What if the biggest bottleneck in AI antibody discovery was never AlphaFold's problem to solve at all? Dr. Aridni Shah of Immunito AI sat down with host Akshay Datt to explain how her team builds antibodies from a target's shape alone, compressing a process that used to take animals a year and a half into hours.  

Dr. Aridni Shah left academic structural biology, after a PhD at NCBS-TIFR studying honeybee brains, when she hit the wall every antibody researcher knows: custom antibody generation can take a year to eighteen months with no guarantee of success. That bottleneck became the founding insight behind Immunito AI, the Bengaluru TechBio company she co-founded with Trisha Chatterjee in 2020. Instead of injecting animals and waiting, Immunito AI uses generative AI to design antibodies atom by atom, directly from a target protein's shape, a technique the company built before AlphaFold existed. Across four internal preclinical oncology and autoimmune programmes, and licensing economics that can rival Merck's $30 billion Keytruda, the company is testing whether Indian deep tech can originate novel biologics instead of just manufacturing generics. In this conversation, Aridni walks host Akshay Datt through AI antibody discovery and why Indian venture capital still struggles to underwrite biotech risk.  

👉How Immunito AI's AbInitio platform designs antibody sequences and 3D structures simultaneously from a target protein's shape, without animal immunization. 

👉Why Aridni Shah's PhD research on honeybee time memory exposed the yearlong bottleneck in traditional antibody discovery that led her to found Immunito AI. 

👉What makes AlphaFold different from Immunito AI's AbInitio, and why protein folding prediction alone cannot design a new antibody from scratch.  

👉How a single preclinical antibody licensing deal can carry a $10 to $50 million upfront fee and $200 to $500 million in milestones, similar to how Merck's Keytruda scaled to $30 billion in annual sales. 

👉Why Indian venture capital funds still struggle to underwrite biotech and drug discovery risk compared to US funds like a16z.

#AridniShah #ImmunitoAI #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #AIAntibodyDiscovery #AIDrugDiscovery #DeNovoAntibodyDesign #BiotechIndia #IndianStartups #DeepTechIndia #AntibodyTherapeutics #GenerativeAI #DrugDiscoveryAI #BioE3Policy #startupindia #TechBio #CancerResearch #AIInHealthcare #IndianVentureCapital #NCBSBengaluru 

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

How AI Builds Cancer Drugs From Scratch | Aridni Shah, Immunito AI

Shirts are 2x the market. Pants are 200x less crowded. Dhruv Toshniwal bet on the category everyone treats as an afterthought, and built The Pant Project into a ₹120 Cr run-rate D2C brand.  

Dhruv grew up around a 50-year-old textile business, Banswara Syntex. He studied finance at Wharton, spent four years at Oliver Wyman in New York, then came home to build something of his own. The first two brands he tried inside the family business didn't work. The third idea was pants.  

The Pant Project started as a custom-made pants brand in the middle of COVID. It got stuck around ₹30 Cr. Then ready-to-wear took off, and today it's 85% of the business, doing about ₹10 Cr a month in net sales.  

In this episode of the Founder Thesis podcast with Akshay Datt, Dhruv breaks down how Indian men actually buy trousers, why comfort beats logos in bottom wear, and what it takes to grow a D2C brand without burning cash.  

What you'll learn 

👉Why 80% of men's pants sales come from just five colours 

👉How fit accuracy went from 75% to 93% using customer data 

👉Why 60% of sales come from the brand's own website, not marketplaces 

👉How marketing efficiency went from ₹1 to ₹4 of sales per ₹1 spent 

👉The 700 sq ft store format that works, and why one trial room loses sales 

👉How no-fade Ink Lock jeans grew denim to 25% of sales 

👉Why Dhruv says raise late, raise little, and pick partners you trust  

Chapters 

00:00 How Indian men buy pants  

03:35 Offline vs online, value vs premium 

 06:15 The ₹40,000 Cr bottom wear market  

08:48 Why pants: low inventory risk, high loyalty  

10:54 From Wharton to Oliver Wyman to Banswara Syntex  

13:12 Two brands that didn't work  

14:57 Starting custom-made during COVID  

15:47 Fixing fit with customer data  

18:21 ₹10 Cr a month and the channel split  

20:15 Custom vs ready-to-wear  

22:54 Fabric R&D and Ink Lock jeans  

26:25 The grip that keeps shirts tucked 

29:16 Margins and raising the first round  

32:10 What investors asked about the family business  

34:00 How funding helped hire senior talent  

36:53 Fundraising advice for first-time founders  

38:13 How marketing got 4x more efficient  

42:51 What works in retail stores  

48:15 How online ads drive store footfall  

51:02 Focus as a superpower  

55:30 Hiring and retaining talent  

01:01:20 Where AI helps and where humans win  

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

Hitting ₹120 Cr Selling Only Pants | Dhruv Toshniwal, The Pant Project

Two companies can start the same size, and only one of them grows up. Manish Sabharwal lost his first venture to a drag along right, then spent 25 years building TeamLease toward a single stated ambition, to be India's largest private employer.  Manish Sabharwal is the son of civil servants who went to Wharton, came home to start a life insurance company that turned into a payroll business, and sold it to Hewitt when his investor exercised a drag along right. He then spent 25 years building TeamLease, hiring somebody every five minutes for 20 years. He took no outside money for the first seven years, made no acquisitions for 16, and today runs 180 people in regulatory affairs whose only job is compliance. 

With host Akshay Datt, himself a founder who spent a decade in HR before shutting it down, he works through why most companies stay dwarfs, why search firms never make good public companies, and why 45% of India's labour force is still on the farm 35 years after 1991. Recorded months after he handed over the company he built.  

👉How Manish tells a baby from a dwarf, and why the difference between them is never more funding. 

