are pre-paid with zero Cash on Delivery (COD).

Healthy Gross Margins coupled with excellent CM3 metrics, net after shipment+warehousing, brand marketing, and performance marketing, show healthy prospects for the core offering of the company.

The Future of Precision Health

Sova's approach represents a template for the future of healthcare - moving from one-size-fits-all solutions to truly personalized health.

And it has also attracted investors of good standing.

Tanveer thought of going to market to raise a small round in Q4 FY25, however, his existing investors themselves ended up oversubscribing to it:

“We raised a small round last quarter, which was oversubscribed by existing investors so we never took it to market. But it felt great to have their vote of confidence.”

With the growth that the company is witnessing, the founders felt it is the right time now to raise their Series A round.

Their success has demonstrated that consumers are willing to pay premiums for evidence-based personalization and that such personalization can be delivered at scale.

The barrier to starting a Nutraceutical DTC brand in India is very low. Contract manufacturing, logistical services, and marketplaces are available to anyone. Lax regulations also enable absurd claims.

Max notes:

“The combination of diagnostics and customization solves these problems.”

“This is the right for Sova to exist. We don't play in the same league with all these other guys. It's just not what we do.”

As they expand into protein, multivitamins, and skin health, Sova continues to refine their model of precision nutraceuticals, setting the standard for how healthcare should evolve in the 21st century.

The company's ability to deliver life-changing results—like Arjun's* story in the beginning—isn't just about better products. It's about a fundamentally different approach to health that treats each person as the unique individual they are, rather than as a generic patient with standard needs.

Tanveer signs off:

“Gut health is a great entry point for us. It's a great proof of concept. Where else can we go with this?” Tanveer asks. “We are already working on other categories using a similar framework of test-backed, personalized products. We call it evidence-based precision health.”

*The name of Arjun in the story at the beginning of the article has been changed to protect privacy.

Sova Health is raising a Series-A. If you are interested in having a detailed discussion with the management and have access to Sova’s data room to learn more details about the company, please write to us at banjan@tal64.com.

Addendum:

Tanveer mentioned:

“Repeat purchase. Bought SovaX for himself first and now for the whole family. Three members.”

“I had to go to our shareholders and ask for a loan of $500,000 so I could meet payroll,” recalls Trevor Tomkins, describing his second week as president of Milk Specialties (now known as Actus Nutrition) in 1996.

The animal nutrition company was hemorrhaging $3 million annually when Trevor, then 47, took the helm after a management crisis.

The company's then-CEO had instructed Trevor to lie to the board about a product's FDA approval status.

He refused.

“It was totally unethical. I got advice from a Chicago law firm. And they suggested that I write to the shareholders and tell them what was going on. So I wrote to the shareholders and said, you know, I'm basically blowing the whistle,” Trevor recounts.

This act of integrity, which could have ended his career, instead became its defining turning point.

The risk paid off. Within days, the CEO was fired, the major debt holder converted their stake to equity, and Trevor was asked if he could take over as president.

He agreed.

He immediately refocused the company on fundamentals:

“Know your customers well, and then know and understand the products the customer wants.”

From that ethical stand, Trevor would transform a failing $53 million company into a nearly $500 million (by revenue) enterprise in just 15 years when he retired—and currently $1.5 billion+ dollars in revenue today—all while adhering to principles he learned from a small dairy farmer in England: his grandfather.

Table of Contents

• Early Life

• Milk Specialities Company

• Trevor’s Most Valuable Lesson

• Creating Wealth For Stakeholders

• Venture Dairy Enterprises

• Venture Dairy Solutions

• India Focus

• Global Opportunity

• The A2 Milk Controversy

• Advice To Young People: Pursue Entrepreneurship

Early Life

Born in 1949 in Hemel Hempstead, a small town north of London, Trevor's journey began with tragedy.

His father, William Gordon Tomkins an airline pilot for British European Airways (a predecessor to British Airways), was killed in an aircraft crash in 1957 when Trevor was just eight years old.

“It was an extremely tough time, as you can imagine,” Trevor reflects. “My mother was left with two children and I was at a very nice school.”

Unable to afford his education after his father's death, Trevor's future seemed uncertain until a scholarship opportunity arose at one of England's most historic educational institutions.

“I was able to get a scholarship to go to one of the oldest schools in England called Christ's Hospital, which was founded in 1552 by Edward VI as a charity school. It was basically founded for orphans and poor people on the streets in London,” he explains.

At this boarding school, now located in Sussex, young Trevor found a new path forward, starting at age 10.

“I learned what a holistic education meant. But most of all, I was inspired by two teachers at the school who encouraged me to follow my dream. And my dream was to be a farmer.”

This unusual ambition for a boy who had lost his father stemmed from the influence of his maternal grandfather, Mark Burgess, who ran a small dairy, cattle, and mixed farm. After his father's death, his grandfather ‘took me really under his wing. He was an extraordinary man,’ Tomkins recalls with evident admiration.

During school holidays, Trevor would work on his grandfather's farm, learning the practical aspects of agriculture while absorbing deeper lessons about business ethics that would guide him throughout his career.

Determined to follow in his grandfather's footsteps, Tomkins secured a place at Reading University, then one of the UK's top agricultural schools. But once there, he was told that ‘the University aims to produce scientists and business people and if you want to be a farmer go to the farming college down the road’ He then had a dilemma but decided to stay!

Trevor completed his degree in agriculture and went on to earn a PhD in animal science—academic credentials that would later prove invaluable in his business career.

His expertise in animal nutrition, particularly dairy cattle, would become the foundation for his career successes.

Milk Specialities Company

After earning his PhD in animal science, Trevor built a career applying scientific knowledge to practical dairy farming.

In 1983, while working for an English company (Volac Ltd), he was sent to the United States for what was supposed to be a one-year assignment to help set up the American business. That temporary position in Beaver Dam, a small community north of Madison, Wisconsin, would change the trajectory of his life.

Trevor recalls, “We had a two-year-old son, a four-year-old daughter, and my wife. And we thought this would be an interesting adventure. So off to America, we went.”

Among his early contacts was a company called Milk Specialties, which became one of his first customers.

When his one year was nearly up, Milk Specialties made him an offer. “They said, why don't you come and join us? We think you'd enjoy being part of our company and we'd certainly enjoy you being part of Milk Specialties.”

