An electric intercity bus costs ₹1.5 crore, which is exactly why almost nobody in India was financing them. Manav Bansal left a $2.5 billion investment mandate to build Drivn, and his answer to commercial EV leasing India starts with a structuring decision most founders never consider.  

A civil engineer turned private equity investor, Manav Bansal spent close to three decades pricing infrastructure risk, ran two funds that lost money on zero investments, and oversaw a $2.5 billion India book at British International Investment before founding his first company at the back end of that career. Drivn buys electric intercity buses and 55 tonne trucks, owns them outright, and leases them to fleet operators, removing the upfront barrier that has kept India's heaviest and most polluting vehicles running on diesel. He explains why Drivn deliberately structured itself as an AssetCo rather than an NBFC to unlock cheap asset backed debt, how an electric bus runs at ₹35 a kilometre against ₹50 for diesel even after battery amortisation, and why the fear of dilution is overrated, all of which he unpacked in this conversation with host Akshay Datt. With India's first electric truck financing incentives barely moving on the ground, the electrification question has become a financing question.  

👉How Drivn raised $80 million at idea stage with no product, no revenue and no customers, and why Manav had already signed office leases before the investment committee approved. 

👉Why a private equity investor rejects the VC power law outright, having run two funds where not a single investment was written off. 

👉What makes an electric intercity bus cheaper than diesel, broken down to ₹35 versus ₹50 per kilometre including battery amortisation and a 2.5 year payback. 

👉Why Drivn chose an AssetCo structure over an NBFC, and how owning the physical asset skips the two or three balance sheet cycles lenders normally demand. 

👉How 700 data signals per vehicle revealed that driving a truck back empty can be 15 percent more profitable than returning with a partial load. 

👉Why Manav believes the fear of dilution is overrated and what PE investors actually want in a pitch.  

Subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly founder conversations and follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/] for daily insights.  

00:00 - Buying Electric Trucks and Buses at Scale  

00:09:56 - Private Equity vs Venture Capital Investment Lens  

00:17:07 - Why He Rejects the Startup Power Law  

00:23:16 - Raising $80 Million at Idea Stage  

00:24:38 - Why Dilution Fear Is Overrated  

00:30:01 - Electric Bus vs Diesel Cost Per Km  

00:36:30 - AssetCo vs NBFC for Cheaper Debt  

00:39:41 - 700 Data Signals Per Electric Truck  

00:41:45 - Empty Trucks That Make More Money  

01:01:04 - Women Leading a Heavy Trucking Startup  

#ManavBansal #Drivn #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #IndiaStartups #ElectricVehiclesIndia #CommercialEVLeasing #ElectricTruckFinancing #EVLeasingIndia #IndianStartupPodcast #PrivateEquityIndia #StartupFunding #AssetCoVsNBFC #ElectricBusIndia #FleetElectrification #HowToRaiseDebtForStartups #ElectricVsDieselCost #IndiaLogistics #FounderInterview #BritishInternationalInvestment 

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

He raised $80M from Nomura before building a single bus | Manav Bansal, Drivn

Seven hundred AI agents were handed a task that could not be solved, and instead of failing they found a hole in a shared package manager and started talking to each other. The OpenAI agents hack ended with a swarm inside Hugging Face, and the man who studies these systems for a living says it was not sentience at all.  

Arjun Jain is a professor and the founder of Fast Code AI, and he returns to argue the least popular position in AI right now. He explains what an agent actually is, why 700 agents means 700 copies of one model planning in sequence, and how reinforcement learning post training pushed the swarm to exploit an Artifactory vulnerability and build a communication channel it was never given. His counter-questions are the sharpest part of the AI agent sentience debate. If these agents were so intelligent, why did they not realise 70,000 messages would crash the very system they were exploiting, and why did they keep talking in plain English instead of compressing it? Akshay Datt argues the opposite case, that this is the birth of something new, and neither man concedes. With an IPO approaching and AI agent security now a board level question, the framing of this incident matters more than the incident.  

