What we've learned about backing companies in India

SolarSquare is a clear case - they sell the third-largest purchase of a middle-income family's life into a market with a deep trust deficit, so it grows through the referrals and local partners homeowners already rely on. That trust engine drives over a third of its growth and has made it India's largest residential solar brand.

Meesho is the same instinct at a national scale. It built India's largest horizontal e-commerce platform on the back of everything conventional wisdom said would sink it: unbranded products, housewives as the salesforce, lower AOVs, and each turned out to be uncopyable because each matched how trust and commerce already move through India.

India is a long-tail economy where the fragmentation is structural. So the operational mess never truly disappears; and pushing it onto customers or third parties you can't control is how you eventually blow it. The companies we back choose to absorb that complexity themselves. In our portfolio: Orange Health owns its labs and riders, SolarSquare owns installation and service, LEAD School owns the entire classroom stack.

While owning the supply side is expensive, it scares off challengers, can't be cut short with capital, and makes customers anchor to the one operator that always delivers. This matters even more now that AI has crushed the cost of building software. AI can finally absorb the coordination tax that made every new city, site, or lab expensive to run, turning a defensive moat into a compounding one.

Rio is a case in point: it started as an all-in-one WhatsApp agent (like Instinct or Muse) and pivoted into pharma once it became clear that medicines were where demand sat. Even Meesho's founders spent months with small vendors and shopkeepers, and came away with the insight that Indian retail is discovery-first, that shoppers come open-ended, happy to be led to a product rather than hunting one down. Both came from being close enough to the market to see what it was actually doing from the ground up, and that proximity is what we look for.

We usually invest at the idea stage, before there's a product-market-fit and often before the market even makes obvious sense. At that point there's little to underwrite except the founder, so we look for people who've already been through the 0-to-1 grind. Usually that means a repeat founder or someone who joined a startup early and helped build it. Both have paid for the expensive lessons already, so they validate ideas quicker, hire their A-team in weeks, and are precise about the risks.

We have a bunch of these in our portfolio: Gazal built Rivigo, and we're now investors in her second venture, Nuuk. Zishaan built Toppr, and we're backers in his next one, Heartbeat. Amit built and exited Simsim with us on the cap table, and we're now investors in his current company, Xneeti.