By 1985, with a green card in hand, Trevor joined Milk Specialties as head of research and technical services.

“I brought quite a lot of novel technology from Europe, from England, particularly related to animal nutrition and calf nutrition. And I had a lot of fun,” he says.

His innovative products helped the company grow until it was sold to an investment group with ‘fancy ideas of taking the company public’.

“Under new management that understood balance sheets but not products, the company began to falter, making ‘very silly decisions’ and ‘two very stupid acquisitions’—a pet products company they knew nothing about and a competitor whose customers wanted nothing to do with Milk Specialties.”

From 1990 to 1996, the company struggled increasingly until reaching a crisis point. The CEO instructed Trevor to lie to the board about FDA approval for a product—a demand that triggered the ethical stand described earlier.

After becoming president in 1996, Trevor implemented a transformational strategy based on fundamentals. His business philosophy, tested in the crucible of Milk Specialties' near-collapse, yielded extraordinary results:

• From $53 million and losing money in 1996 to $95 million in sales by 1999

• Reaching $140 million in sales by 2006

• Exploding to $500+ million in sales by 2011

This remarkable 10x growth over 15 years came from three principles that echoed his grandfather's wisdom:

“We focused on three things: making sure that our customers loved us, looking after them all the way; making sure our employees were happy, that they felt motivated, they felt part of the company; and making sure that our suppliers felt that we treated them very fairly.”

Trevor's approach to understanding customers was methodical and scientifically grounded.

“I think I was very fortunate with a strong technical background and already a great relationship with most of our key customers. And they were very supportive. They recognized the dilemma that I was in.”

He explains the distinction that many businesses miss:

“I think that I was fortunate to understand the difference between marketing and sales. A lot of people don't understand the difference, but they're very different disciplines. Marketing is a discipline about understanding what the customer wants and then helping basically produce products or help the company produce products that the customer wants. But then sales are about getting a customer to buy the product. Very different.”

With this clarity, he rebuilt the leadership team.

“I hired a head of marketing and we began to change the focus of the company. We began to really focus on products that we knew were going to be successful in the marketplace.”

His science-based approach was another differentiator.

“I recruited some of the best academics from around the country to come and help us. So we met three times a year. And all I wanted to do was focus on the science. I did not want to focus on just the glitz of marketing or the glitz of sales, but focus on building products that would make the customers money.”

Trevor’s Most Valuable Lesson

“The most valuable lesson I probably ever had in my life was from my grandfather—always leave half a sixpence on the table,” Tomkins says.

A sixpence was a British coin, and this philosophy of never extracting the last penny from a business deal would become foundational to Trevor's approach to business.

This philosophy became vivid through his grandfather's actions at cattle markets:

“When he went to the markets in the spring, he would go up to the people selling the cattle and say, ‘That's a very nice looking cow. How much do you want for it?’ And the man would say, ‘A hundred pounds.’ And my grandfather would say, ‘I think it's worth more than that. I'll pay you a hundred and ten pounds.’ And the man was delighted.”

“In the autumn, when he went to sell the cow, a buyer would come up to him and say, ‘Mr. Burgess, that's a very fine-looking cow. How much do you want for it?’ And my grandfather would say, ‘Well, how much are you willing to pay?’ And he would say, ‘A hundred and fifty pounds.’ And my grandfather would say, ‘That's too much. A hundred and forty pounds will be enough.’”

The result?

“What that did is it built this incredible loyalty of supplier and customer,” Tomkins explains. “I have seen so many greedy people in business that want to drive the last rupee/dollar out of the deal. Business must be about win-win, that you leave the table happy and I leave the table happy.”

This counter-intuitive approach—sometimes paying more than asked and accepting less than offered—created relationships that sustained his grandfather's business through difficult times.

“At times, business was hard, things were tough. But he would always be looked after by those loyal suppliers and loyal customers. Very valuable lesson.”

This wasn't just talk. When acquiring a bankrupt competitor for Milk Specialties, Trevor applied the principle of building relationships with the vendors and suppliers of the target company.

“We will pay you back the money that you are owed, although we have no obligation to do so. But we will do that because we think it's an important business philosophy,” he explained.

“Every one of those suppliers then became extremely loyal and helped look after us during tough times.”

Creating Wealth For Stakeholders

As the company stabilized and returned to profitability, its then-shareholders proposed a management-led buyout. Trevor recruited a financial team, and borrowed money from a close friend to ‘put some money on the table,’ and in late 1999, the deal was completed with management owning 10% of the company and new shareholders owning 90%.

From 1999 to 2006, the company continued its growth trajectory, increasing sales to about $135-140 million. At this point, another ownership transition occurred, with a new private equity group, Stonehenge Partners, offering the management team a compelling deal:

“If you stay as a management team for five years and if you grow the company to $500 million, we will increase your ownership to 40%.”

From 2006 to 2011, Tomkins and his team delivered spectacularly on this agreement, taking the company from about $135 million in sales to $500+ million.

“We happened to be in the right place at the right time,” Trevor reflects modestly. However, the results came from his deliberate strategy of diversification and value-added processing.

“We were able to take the technology that we had been developing for animal nutrition and take it into the human nutrition area. So we were one of the pioneers of producing very, very high-quality milk protein products. And we started supplying the domestic and international ingredient markets... and became major suppliers to some of the large nutritional product companies.

The synergies between these divisions created a competitive advantage:

“Each fitted well with the others. We built strong relationships with farmers and developed excellent connections with milk processors. We were able to purchase byproducts from milk processing and transform them into high-value products for the human dairy market.”

The company's physical footprint expanded in tandem with its financial growth:

“We moved from three manufacturing plants to four to five to six to seven and then eventually to eight manufacturing plants spread across the United States.”

By 2011, the Milk Specialties transformation was complete—from a failing $53 million company losing $3 million annually to a diversified dairy nutrition powerhouse approaching half a billion in sales, with management owning 40% of a vastly more valuable enterprise.

Today, the company is known as Actus Nutrition and is closing $1.5+ billion in sales.

Venture Dairy Enterprises

By 2011, with Milk Specialties valued north of $500 million and management owning 40% of the company, Trevor could have comfortably retired.

Instead, he took his grandfather's philosophy global, founding Venture Dairy with his then-CFO, and close friend, Mike Drennan.