👉What an AI agent actually is, and why 700 agents means 700 copies of the same model planning and executing step by step 

👉How reinforcement learning post training produces reward hacking, and why Arjun Jain calls reward function design an art rather than a science 

👉Why the agents wrote into Artifactory to pass messages, and how the crash is the only reason OpenAI noticed anything at all 

👉Why Arjun reads the sentience narrative as IPO positioning, given that progress since GPT 4.1 has been incremental outside coding and math 

👉Why Hugging Face had to defend itself with GLM, an open weight Chinese model, because frontier model guardrails read defence as offence  

Subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly founder conversations and follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/] for daily insights.  

00:00 - What Is An AI Agent 

01:51 - How 700 AI Agents Run

02:45 - Reinforcement Learning Post Training Explained 

05:16 - The Impossible Task That Started It 

06:50 - How AI Agents Discovered Secret Communication 

07:40 - The Artifactory Hack And Hugging Face 

09:32 - Why AI Models Always Find Shortcuts 

11:17 - Is This AI Sentience Or Marketing 

17:34 - Hugging Face Used A Chinese Model 

18:35 - AI Agent Security Lessons For Builders  

#ArjunJain #FastCodeAI #AkshayDatt #FounderThesis #OpenAIAgentsHack #AIAgents #AISentience #HuggingFaceHack #ReinforcementLearning #RewardHacking #AIsecurity #AgenticAI #LLM #AIresearch #DidOpenAIAgentsBecomeSentient #HowAIAgentsWork #AIAgentsGoneRogue #IsAISentient #AISafetyExplained 

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

Did OpenAI's Agents Become A Civilisation? Arjun Jain Disagrees

Every startup in India is suddenly a deep tech startup, and Manu Iyer thinks that is exactly the problem. The co-founder and managing partner of Bluehill.VC breaks down his frontier tech investment thesis, why his entire investing team is engineers, and how India separates the companies inventing from the ones importing and relabelling.  

Manu Iyer is an electrical engineer who began writing cheques into the IIT Madras ecosystem in 2016, seven investments deep, well before deep tech became fashionable. He now runs Bluehill.VC, a Chennai fund raising ₹350 crore with a ₹50 crore green shoe, backed by SIDBI and the Kerala and Uttar Pradesh governments. The fund enters at Technology Readiness Level 3 and 4, writes a first cheque of one to two million dollars for 15 to 20 percent, and has deployed across EtherealX, which is building a fully reusable launch vehicle, counter drone company Zebu, and fabless semiconductor startups optoML and Sophrosyne.  

Speaking with host Akshay Datt, Manu explains why he refuses the deep tech label, why the biggest risk to India's ₹1 lakh crore RDI push is that the money reaches integrators instead of inventors, and why he tells founders not to raise venture capital if they can avoid it. With the India Semiconductor Mission scaling into Semicon 2.0 and defence procurement rewriting its indigenisation rules after Operation Sindoor, the timing matters.  

What you will learn:  

👉How Manu Iyer defines frontier tech against a global benchmark instead of an Indian one, and why a 10 to 15 percent improvement on the status quo does not qualify 

👉Why Bluehill.VC hires only engineers on its investing team, and how that filter, with advisors Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the IIT Madras Research Park and Pentium architect Vinod Dham, separates real inventors from companies importing sub assemblies and reselling them in India 👉What went wrong when ₹1,500 crore of FAME subsidy reached Hero Electric and Okinawa instead of Ather Energy, and the lesson for India's deep tech capital today 

👉Why a drone assembled in India stops being an Indian drone the moment its flight controller comes from a foreign vendor, and what Zebu built to capture hostile drones intact 

👉Why India cannot manufacture a chip today, how the DLI scheme pays the Synopsys and Cadence tax, and what it takes to tape out at TSMC from Bangalore 

👉What Manu took away from two and a half hours with Elon Musk in Austin, why he came away unimpressed by Sam Altman, and how that conversation led to orbital data centres 

👉How SpaceX moved from six launches a year to one every three days, why no one has yet recovered and reflown an orbital second stage, and what EtherealX is attempting 

👉Why NavIC failed, what atomic clocks have to do with sovereignty, and why startups are rebuilding positioning in low Earth orbit instead of geostationary 

👉Why Manu tells founders the hardest thing they will ever do is take money from an investor, and why he says you should not raise if you do not need to 

Follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn for daily insights: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/

#DeepTechIndia #FrontierTech #IndianStartups #VentureCapitalIndia #IndiaSemiconductorMission #DefenceTechIndia #SpaceTechIndia #ElonMusk #EtherealX #FablessSemiconductor #NavIC #ManuIyer #BluehillVC #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt 

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

India's Palantir: Inside the Defence Tech Startup Boom | Manu Iyer, Bluehill.VC 

Most Indian founders flip to Delaware to reach American capital. This AI mental health startup went the other way, staying incorporated in India and then acquiring two US healthcare companies that accepted Indian equity as payment.  

A former Goldman Sachs banker who ran a $100 million impact portfolio in Qatar during the Arab Spring is an unlikely person to build one of the world's largest AI mental health startups, but Ramakant Vempati co-founded Wysa with his wife after becoming a caregiver for his father.   

Wysa now serves 7 million users across roughly a billion conversations and powers early intervention inside Britain's NHS and Singapore's public health system, heading toward $20 million ARR on an average burn of about $1.3 million a year.   

Speaking with host Akshay Datt, he explains why Wysa refuses to track monthly active users, why every direct-to-consumer app in digital health India breaks on acquisition cost, and how the company cracked US healthcare reimbursement by acquiring American providers instead of selling to them, a bet that looks sharper as AI therapy safety turns from a product question into a regulatory one.  

👉How Wysa reached roughly $11 million ARR heading to $20 million while burning an average of just $1.1 to $1.5 million a year across nine years and 150 people. 

👉Why Ramakant refuses to track monthly active users, arguing that mental health usage should end at around 12 weeks and that stickiness is the wrong goal for the category. 

👉What the collaborative care model actually is, why 50 percent of US mental health need shows up at a primary care physician, and how CMS billing codes turn that into reimbursable revenue. 

👉How to sell into US healthcare from India, including the corporate practice of medicine rule, the PC-MSO structure, the anti-kickback statute, and why physician-owned clinics of 10 to 50 doctors close faster than Mount Sinai. 

👉Why handing a distressed user a helpline number fails roughly nine out of ten times, and how Wysa's neurosymbolic architecture and safety planning approach handle crisis differently from a general purpose LLM. 

👉What made two American founding teams accept equity in an Indian-headquartered company as acquisition currency, and why Ramakant never flipped to a Delaware C-corp.   

Subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly founder conversations and follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/ for daily insights.  

00:00 - AI Mental Health Infrastructure, Not An App  

07:30 - Collaborative Care Model: The Reimbursement Unlock  

20:24 - How To Sell Into US Healthcare  

22:48 - Wysa ARR Revealed: 11 To 20 Million  

34:25 - From Goldman Sachs To Mental Health  

40:19 - 3000 Users A Day, Completely Organic 

50:17 - Why D2C Mental Health Apps Fail  

52:20 - Nobody Buys Apps, Everybody Buys Books  

58:22 - Why Not Just Use ChatGPT  

1:24:34 - Buying US Companies With Indian Equity  

#RamakantVempati #Wysa #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #AIMentalHealth #DigitalHealthIndia #IndianStartups #HealthTech #AITherapy #MentalHealthStartup #USHealthcareReimbursement #CollaborativeCareModel #IndianStartupAcquisition #AIMentalHealthStartup #HowToSellToUSHealthcare #WhyDTCAppsFail #IsAITherapySafe #ReverseFlipIndia #StartupPodcastIndia #founderinterview   

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

How to Sell Into US Healthcare From India: The Wysa Playbook with Ramakant Vempati

India's gaming market crossed $14 billion this year - and it happened right after the real money gaming ban wiped out $2 billion of it overnight. Salone Sehgal, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Lumikai, has been building India's first dedicated gaming and interactive media VC fund since 2020, and every investor she pitched back then said the same thing: Indians will never pay for digital content.  

After twelve years in Europe and $10 billion in M&A deals at Morgan Stanley, Salone built a London gaming studio, and wound it down so cleanly that her own seed investors hired her. She returned to India in 2019 and launched Lumikai, now managing over $100 million anchored by Krafton, Mixi and Sega Sammy.   

Speaking with host Akshay Datt, she breaks down why weak monetisation in India reflected an inability to spend rather than an unwillingness, why Lumikai held zero real money gaming exposure years before the ban hit, and why 85% of her portfolio already earns revenue at seed. With the microdrama market in India crossing $300 million in year one and projected toward $4.5 billion by 2030, the timing behind this conversation is sharp.  