“The management team that we had built, many of them stayed, many of them are still there running the company today. And then a number of us took our shares and sold them because we had a separate ambition and we wanted to do something to basically help the underprivileged in the world.”

Venture Dairy is an investment firm with a mission to help small farmers through sustainable dairy farming practices

“The firm will be looking for established businesses in the dairy and food production sector, focusing on companies with revenues between $5-60 million. Our investments typically range from $2.5-5 million per company, acquiring anywhere from 5% to 25% ownership stake.”

The firm brings more than just capital—it offers deep industry expertise, access to technology, and market connections.

“We said that we needed to understand the problems in emerging economies,” Trevor explains. “I personally don't like the word third world. I think we should talk about emerging economies. Or talk about the global south.”

He and Drennan spent years conducting firsthand research across Central America, Vietnam, East Africa, Southeast Asia, and India.

Their immersive research revealed stark realities:

“In Vietnam, we saw small farmers with one or two cows tied up in dirty barns with no access to proper nutrition or veterinary care. In East Africa, farmers were getting paid a pittance for their milk by middlemen who would then dilute it and sell it at a premium. In India, we found farmers with excellent dairy genetics but no knowledge of proper feeding or housing.”

What they discovered was a universal pattern:

“We saw this problem that was the same virtually everywhere. There is a disconnect between the small farmer and the marketplace.”

A key investment thesis for Venture Dairy revolves around creating market linkages that solve fundamental problems.

Venture Dairy made its first investment in India by backing Akshayakalpa Organic in 2013. Akshayakalpa is today India’s largest organic food company.

As Trevor observes, “Akshayakalpa, by creating market linkages for smallholder farmers, managed risk to give confidence to capital providers that this is an investment worth making.”

The partnership with Akshayakalpa flourished beyond financial investment:

“I went down and met Shashi Kumar (co-founder and now CEO) and immediately identified a person with whom I believe I could not only develop a very strong personal and professional business relationship but also a man that would be as good as his word.”

This approach addresses one of the most critical challenges for smallholder farms: access to capital becomes possible when stable market connections reduce investment risk.

Venture Dairy Solutions

Drawing on his lifetime in the industry, Trevor identified three critical pillars for transformation:

“One is identifying appropriate technology. The second is to understand that any successful business must have access to capital. And then the third is to have access to the markets. And there must be a sharing, not necessarily equal, but equitable along that value chain.”

For the first pillar—appropriate technology—this meant developing simple, cost-effective solutions:

“Instead of having those cows tied up inside dirty old barns, we could build nice, ‘modern, simple facilities’ that dramatically improve animal welfare and productivity.”

For the second pillar—access to capital—Venture Dairy looks to work directly with financial institutions:

“We could help work with banks, and local financial institutions to help them build their portfolios. Because most banks, financial institutions, don't understand the complexities of agriculture.”

He elaborates on why agriculture presents unique financing challenges:

“Agriculture is essentially still related to biological systems. And biological systems have risks associated with them. And the job of the specialist is to know how to manage that risk.”

And for the third pillar—market access—they focus on building sustainable connections between farmers and consumers:

“There must be a sharing, not necessarily equal, but equitable along that value chain.”

India Focus

After extensive global exploration, Venture Dairy decided to concentrate its efforts:

“We have restricted our focus lately to India. We believe that you can't be all things to all people. And very frankly, we would prefer to do something really well than several things not so well.”

This disciplined focus reflects Trevor's belief in thorough research before commitment:

“One of the things that I said seven, eight years ago was that I would not want to invest in any other company in India until I understood India. And now I think I understand enough about India to be able to talk with authority and to identify real opportunities.”

This geographic focus came partly from difficult experiences elsewhere.

“We actually had a bad experience in East Africa, in Kenya. We ran into widespread corruption. And so we pulled out of East Africa. Lost quite a lot of money there. But it was totally unacceptable to me to be involved in anything that required needing to bribe people.”

More recently, Venture Dairy has begun investing in Frontrunner Farms (FFIN), a Mysore-based agricultural venture co-founded by Trevor's son Nicholas.

The investment team now includes five experienced entrepreneurs apart from Trevor: Kevin Bellamy (former portfolio manager for Rabobank) and James Neville (former CEO of Volac Ltd and grandson of the founder Dick Lawes who was the person that asked Trevor to go to the US in 1983), Tom Utgard, formerly of Stonehenge Partners and one of the original shareholders in Milk Specialties in 2006, and Mike Drennan.

Global Opportunity

Trevor sees both crisis and opportunity in global food systems.

For India, where 220 million dairy cows produce a mere 2.5-3.5 liters of milk per day, he envisions a radical transformation:

“If we could get the average cow in India to produce 15 to 20 liters a day—five to eight times more—we could reduce the number of dairy cows from 180 to 50 million. And if we got down to 50 million, we could feed those 50 million cows properly, as opposed to trying to feed 180 million cows badly.”

The current inefficiency has environmental consequences too:

“90% of what the cow is eating is just maintaining its body weight and its body movements. What we call maintenance, only 10% is going into production. By contrast, In an efficient animal, 70% of the nutrition is going into producing milk and only 30% maintaining the animal.”

This stark difference represents both an environmental and economic opportunity. With fewer, more productive cows, resources could be used more efficiently while reducing environmental impact:

“Improved efficiency will dramatically reduce the amount of greenhouse gas produced per kilogram of milk produced.”

Trevor's analysis of India's dairy sector is comprehensive:

“The biggest single issue in India is that the dairy population is enormous, 220 million milking dairy animals. I don't think anybody knows. The average milk yield is 2.5-3.5 liters per cow per day. You can't take them down the roadside, have them grazing for a few hours on very low-quality forage by the roadside, with no water, temperatures in the high sort of 20s, 30s, even 40s in places, and expect them to produce milk.”

This observation turns into a call for fundamental reform:

“It's got to start with appropriate housing for the cows, appropriate nutrition, understanding that the cow is a ruminant and it's got to have what we call a total mixed ration.”

Beyond nutrition, he points to quality control issues that must be addressed:

“We've got to make sure that the cow is being managed properly, that it's not getting disease, that the milk is not being contaminated with antibiotics or more. So in India, as you know, a very large percentage of the milk is contaminated with antibiotics and other adulterants.”

The A2 Milk Controversy

Tomkins doesn't shy away from controversial topics in the dairy industry. One particular marketing phenomenon—A2 milk—draws his critique as emblematic of poor science misused for marketing purposes.

While respecting cultural attachments to traditional cattle breeds, he emphasizes that the industry must be grounded in scientific reality:

“I do understand that A2 milk is associated with desi cows and there is a huge attachment to desi cows in India. So I think that we've just got to be aware that the science is thin, but the perceptions are great.”

This is particularly problematic in India, where a massive market has emerged around the purported benefits of "desi cow milk" or A2 milk.

When asked whether products like ‘A2 ghee’ (clarified butter) make scientific sense, his answer is blunt:

“A2 is beta-casein protein. Ghee doesn’t have protein! The butterfat in ghee from A2 cows and or desi cows and regular cows is the same, there is no difference.”

He sees the trend as ‘a short-term hype’ rather than a sustainable business.

Instead of focusing on unsubstantiated A2 claims, Tomkins urges the industry to concentrate on what truly matters:

“We must focus on improved efficiency, which will dramatically reduce the amount of greenhouse gas produced per kilogram of milk produced.”

His focus remains on the nutritional value that dairy provides. Rather than getting caught up in A2 marketing claims, he sees better opportunities in value-added dairy products::

“Milk, whole milk, is one of the most nutritious of all products in terms of its ability to provide protein, energy and fat, energy and lactose carbohydrate. And it's an extremely valuable product. We must focus on the downstream products, the paneer, the curds, the yogurts, the butter, and the ghee. And now the growth of cheese, big opportunities for the dairy industry.”

Advice To Young People: Pursue Entrepreneurship

For young entrepreneurs, Trevor offers wisdom that transcends his industry.

“Never wait to be given responsibility. Just keep taking it until somebody tells you to stop. I have never, ever been told to stop taking responsibility.”

When identifying talent, Trevor has a simple but penetrating question:

“If I gave you a magic wand and you could wave that magic wand, what would you like to be doing in, say, five years?”

The answer reveals a critical quality he seeks:

“The people who say, ‘I would like to be doing this and this or I would like to learn this or this,’ were the first indication for me of the energy I was looking for. So my biggest factor is energy. Energy is very tangible. You can feel it. And if I can feel energy, that person has already got one solid tick by him or her.”

For ethics assessment, his probing question is equally revealing:

“What is the most difficult ethical situation that you have ever been put into in your career? And how did you handle it?”

The answer—or lack thereof—speaks volumes:

“If people said, well, I've never had a, no, I don't think I've ever had a difficult ethical situation, I would say they either had and chose to forget it or they didn't have, in which case they probably weren't really in what I would call a position of responsibility.”

When hiring decisions don't work out, Tomkins advocates for direct, respectful communication. He notes a surprising pattern in these difficult conversations:

“Interestingly, I think in most cases where I've had to let somebody go and I've talked to them, at the end of the conversation, do you know what they say? ‘Thank you. Being honest.’”

To the digital-first generation, he makes a passionate plea to consider the fundamentals:

“I would like to encourage young people to think carefully about what they want their lives to look like. So many young people today get sucked into a fast-moving world of technology and the Internet and the digital world.”

Instead, he urges them toward something more essential:

“One of the very basics is caring for the planet and caring for our soil, caring for our livestock, caring for our food production systems. Because we desperately need young people to be the caretakers and the visionaries who will help this planet produce the food that an ever-growing population is going to need.”

His final observation reveals why, at 76, he continues his mission:

“I can't think of anything more satisfying than entrepreneurship. The joy that comes from solving problems... It's a bit like why people want to go to arcades and play games. They want to win, they want to find solutions.”

If you want to get in touch with Venture Dairy and Trevor Tomkins, please write to us at banjan@tal64.com.

I got an opportunity to visit a few of their dark stores (in Mumbai) and pharmacies last few weeks to see the story in action.

And it is quite action-packed, to be honest. Shashank says:

“Amazon did it, Zerodha did it, Rapido did it. They all entered crowded markets and changed the game not by competing on features, but by completely reimagining the cost structure.”

The comparison to Rapido isn't accidental. While Ola and Uber were taking 20-30% commissions from both riders and passengers, Rapido flipped the script with a simple proposition: Pay Rs. 10 per ride, period. No percentage cuts, no surge pricing drama—just a flat fee that turned the ride-sharing business into a true marketplace where market forces, not platform algorithms, determined prices.

“That's exactly what we're doing with pharmacies,” Shashank explains.

The Data Goldmine

But the real story isn't in the deliveries—it's in the data.

In just over a year, they've processed 320,000+ orders across a network of 1.5 lakh unique customers approximately.

Shashank says, “We will have live inventory data from 1.5 lakh pharmacies now after our recent partnership with the dominant pharmacy ERP providers which on aggregate level have a presence of 85% of retail pharmacy space. We know which doctor is prescribing what medicine, which pharmacy stocks which brands, what combinations work, etc.”

This isn't just operational data; it's healthcare intelligence that pharmaceutical giants and insurance players are eager to access. The company's pitch to investors isn't just about logistics efficiency—it's about becoming the nervous system of India's pharmaceutical industry.

Here is a clip with the views of a pharmacist who is part of the DocPharma network:

The Amazon Playbook

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of DocPharma's strategy is its long-term vision. Shashank frequently references Amazon's journey—a company that ran its core e-commerce business at a loss for decades while building AWS into a profit juggernaut.

“Amazon's e-commerce platform generated the volume that made AWS possible,” he explains.

“We're building the infrastructure today that will support multiple revenue streams tomorrow. Brand partnerships, data insights, insurance partnerships—all built on this foundation.”

How could it go wrong?

I asked Shashank how could it all collapse. What is the worst-case scenario?

Shashank thought for a while and said there are only three ways a platform like theirs go bust — either demand gets disrupted or supply gest disrupted. Or regulations kick in and they turn out to be unfavorable for the platform.

The pharmaceutical industry is governed by a 1947 act that was never designed for digital platforms.

“Companies with more than 49% FDI can't get drug licenses,” Shashank acknowledges. “We're an aggregator, so we don't need one. But regulations could change.”

The comparison to Paytm's regulatory troubles hangs unspoken in the air.

“Regulations can kill a company or crown it the industry leader,” he admits. “You have to be prepared for both scenarios.”