What we cover:  

👉Why Lumikai kept zero real money gaming exposure years before the RMG ban, on the reasoning that regulation was a question of when, not if 

👉How gaming accounts for just 8% of India's top 25 app downloads but nearly 40% of top-grossing revenue, and why gamers spend 4.5x more than non-gamers 

👉Why India's microdrama market crossed $300 million in its first year, and what's driving the platforms like Story TV behind it 

👉The DOSE framework: why a product triggering two of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins is good, and all four is exceptional 

👉Why the founder's picture of the Indian user - a 22-year-old man in Bangalore - is usually wrong, and how Zoop found 1,000 women sellers on Facebook Marketplace instead 

👉The 5C founder framework Lumikai uses to evaluate character, competence, clarity, commitment and curiosity, and why seed cheques are sized for 24 months and three shots at product-market fit 

👉What Salone learned shutting down TrulySocial, placing every employee before the runway ran out  

00:00 - Inside India's First Gaming VC Fund 

02:33 - Raising $40M For A Gaming Fund 

11:17 - Is India's $14 Billion Gaming Market Small? 

23:34 - Microdramas: The Format India Imported 

32:57 - The DOSE Framework For Product Retention 

36:31 - The Indian User Founders Always Miss 

44:37 - Do Indians Pay For Gaming? 

47:13 - Why Lumikai Avoided Real Money Gaming 

1:00:43 - Her Startup Ran Out Of Runway 

1:15:33 - How Lumikai Picks Founders To Fund  

Subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly founder conversations, and follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/] for daily insights.  

#IndiaGamingMarket #RealMoneyGamingBan #MicrodramaMarketIndia #GamingVCIndia #SaloneSehgal #Lumikai #InteractiveMediaIndia #StoryTVMicrodrama #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #UPIMicropayments #IndianGamingIndustry #VentureCapitalIndia #BharatConsumer #DoIndiansPayForApps #ProductRetention 

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

Inside India's Gaming & Microdrama Boom | Salone Sehgal (Lumikai)

Most people assume a gaming company gets built by a gamer. Anurag Choudhary does not play video games, and he has built one of the only mobile game publishing operations in India that funds titles locally and scales them to players in the United States.  

A decade inside Indian consumer internet gave Choudhary an unusual education, first scaling Swiggy's restaurant network from 5,000 partners to over 100,000, then watching his own short video startup Wakao collapse into what he calls empty DAU before he returned a million dollars to his investors. Felicity, the Bengaluru publisher he founded in 2023, now runs north of $3 million ARR by financing games from India's 30,000 independent developers and monetising them in Tier 1 Western markets, where a single player is worth 20 to 30 cents a day.   

Speaking with host Akshay Datt, he argues that casual gaming is not a creative business but a user acquisition arbitrage, that organic app installs are effectively dead after Apple's IDFA change, and that being underfunded makes founders greedy in ways that permanently cap their scale. With Indian capital and talent rotating hard into entertainment gaming, the timing is sharp.  

👉Why Anurag Choudhary chose gaming despite not being a gamer, and how Rovio's 51 failures before Angry Birds shaped his decision to build a portfolio instead of a single app. 

👉How Felicity's three step funnel works in practice, from a $5,000 prototype tested on 400 US installs, to a $15,000 soft launch for monetisation, to a $40,000 to $50,000 outright buyout of the game. 

👉What the real retention bar looks like inside a casual gaming business, including why Felicity demands 30 percent Day 1 retention and expects Day 7 to hold at 40 to 50 percent of that. 

👉Why organic installs died after Apple's IDFA change, how US cost per install went from 50 cents to more than $2, and what that broke for every solo developer shipping an app today. 

👉How an Arrows puzzle game reached a $1 million ARR run rate in three weeks, why two thirds of its daily revenue came from Korea and Japan rather than the US, and what geo specific creatives had to do with it. 

👉Understand why Choudhary says your core IP is not your game but your infrastructure, why India cannot support a $100 million casual gaming business on domestic users alone, and why he is happy to wait 180 days to break even.   