The irony isn't lost on anyone: DocPharma is enabling the very platforms that could eventually acquire or compete with them. But Shashank sees this as inevitable.

“When the market consolidates—and it will—these players will need our infrastructure. Building their own supply chain will cost more than acquiring us.”

“There are 1.5 lakh pharmacies,” he points out.

“They can't all suddenly decide to work exclusively with one platform. But online pharmacy companies? They could consolidate tomorrow.”

It's a calculated gamble, but one backed by the reality of Indian market dynamics.

The Hedge Bet

Recognizing these risks, DocPharma isn't putting all its eggs in one basket. They're expanding into lab services, building D2C brand partnerships, and developing data analytics capabilities. The goal isn't just to survive market consolidation but to emerge as an essential piece of India's healthcare infrastructure.

As the conversation winds down, Shashank shares one final insight:

“We're not building a delivery-aggregator company. We will make money there too, but that is not where the real value lies. We're building the invisible backbone that makes healthcare more accessible. And the data and processes we run will be valuable for multiple players in the industry.”

In an industry often obsessed with flashy consumer apps and billion-dollar valuations, DocPharma is betting that sometimes the most valuable platforms can be the ones you never think about.

DocPharma is raising $5 million in a pre-series A capital raise. They ended Q4 FY25 at Rs 8.5 cr platform sales.

DealShare, an e-commerce unicorn valued at $1.8 billion, knew they were in serious trouble.

Their supplier of Nandini milk products had been caught adulterating goods, and the Nandini authorities had tracked the tainted products to DealShare's facilities.

Prachura Padakannaya points out:

“India is a complex country. Building a company is not just about building a business. It is also a question of solving regulatory challenges, and getting an audience with the right people.”

With their reputation on the line and legal consequences looming, the founders turned to Prachura through a mutual friend. Prachura over the years had become adept at saving such tricky situations.

His help navigating the immediate crisis was invaluable, but what happened next transformed their business.

As he worked with DealShare, Prachura identified an opportunity far beyond the immediate problem.

“Why are you relying on someone else to give you those Nandini packets? Let’s take you directly to Nandini.’”

Using his connections at Karnataka Milk Federation, Prachura helped DealShare establish a direct vendor relationship, eliminating the middleman entirely. The results were dramatic:

“Their profits from this line of business grew like almost 5x. Because their fastest moving products was milk, ghee and a couple of other products from Nandini itself.”

This dramatic turnaround—from regulatory crisis to supply chain revolution—exemplifies the unique value Prachura creates through strategic relationship building.

Instead, what might have remained a costly regulatory headache became a transformative business improvement, all through the power of the right connection at the right time.

From Chess Prodigy to Connection Expert

The foundation of Prachura's relationship-building skills can be traced back to his childhood in Bangalore, where he demonstrated an uncanny ability to learn through observation. At just four and a half years old, he absorbed the rules of chess simply by watching his parents teach his older sister.

He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming an under-7 state champion and competing in national and international tournaments.

“I played till under 15, under 17. I went for Under-11 and Under-13 World Championships also. One was in Spain and the other was in Greece.”

After completing civil engineering at Dayanand Sagar College in Bangalore, Prachura headed to the University of Michigan for a master's in structural engineering.

“One thing I got clarity once I went there—I knew for sure that I was not ready to work under anyone. I wanted to be my own boss.”

Returning to India in 2016, he launched his first venture, Prasan IT Solutions, developing augmented reality tools for medical students.

Despite having no technical background, Prachura built his team through persistent outreach, discovering an unexpected talent for forming connections.

“Before I started any of my businesses, I considered myself an introvert,” he reveals.

“This PR skillset developed by force. I started slowly realizing in my first business that I was forced to do it. I had to do it for my business. And then I realized that I'm actually good at it.”

This self-discovery—that an introvert could excel at relationship building when motivated by a clear purpose—became the foundation for his eventual transition to relationship-based consulting.

Business x Government x Sports x Entertainment

Prachura's consulting firm, Prachura Group, operates at the intersection of relationship-building and strategic problem-solving.

The company helps clients navigate complex regulatory environments, connect with key decision-makers, and establish partnerships that create sustainable competitive advantages.

Often, the firm also invests in promising startups it is building a narrative around.

Prachura explains:

“We invest in startups we are consulting. We also invest in movies and sports teams.”

The consulting approach centers on leveraging Prachura's extensive network to solve problems that would otherwise be difficult or impossible for clients to address on their own.

By maintaining relationships across government, business, entertainment, and sports, he creates value through strategic introductions and targeted problem-solving.

Unlike traditional consultants who primarily offer expertise, Prachura's core product is access—to people, information, and opportunities that can transform business challenges into strategic advantages.

A Systematic Approach to Relationship Building

What sets Prachura apart isn't just his network, but his systematic approach to building and maintaining relationships. His methodology includes three key components:

1. Build Genuine Friendships

Prachura believes in nurturing genuine friendships through consistent communication and not be transactional at all:

“I make it a point to stay in touch with people I value, reaching out at least once every six months. It’s not reaching out only when I need something—it's about remembering people and caring enough to check in on them regularly.”

This habit developed organically during his daily commutes:

“My drive to work was about an hour each way. Instead of just listening to the same playlist repeatedly, I started using that time to reconnect with people I care about. It became a natural part of my day.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when many were feeling isolated, Prachura deepened these connections:

“When everyone was home during lockdown, I made more time for personal outreach. I'd call five or six friends daily just to check in—how they were doing, if their families were safe. I also tried to make new connections by reaching out to one or two new people almost every day. These weren't transactional calls—they were genuine attempts to build relationships during a difficult time.”

2. The Value-First Approach

Prachura always leads with offers of assistance rather than requests:

“When I'm building relationships, I always offer help first,” he explains. “When I offer help, they're like, ‘Okay, this guy's of value to me.’ So I've already established the bond that I'm gonna add value to you. They'll continue the conversation. They'll want to hear my story more.”

This approach creates a foundation of goodwill that makes future requests more likely to be received positively.

3. Persistent Outreach Without Ego

Perhaps most distinctive is Prachura's willingness to continue reaching out despite initial rejection:

“You have to leave your ego aside. You have to be persistent. Just keep knocking and knocking,” he advises.

“People have come and told me, 'Prachura, you're a really persistent man. It is very difficult to say no to you.’”