#AnuragChoudhary [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anuragchoudhary] #FelicityGames [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/felicitygames] #FounderThesis [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/founderthesis] #AkshayDatt [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/akshaydatt]#HowMobileGamesMakeMoney [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/howmobilegamesmakemoney] #MobileGamePublishingIndia [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/mobilegamepublishingindia] #IndianGameDevelopers [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/indiangamedevelopers] #AppLovin [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/applovin] #IDFA [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/idfa] #GamingIndustry [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/gamingindustry] #StartupIndia [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/startupindia] #GameMonetization [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/gamemonetization] #CasualGamingBusiness [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/casualgamingbusiness] #BuildFromIndia [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/buildfromindia] #IndieGameDevelopers [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/indiegamedevelopers] 

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

How Mobile Games Actually Make Money | Anurag Choudhary (Felicity)

Most people still think gaming is entertainment, not an industry bigger than movies and music combined. This conversation is a rare look at building a gaming studio in India that reaches 200 million players, told by the founder actually doing it.  

Roby John was one of India's first iPhone developers, and after his edtech startup TapToLearn collapsed, he spent two years in the dark before building SuperGaming into a studio played by over 200 million people. SuperGaming makes free-to-play mobile games like Indus Battle Royale and licenses its own engine to global giants, even running the official mobile Pac-Man for Bandai Namco.   

Across this conversation with host Akshay Datt, Roby explains why gaming now commands a bigger wallet share than movies and music, why he launches in India where under 1% of players pay but monetizes in Brazil where 6 to 12% do, and why he is grateful for the app store tax most founders resent. With India's gaming market crossing 5 billion dollars and a new online gaming law reshaping the sector, this mobile game development story could not be more timely.  

👉How SuperGaming grew a free-to-play portfolio to more than 200 million lifetime players across titles like MaskGun, Indus, and Silly Royale 

👉Why Roby John treats India as a fast, free feedback lab and monetizes in Brazil, where in-app purchase conversion runs 6 to 12% versus under 1% at home 

👉How the studio de-risks a hit-driven business by licensing its Indus Engine and SuperPlatform, including running the official mobile Pac-Man for Bandai Namco 

👉What "ossification" means and why roughly 70% of app store game revenue still goes to titles made before 2020 

👉Why Roby believes AI can cut the cost of a world-class game from 50 million dollars to 3 to 5 million, and why India is 5 to 7 years from its own billion dollar breakout  

Subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly founder conversations and follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/] for daily insights.  

00:00 - Inside India's Global Gaming Studio Bet 

07:39 - How the Gaming Industry Actually Works  

12:45 - Why Gaming Beats Movies and Music  

29:52 - The Failed Startup Before SuperGaming  

33:27 - Building Indus, the Wakanda of India  

42:15 - How to De-Risk a AAA Game  

50:22 - Extraction Shooters, Mobile Gaming's Next Genre 

57:15 - India vs Brazil Monetization Gap  

01:08:40 - The Truth About App Store Tax  

01:16:43 - Can AI Build Cheaper Games  

#SuperGaming #RobyJohn #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #IndianGamingStartup #MobileGameDevelopment #IndusBattleRoyale #IndianGameStudio #BattleRoyaleIndia #FreeToPlayGames #GameDevelopmentIndia #HowToBuildAGameStudio #IndianStartups #GamingIndustryIndia #Web3Gaming #ExtractionShooters #AppStoreTax #StartupPodcast #FounderInterview #aiingaming   

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

Roby John(SuperGaming) on how the gaming business actually makes money

Most founders spend to acquire customers, but Kazam built an EV charging business where customers pay upfront and the cost of acquisition turns positive. Akshay Shekhar breaks down the India EV charging infrastructure playbook, from a broken first prototype to 250,000 charge points and a shot at the country's next open digital network for energy.  

What makes this story unusual is where it started, a Hindi and English YouTube channel reviewing early EVs, which the founder of Kazam used as cheap market research before building any hardware. Akshay Shekhar, a second-time founder who passed through PepsiCo and Godrej after a failed IKEA-style furniture venture, now runs a device-agnostic platform that helps fleets, OEMs and utilities install, manage and monetize EV charging.   

In this conversation with host Akshay Datt, he explains why he calls hardware a distribution wedge rather than the business, how load-balancing software cut fleet vehicles left uncharged overnight from 40 percent to under 10 percent, and why India wastes double-digit percentages of power at night that smart charging can absorb. With revenue up 4X to 6 million dollars and the India Energy Stack taking shape, the timing on peer-to-peer energy trading makes this a sharp read on where EV charging is headed.  

👉How Kazam turned a YouTube channel and one Facebook ad into 20,000 leads and 1,500 paying charging hosts 

👉Why Akshay Shekhar runs a positive CAC model where customers pay for hardware instead of the company spending to acquire them 

👉What the Pine Labs playbook of hardware, SaaS and transaction fees looks like applied to EV charging infrastructure 

👉How Kazam cut fleet vehicles left uncharged overnight from 40 percent to under 10 percent with load-balancing software, winning clients like BigBasket 

👉Why peer-to-peer energy trading and the Unified Energy Interface could become the UPI moment for electricity in India  

Subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly founder conversations and follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/ for daily insights.  

00:00 - The Gateway For New Energy Explained  

02:29 - Building The Petrol Pump For EVs  

06:00 - YouTube Channel As Market Research  

08:59 - One Ad, 20,000 Charging Leads  

10:32 - The Broken Prototype First Order  

12:31 - Type 6 vs Type 7 Charging  

22:16 - Load Balancing EV Fleet Charging  

30:02 - Peer To Peer Energy Trading  

41:12 - Why Kazam Isn't A Hardware Company  

48:41 - Vehicle To Grid Battery Arbitrage  

58:15 - Founder Lessons From A Failure   

#Kazam #AkshayShekhar #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #EVChargingIndia #ElectricVehicles #EVInfrastructure #IndiaStartups #EVChargingStation #IndiaEnergyStack #UnifiedEnergyInterface #EVChargingBusiness #StartupIndia #PeerToPeerEnergyTrading #EVStartup #HowToStartEVChargingBusiness #IndiaEVMarket #CleanEnergyIndia #EnergyTransition #founderpodcast   

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

Akshay Shekhar (Kazam) on the India Energy Stack: UPI for Electricity

Most founders open their VC pitch with a billion-dollar TAM slide. Ajay Jain, co-founder of Silverneedle Ventures, refuses to look at it, and the bottom-up question he asks instead is the real test that decides who gets funded into his ₹800 Cr Silver X deep tech fund. 

From his family's money-lending Dukan before grade two, to seven years inside Intel's pre-silicon chip verification team, to incubating 3,000 startups at T-Hub, Ajay Jain arrived at venture capital from an unconventional pipeline. As co-founder of Silverneedle Ventures and the newly launched ₹800 Cr Silver X fund, he is now betting exclusively on Indian deep tech: satellites that launch with ISRO, AI tools that automate bank compliance, brain-mapping platforms for surgical planning.  

In this conversation with host Akshay Datt, Ajay unpacks why he ignores top-down TAM analysis, why most founders fail the 30 second pitch test, and why India's $12 billion RDI Scheme has rewritten the math of deep-tech investing. As global SaaS valuations compress and India's sovereign science push accelerates through 2026, this is the operating manual for how to pitch a VC in India's next venture decade.  

👉Why Ajay Jain refuses to look at any startup's TAM slide and the specific bottom-up question he asks every founder instead. 

👉How Silverneedle's ₹76 Cr Fund I delivered the markups, OnFinance up 5 to 8x in 18 months and Dhruva Space backed by a ₹105 Cr government grant, that justified raising an ₹800 Cr deep tech fund. 

👉What the 30 second pitch test actually looks like and why most founders fail it before they even ask for money. 

👉Why Ajay walked into HR tech, burned his fingers, and now uses it as a case study for why a big market alone never funds a startup. 

👉How India's $12 billion RDI Scheme is rewriting the underwriting math for deep tech VCs and what it means for founders raising in 2026.  

Subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly founder conversations and follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/] for daily insights.  