This persistence has led to connections with numerous high-profile individuals across industries, creating a network that becomes more valuable with each new addition.

The Philosophy Behind the Practice

Prachura's approach to relationship building is grounded in a distinctive philosophy about success and opportunity:

“Success is not earned. It is given. If you don’t ask, you won’t get it.”

This perspective shapes his persistent, value-focused approach to building relationships. By systematically cultivating connections and consistently offering help before requesting favors, Prachura increases the likelihood that when he does ask, the answer will be yes.

He also recognizes the compound returns of relationship building:

“I've just started. Imagine this over a period of five, 10 years, right? It'll compound.”

“Unlike physical assets that depreciate over time, relationships often become more valuable as they mature—particularly when maintained through consistent communication and mutual value creation.”

As businesses navigate increasingly complex regulatory environments and competitive landscapes, the ability to build and leverage strategic relationships becomes a crucial competitive advantage.

In Prachura’s world, relationships aren't just a means to success—they are the business itself.

If you want to work with Prachura Padakannaya or want to know more details about having him as a strategic investor, please email us at banjan@tal64.com.

Tanmay Lad, Rishi Kumar Murugan, and Nilkanth Parmar, co-founders of SubVerse AI, had traveled to the Hitachi Payments office in Chennai to showcase their AI voice agent technology to the company's CTO.

After a lengthy meeting discussing potential use cases, the plan was to set up a controlled demonstration: a conference call where their AI voice agent and one of Hitachi's human customer service representatives would both be on the line with an actual customer.

What happened next was entirely unplanned—and completely changed the trajectory of their relationship with Hitachi Payments.

“While setting up that call, the chief engineer was busy and he was trying to fix it, but he just messed it up,” Rishi recalls with candid humor.

“He was supposed to arrange a conference call with the voice agent and one of their customer service agents. They were both supposed to be in the same call with the actual customer.”

In the scramble to set up the demonstration, something went wrong. The human agent never made it onto the call. It was just the customer and SubVerse’s AI voice agent, ‘Pooja’. Hitachi Payments was handling the call on behalf of its client SBI Payments.

Here is the raw call recording without any edits. Hit the play button on the right:

Rishi explains:

“The customer started explaining the problem they were facing. The AI completely took over the call and resolved the issue on its own.”

The AI voice agent listened patiently as the merchant, Kingsley, explained the socket error he was experiencing with his POS terminal. Pooja then guided him step-by-step through the troubleshooting process.

The AI agent even handled an additional request for paper rolls, creating a delivery order and providing a tracking number:

“Your complaint ID is F for France, V for Varanasi 2383462. I will also send you a WhatsApp message for tracking.”

The customer never realized Pooja was an AI agent. The AI's performance left the Hitachi Payments team stunned.

“By the time the chief engineer's panic subsided, the whole call had already finished. He was searching through the database to see what had happened during the call,” Nilkanth recounts.

What truly impressed the Hitachi CTO wasn't just the seamless problem resolution, but the AI's linguistic adaptability.

“It even switched languages between English and Tamil. The customer was speaking in two different languages,” Tanmay explains.

“The CTO was actually flummoxed by what had happened. He was so happy that he took us out for dinner that evening. And that's how we secured our partnership with Hitachi Payments.”

This unplanned, real-world test had demonstrated something crucial: SubVerse AI's voice agents weren't just capable of handling scripted demos—they could manage authentic customer interactions under pressure, delivering faster resolution times than human agents while maintaining a natural, respectful conversation flow.

Background

Tanmay Lad grew up in Jalgaon in a small business family where he learned the basics of business by helping his family run a stationary shop.

Meanwhile, Rishi Kumar was raised in Mumbai’s Income Tax quarters—his father has been a career Income Tax Officer for 35+ years, due to retire in 2025.

Tanmay and Rishi met each other on their first day on the IIT-Bombay campus—they were roommates.

After graduation, they initially took different career paths. Tanmay joined Cairns, an oil and gas company under Vedanta, where he excelled.

In one notable achievement, he found an innovative solution when four oil wells converted to polymer wells were sitting idle due to commissioning delays. By modifying the process using in-house inventory, Tanmay's initiative resulted in the production of approximately 100,000 barrels (valued at $6.8 million) with minimal extra cost—earning recognition from top management.

Later, he pursued an MBA at IIM Ahmedabad, excelling academically and winning prestigious scholarships like:

OP Jindal Scholarship (1 out of 10 selected from 389 students) and the Aditya Birla Group Scholarship (1 out of 20 from 389).

He then joined BCG, where he led a project to revamp field sales for a major public sector bank, improving salesforce effectiveness by 30% in just three months.

Rishi was a founding member of Lovetreats, an online sexual wellness products retailer where he creatively addressed cultural taboos.

He recounts:

“While building Lovetreats we figured India has a lot of taboos surrounding sexual wellness products delivered online at home (joint family households). So, we registered the company as LT Digital Private Limited and had that as the shipping address on the packaging.”

This approach led to the highest percentage of female users (approximately 65%) among competitors. Impressively, he helped the company grow completely bootstrapped to $1 million in revenue within 18 months of launching.

He then also spent time working with Zoomcar to build PEDL, a last-mile rental bicycle program launched across multiple cities at an affordable rate of 20 rupees per hour.

Nilkanth Parmar, the third co-founder who would join them later, started his freelancing journey after graduating from NIT Surat. He landed clients from the US, Spain, Australia, etc., slowly scaling his team in the process.

He had worked on numerous tech projects, including the open-source project AsyncAPI/Modelina, which creates data models in any language based on an Event Driven Schema; MployTrakr, an HRMS system for MSMEs; Ellu, a Spanish-based E2E encrypted chat platform; and several other significant projects across various tech stacks.

Opportunity

By August 2022, Tanmay, Nilkanth, and Rishi had come together to start something meaningful together.

Tanmay had realized that consulting wasn't creating real-world value:

“The kind of value that we were creating is just in PPT and people's minds. That value is not actually created unless and until people at the client side actually work upon it and execute on it.”

They spent months researching various industries—from electric vehicles to D2C brands to import-export—before eventually zeroing in on the potential of AI, particularly large language models (LLMs).

By April 2023, they recognized that the core technologies they were working with—text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and LLMs—could be applied to create voice agents for customer service, with particular potential in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector in India.