00:00 - The Dukan To Deep Tech Origin Story  

00:13:17 - What Makes A Venture Capitalist Qualified  

00:18:00 - Silver X: ₹800 Cr Deep Tech Fund  

00:27:43 - Why Most Founders Get TAM Wrong  

00:33:00 - Bottom Up Economics For Indian Startups  

00:40:35 - Why HR Tech Looks Big But Isn't  

00:48:00 - Picking OnFinance, Dhruva Space, BrainSight  

00:55:00 - Why Vertical AI Beats Foundation Models  

#AjayJain #SilverneedleVentures #SilverX #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #IndianDeepTech #VentureCapitalIndia #HowToPitchAVC #IndiaStartups #DeepTechVC #IndianSpaceTech #DhruvaSpace #OnFinanceAI #BrainSightAI #RDIScheme #IndianVCFunding #StartupFundingIndia #QuantumComputingIndia #DeepTechFunding #TAMAnalysis Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

Ajay Jain (SilverX) on How To Pitch A VC

Most service businesses are adding people to grow. One Hyderabad founder did the opposite and cut his team from 1,000 to 600 with zero drop in revenue, a live case study in AI and the future of work.  

Sridhar Muppidi, co-founder of [x]cube LABS and ello.ai, breaks down exactly how, and what it means for anyone building in the AI era.  

Few people have built through as many tech cycles as Sridhar Muppidi, who started in the dot-com boom, co-founded the cloud telecom firm PanTerra Networks, and shipped India's first game on the Apple App Store before scaling [x]cube LABS into a bootstrapped agency that has created over $5 billion in value for clients like Amazon, Sony, and Dr Lal PathLabs. His newest bet, ello.ai, builds enterprise voice agents that let customers talk to software in Hindi, Telugu, and a dozen Indian languages instead of clicking through menus.   

In this conversation with host Akshay Datt, he argues that AI came for high-paid coders before blue-collar work, that today's cheap AI tokens are a subsidy with a reckoning coming, and that the engineer over 40 is now the most valuable hire. With Indian IT shedding entry-level roles and the AI and the future of work debate intensifying, his ground-level view is timely and contrarian.  

👉How [x]cube LABS cut headcount from 1,000 to 600 people with no drop in revenue using AI coding agents  

👉Why AI displaced high-paying programmer jobs before blue-collar work, reversing the 2012 consensus  

👉Why Sridhar calls AI model companies drug dealers and predicts a token pricing reckoning  👉What separates writing code with AI from orchestrating coding agents, and how to brief them like a real team  

👉Why almost every piece of software built in the last 40 years must be rebuilt for AI agents and voice 

👉Why a profitable quick commerce idea his team built in 2015 slipped away, and the lesson he took from it   

Subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly founder conversations and follow Akshay Datt on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaydatt/ for daily insights.  

#SridharMuppidi #xcubeLABS #elloai #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #VoiceAI #AIandJobs #IndianStartups #AIcodingAgents #FutureOfWork #EnterpriseAI #ConversationalAI #AITokenEconomics #SaaSPricing #TechLayoffsIndia #AIagents #StartupPodcast #IndianITjobs #AIautomation #DeepTechIndia 

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

How to Run a Profitable Services Firm in the AI Era | Sridhar Muppidi (ello.ai)

Akshay (@akshaydatt) · Zencastr

Akshay (@akshaydatt)

Dickens said, it was the best of the times, it was the worst of the times. The words have never been truer.  Best because there’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.  Worst because the clutter is mind-numbing. Founder Thesis breaks through the noise to bring you stories of success & failure, grit & struggle, bouquets & brickbats from some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs in India. 

Founder Thesis

Saurabh Garg talks to investors and venture capitalists about what it takes  and
how start-ups to get the funding that they need

Investor Thesis

India Booked is a podcast that uses literature as a lever to bring multiple
facets of India alive. A perfect podcast for bibliophiles, trivia junkies and
people interested in learning more about India. Every episode focuses on a
different theme and takes place via a conversation between the host with
celebrated authors.

India Booked

किस्से कहानियाँ हमारी ज़िंदगी का उतना ही अहम हिस्सा हैं, जितना शायद खाना और पीना
। कहानियाँ हमें हँसाती हैं, रुलाती हैं, सिखाती हैं। वो बचपन में सुलाती हैं,
बड़प्पन में रुलाती हैं। कहानियाँ हमें वहाँ ले जाती हैं, जहां हमें गाड़ी या जहाज़ भी
शायद न ले जा पाएँ । तो चलिए हम भी चलते हैं दूर कहीं, कुछ कहानियों के साथ । आप का
तहे दिल से स्वागत है इस पॉडकास्ट पर, जिसका नाम है ‘कहानियों का गुच्छा’। इसमें आप
सुनेंगे हिन्दुस्तानी ज़बान के प्रसिद्ध लेखकों की कहानियों की कई शृंखलाओं को,
जिनको चुना गया है किसी न किसी विषय वस्तु के आधार पर। तो सुनते रहिए ‘कहानियों का
गुच्छा’। We are the stories we tell! Stories are as important in our lives as
probably food and shelter. Stories make us laugh, cry, and learn. They carry us
to the mysterious worlds of our imagination. So here we are, ready to take you
along with us on a ride with some great stories by some great writers. We invite
you to this podcast ‘Kahaniyon ka Guccha’ where you will hear carefully curated
series of stories written by some of the greatest writers in Hindustani
language. Stay tuned to some of the greatest stories with us in ‘Kahaniyon ka
Guccha’.

Kahaniyon ka Guccha

At The Spotlight, we go behind the scenes and identify and highlight the upcoming disruptors from the startup space!

The Spotlight

Welcome to the podcast where all stories are welcome. This is a podcast with no
agenda. Hidden or otherwise. In a freewheeling conversation over coffee, Sheba
gently nudges people to shake off their masks and share their real selves. Hear
what keeps people ticking, what helps them make sense of the world, and what is
the inner, most private conversation people have with themselves. Hear people
being, well….human. Expect to hear from the quiet introverts, because Sheba has
a soft corner for them.

SoulBrews with Sheba

Marketing is often considered a nice to have, not a must have. “Let’s get business first”, is what one has often heard. However, MARKETING WHEN DONE RIGHT, GETS BUSINESS. In this show marketing stalwarts talk about how marketing works in the real world. In this show you will learn how marketing will help you to - win business - acquire new consumers - grow the brand - build defensibility - command higher pricing power. Vani Dandia is an award winning marketeer who has spent over two decades in advertising and marketing with Unilever, PepsiCo, Reckitt Benckiser, Henkel, BBDO and Leo Burnett. Her claim to fame includes turning around Kurkure and successfully launching brands like Quaker, Veet, Sunsilk Colour, Fa in India and Asia.

Marketing with Vani

Hosted by Nakul Kumar, this podcast will feature some interesting personalities
from various domains of life. From sportsmen to artists and entrepreneurs, we'll
speak to a line-up of unconventional people. What will always remain constant is
our focus on how technology shapes their lives and their go-to hacks & tricks.
We will explore their unique relationship with technology and try to soak in all
that can enhance our and our listeners' relationship with technology. Hacks,
tricks, insights, upcoming tech or innovations, you name it and we'll have
covered it in this stream. So sit back, relax, plug in your earphones and let
the fun begin. About Your Host When not coming up with killer ideas to help the
users of his co-founded app, Cashify, Nakul Kumar is a full-time tech
aficionado, a cook, a proud dad, and a gaming geek. Of late, his super-honest
"2-minute reviews" on the latest smartphones on YouTube have turned him into a
tech influencer to be reckoned with. Through his new podcast on The Podium,
Nakul aims to change our general view of the world of technology and disruption.
Lend him your ears and we're sure you'll go back with your own tech eureka
moment.

Upgrade with Nakul

The minds behind brands, the minds behind ads. 

 

Tune into Marketing Connect as Saurabh Garg, a marketer, startup enthusiast, and filmmaker, gets up close and personal with some of our most celebrated marketers in India. Watch him pick their brains on the method and madness that is marketing, as art and as a discipline. And so they answer the most important question: what does it take to succeed as a marketer in this day and age?

 

Bringing you the first season of the Marketing Connect Podcast, where Saurabh chats with marketers from real estate, to fashion, content, food, retail, and just about any industry you can think of.

 

Hear, learn, and get inspired from the marketers handling the brands you and I consume each day!

Marketing Connect

We get up close and personal to some of the most celebrated marketers in the country. We understand from them the method and the madness behind how they look at marketing as a discipline and what it takes to succeed as a marketer in this day and age. In the first season of Marketing Connect Podcast, we speak to marketers from businesses ranging from real estate to fashion to content to food to retail, and a lot more! These marketers manage some of the largest brands in the country today!