With Tanmay and Nilkanth leading AI product development and backend architecture, and Rishi focusing on sales, marketing, and business development, they had become a team with complementary skills.

The Struggle to Land the First Big Customer—Acko

Securing the first major client wasn't easy.

Even when potential clients showed interest, the path to implementation was filled with obstacles, particularly around integrations with existing systems.

“We got in touch with one of the ex-CXOs through LinkedIn and explained what we were trying to build,” Rishi explains. “He then set up a call with one of his former teammates who was managing customer service.”

After a successful demo, they moved to a ‘paid dogfooding’ process where they demonstrated how their voice agent would handle actual customer calls.

Here is a raw unedited call recording of the SubVerse AI agent talking to a customer for policy renewal. Hit the play button on the right:

“The person was surprised by what was happening—wondering who this agent was that was calling about policy renewal,” Rishi recalls.

The guy was so convinced he was speaking to a human that "he started asking questions like ‘which city are you from?’ and ‘how many years have you worked for Acko?’”

The transcript of this call shows just how convincingly human the AI appeared:

When the customer asked, "Where are you from, Pooja?" the AI gracefully deflected: “I am glad you are curious, Mayankji. But my main goal is to help you with your insurance needs.”

Even when directly challenged with “Are you a human or are you a bot?” the AI maintained its composure: “I understand the confusion, Mayank-ji. I am a virtual assistant here to help you with your insurance queries.”

What made the AI so convincing wasn't just the natural-sounding voice but its comprehensive capabilities:

“That's the level of quality we've achieved with our voice agent—it's human-like, always patient and responsive to how customers speak. It handles interruptions naturally and has all the relevant details about both the car and the customer.”

Acko is now a paying customer of SubVerse AI.

These early successes with Acko and Hitachi Payments (SBI Payments) validated their approach. But as they worked deeper with Acko and Hitachi Payments, they realized that voice agents alone weren't enough—clients wanted comprehensive solutions that could handle various tasks and integrate with their existing systems.

The Evolution of the Product

What began as an AI voice agent evolved into a complete workflow automation platform.

“Just having a voice bot isn't enough—the voice agent is only the front-facing component of what clients really need,” Tanmay explains.

“Behind that, you need specialized agents for different tasks, all working together seamlessly.”

They expanded beyond voice to include Email and WhatsApp agents that could interact with a company's knowledge base to answer queries, create tickets, assign them to relevant departments, and check compliance against company policies.

The core innovation was making these complex workflows simple to design.

Rishi notes:

“Traditional SaaS platforms are too static for this purpose. With our system, you simply provide broad instructions like 'do this, do that,' and the platform handles everything else.”

The system intelligently determines which specialized agent to deploy at each moment, based on the actual content of the conversation.

The transformative impact of their technology was evident in the metrics. Traditional IVR systems had dismal engagement rates.

Tanmay explains:

“Less than 10% of people listen to the entire message; most hang up within 10 seconds. In contrast, with SubVerse’s voice agents, more than 60-70% of people engage in actual conversation, which is comparable to human-agent interactions.”

Nilkanth adds:

“Our AI agents speak multiple languages in natural, human-like voices. They handle complex queries and integrate seamlessly with existing systems. They are always available, delivering consistent, and quality service.”

BFSI Industry-Specific Solution

As their product gained traction, SubVerse AI secured funding through an incubation program at SINE, IIT Bombay.

Currently, both the BFSI enterprise clients of SubVerse AI are processing around a few hundred calls per day and around a thousand workflow operation tasks.

While Acko is already converting into a long-term contract, Hitachi Payments which started a few months after Acko is moving quickly toward a long-term conversion.

Through their journey, Tanmay, Rishi, and Nilkanth have demonstrated that combining complementary skills—Tanmay's business acumen and technical prowess, Rishi's entrepreneurial drive and market understanding, and Nilkanth's technical development expertise—can create solutions that fundamentally transform how businesses interact with their customers.

The accidental demonstration at Hitachi Payments wasn't just a lucky break—it was the culmination of a deep understanding of both technology and market needs. As Tanmay concludes in their pitch:

“Customer service is unncessarily complicated—we want to work with BFSI clients and fix it in the long term for the industry as a whole.”

SubVerse AI is beginning its pre-seed capital raise, where they are aiming to raise $500K from industry-specific angels and funds.

If you want to work with the SubVerse AI team or want to know more details about investing in the company, please email us at banjan@tal64.com.

Educated at IIT-Kanpur, she had worked in corporate America for a decade before returning to India to start Bootcamp Fitness—a chain of gyms for the growing cohort of aspirational fitness enthusiasts in Bengaluru.

As the sole founder running five Bootcamp Fitness gyms across Bangalore—HSR Layout, Sarjapur, BTM, Bellandur—she felt the weight of every decision on her shoulders.

“It was generating positive cash flow from the first month"—enabling organic growth from a single location to five. "I only invested in the first gym, and used the cash flow from that location to open additional gyms. I had scaled up to 5 gyms, all bootstrapped.”

Yet five years into the journey, exhaustion was setting in.

The gyms were generating cash, but scaling further seemed like a distant dream. With each new location, she faced the same challenges: raising capital, finding the right space, training staff, and managing operations—all while maintaining quality across existing locations.

Traditional banks weren't interested in funding her expansion without substantial collateral, and venture capitalists dismissed the business as not scalable enough, lacking the growth trajectory that could lead to a billion-dollar valuation.

“It took 5 years to reach that scale of 5 gyms. If I had received Rs 4-5 crore at that point to strenghten our fundamentals, we could have grown the business significantly because all the foundational elements were already in place.”

“If the market had been more receptive to providing capital for businesses like mine, I would have definitely sought that funding.”

Instead, she made the difficult decision to sell her gyms to different owners and exit the business she had built from scratch.

The experience left her with a profound realization: India was full of fundamentally sound businesses that generated consistent profits but struggled to scale because they fell into a financing gap—too established for angel investors, too small for private equity, and not ‘disruptive’ enough for venture capital.

Archana decided to solve this problem herself. She decided to enter the venture business via angel investing and syndicates.

Her transition into investing began with backing a company called Smart Coin (now known as Onyv), which was a significant success.

She notes:

“It is on track for a 25x+ return. It's a very good outcome—it covers all my all my losses, and delivers significant additional returns.”

During 2017-18, the private markets were hit by a downturn and Archana began to get access to all sorts of interesting companies.

“I had a lot of misses like Classplus, Zetwerk, etc. But I did get Bank Open right (which would later become India's 100th unicorn).”

She went on to invest in over 150 companies. This phase, while expanding her portfolio and network, also exposed her to the limitations and challenges of angel investing.

“In that journey, I burned my hands in most of my investments although the winners were big enough to give a fantastic return anyway. What I found was that there's no due diligence, there's nothing even close to it,” she remarks candidly.

The lack of accountability post-investment particularly troubled her.

“After writing the check, many founders are not even willing to talk to you.”

That is when Archana crossed paths with Siddharth Sirigeri and Abhishek Mittal.

Birth of Endurance VC

Siddharth Sirigeri comes from a family business background, worked in structured finance at Citi, and brings a sharp eye for governance issues. His frustrations with the traditional VC model stemmed from repeated governance problems he witnessed as an angel investor.

He explains:

“I hated it when any startup I backed was failing because of mis-governance. You expect a high level of diligence. You assume that the lead investor will take care of it, but to be honest, they don't.”

Meanwhile, Abhishek Mittal brings manufacturing expertise, having set up two greenfield manufacturing plants producing 10,000MT p.a. of copper products. With experience managing functions across production, sales, partnerships, and P&Ls, Abhishek brings practical knowledge of scaling physical operations, especially useful for deep-tech companies.

His analytical approach to risk management is central to Endurance's philosophy. While he was investing as an angel and via syndicates, governance issues kept cropping up.

“When the invested as angels and syndicate, we were very small check on the captable, so we didn't have any say.”

“I like to think that beyond the point, no one knows anything,” Abhishek says. “It's more about risk management, managing uncertainty. That is what I think I want to keep learning and master.”

The team's collective experience as operators informs their hands-on investment approach.

Together, the three have been collaborating since 2020, with over 50 common angel investments and 15+ co-led syndicate deals—a partnership that combines venture expertise, financial acumen, and operational know-how.

Two-Pronged Investment Strategy

Endurance employs a hybrid strategy across two distinct approaches, but with a common thread—they typically enter a company’s cap table at what they describe as the ‘0.7 stage’.

“We don't come in at pre-seed. So let's say the ballpark in a consumer business is revenues around 1 crore a month,” explains Abhishek.

“We are bridging VC and micro PE to target outsized returns while mitigating risk by scaling cash-flow-positive and disruptive businesses.”

“Our hybrid approach manages risk while still offering exposure to potentially high-growth opportunities.”

1. Cash Flow Accelerator Strategy (Micro PE)

“We acquire stakes in profitable, asset-light businesses at low multiples, then scale them 10-100x using operational expertise and strategic debt, targeting 15-30x exits,” explains Siddharth.

“Small company valuation multiple is low as there are many such companies, but there are fewer large companies, which sometimes command higher valuation. We want to unlock valuation rerating with scale while deploying minimal equity.”

In this approach, Endurance seeks companies with:

• Around Rs 10+ crore revenue with high gross margins

• Valuations up to Rs 50 crore

• Asset-light business models

• Clear USP and low working capital cycle

• Use debt to lever up the ROEs as the company matures, fetching rerated valuations

“Although there are many small profitable businesses in India, most don't scale due to lack of capital and ability to attract quality talent,” observes Archana.

“Coming from operating backgrounds, we understand this. The purpose of the fund is to bring our resources to exceptional operators who have built and survived under constraints and unlock scale together.”

2. Onshoring of IP (Deep Tech)

“Our second strategy is to back IP-driven tech startups in sectors like space, defense, health, consumer, manufacturing, agri and climate,” says Abhishek. “We're leveraging India's cost advantage and government tailwinds for targeting 30-100x returns on exits.”

This balance between cash flow-growth businesses and IP-driven technology creates portfolio diversification that helps manage risk while maintaining exposure to potentially outsized returns.

First Investment: Chelvies Coffee Company

For Archana, there's a certain poetic justice in using her success as an investor to solve the very problem that frustrated her as an entrepreneur.

The capital gap she encountered with her gym chain—too small for private equity, too ‘traditional’ for venture capital—is exactly the space Endurance now targets.

Once such bet, their first as part of Endurance is the Chelvies Coffee Company:

Chelvies founder Dhruv Singh is the 4th generation entrepreneur from his family.

The family business Kake di Hatti, which has 100+ locations, has been serving authentic North Indian cuisine for more than eight decades, since 1942!

The cafe chain’s numbers tell a compelling story: 72% gross margins, store payback periods under 2.5 years, and a vertically integrated model with Chelvies controlling everything from bean sourcing and roasting to food preparation.

Abhishek says:

“They are now at 6 cafes, at a run rate of approx Rs 14 crores a year.

The revenue per cafe is amongst the highest in the industry. Even for a 1200 sft space, it does approx. Rs 30 lakhs per month in the mature stores.”

Siddharth refers to the company being ‘default alive’:

“Theoretically, if you scale this to 100 cafes, it is Rs 250+ crores. For Endurance, there is a clear exit path at that scale. Worst case, at least there will be cash flow. You are not dying as long as you are running it efficiently.”

For Endurance's team, it checked all the boxes of what they call a ‘dhandha’ business—fundamentally sound, profitable, and ripe for scaling with the right guidance and capital.

Within weeks of their investment, Endurance brought in a seasoned CFO, implemented comprehensive financial reporting systems, integrated ERP with point-of-sale technology, connected Dhruv with lenders for expansion capital, and crafted a detailed growth strategy balancing company-owned stores with franchise opportunities.

Most VCs would have pushed for hyper-growth at all costs—burn cash, grab market share, and worry about profitability later.

Archana notes:

“We took the opposite approach. Let's strengthen the foundation first, then scale methodically through a combination of equity, strategic debt, and franchising.”

This hands-on, approach to scaling businesses represents Endurance Capital's deliberate departure from the prevailing venture capital playbook in India—a philosophy that has been years in the making.

Metrics Endurance Tracks

The firm expects to make only 8-10 consumer-focused ‘dhandha’ investments and 3-5 deep tech investments from their first fund, concentrating capital where they have a deep understanding.

When evaluating opportunities, they focus on:

• Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) –