👉Why giving away 50% of India Life for $2 million forced a sale years earlier than either founder wanted. 

👉What his own board member said about the two co-founders, that without Ashok the company would be a hundredth its size, and without Manish it would not have survived. 

👉Why search firms like Korn Ferry never became good public companies while staffing businesses did. 

👉How 180 people in regulatory affairs and 26,000 ways to go to jail explain why India has so few mid-sized employers. 

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

#ManishSabharwal #TeamLease #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #IndianStartups #StaffingIndustry #HRIndia #Lupin #DeshBandhuGupta #Wharton #IndianEconomy #EaseOfDoingBusiness #RegulatoryCholesterol #LabourReform #StartupIndia #HowToScaleAStartup #IndiaVsChina #FounderPodcast #BuildingInIndia #IndianBusinessPodcast 

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

You Can't Build a Factory on Cash Flow: TeamLease Founder's Lesson

India supplies a fifth of the world's medicines and invents almost none of them. Venkat Nelabhotla spent three decades inside that industry before co-founding Vyome, and here he explains where drug discovery in India stalls, and why he took a rare disease drug to the Nasdaq instead.  

Few operators have run a shampoo brand, a vaccine company and a Nasdaq listed biotech. Venkat Nelabhotla took CavinKare from 21 crores to 200 crores, launched India's first recombinant hepatitis B vaccine at Shantha Biotechnics at 300 rupees against the multinationals' 800, and ran Emami as CEO while its market cap went from 200 million dollars to 1.5 billion. Then he co-founded Vyome with a Harvard professor and went after malignant fungating wounds, the open lesions advanced cancer leaves on the skin, for which no FDA approved drug exists anywhere.   

Speaking with host Akshay Datt, he lays out the rare disease drug development strategy behind a phase two trial that ran on just 15 patients, and his own index of drug discovery in India: if America is 100, China is 40 and India is two or three. It arrives as US tariffs push the Indian pharma industry to think past generics.  

👉How Venkat priced India's first hepatitis B vaccine at 300 rupees against GSK and Sanofi at 800, and won volume by running mass vaccination camps instead of fighting for South Mumbai clinics 

👉Why Vyome deliberately started with Indian dermatology products as low hanging fruit, and only pivoted to US drug development after a 2 billion dollar biotech fund led its Series C 

👉What a malignant fungating wound actually is, why zero FDA approved therapies exist for its symptoms, and how a phase two study in 15 patients produced statistically significant data 

👉Break down the orphan drug designation stack, roughly 3 to 4 million dollars in approval fee waivers, seven years of market exclusivity beyond patents, and tax credits on US clinical trial spend 

👉Why Venkat rates drug discovery in India at two or three against 100 for America and 40 for China, and the biotech sovereign zone with free capital movement and 15 year talent visas he thinks would fix it

#VenkatNelabhotla #VyomeHoldings #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #IndianBiotech #DrugDiscovery #PharmaStartup #NasdaqListing #IndianPharmaIndustry #OrphanDrug #RareDiseaseDrugDevelopment #BiotechStartupIndia #DrugRepurposing #IndiaUSInnovationCorridor #IIMAhmedabad #CavinKare #Emami #HowDrugsAreMade #WhyIndiaDoesntInventDrugs #IndianStartupPodcast 

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

Why India Has So Few Drug Discovery Startups | Vyome CEO Venkat Nelabhotla

Eggoz is India's largest branded egg company, built on a market where over 95% of eggs sold in the country are still loose, unpackaged, and unbranded. Its founder, Abhishek Negi, got here after his first startup, a cab aggregator but failed, and people laughed when he said his next idea was to sell eggs.  

In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast with Akshay Datt, Abhishek walks through why he picked eggs of all things, why he spent three years living in Bihar Sharif running poultry farms himself before ever launching a brand, and why an egg's shell hides everything that actually matters about its quality.  

We get into how Eggoz built an asset-light network of contract farmers instead of owning land, why quick commerce turned out to be the real unlock for a daily-purchase staple like eggs (not e-commerce, not general trade first), and the actual unit economics behind selling on Blinkit, Zepto, and Instamart versus building a Kirana network brick by brick. Abhishek also gets candid about the ₹80 lakh angel round he raised right after his first startup shut down, how investors kept telling him "it's a bird, who cares," and how he decided Eggoz was worth building when his last company wasn't.  

If you're curious about D2C in India, agritech, or what it actually takes to build a national FMCG brand around a commodity everyone assumed couldn't be branded, this one's worth your full attention.  

Chapters 

0:00 – Introduction 

1:06 – Favourite egg recipe & India's egg-eating habits 

4:29 – Why Bihar Sharif, not a metro city

 7:12 – The thesis: why bet on agriculture 

10:23 – Roder: the cab aggregator that failed 

17:39 – What it's like to shut down a startup 

19:37 – Choosing eggs: fixing supply, not creating demand 

22:41 – Deciding to farm before building a brand 

25:02 – Three years of hands-on poultry farming 

29:40 – First funding and the asset-light farmer network 

32:55 – COVID, the egg-price crash, and the pivot to branding 

35:16 – From loose eggs to a branded product 

39:19 – Why general trade came before quick commerce 

44:41 – Growing sales at the retailer level 

46:02 – Eggoz today: revenue and quick commerce split 

47:33 – What it actually takes to win on quick commerce 

49:50 – Blinkit vs Zepto vs Instamart 

51:16 – Marketing: inducing trial, not chasing awareness 

58:42 – Margins: quick commerce vs general trade 

1:02:23 – Gross margins and EBITDA status 

1:04:51 – Raising the $20M Series C 

1:09:03 – Governance, mentors, and the books that shaped him 

1:11:23 – Raising the first ₹80 lakh after a failed startup 

1:15:07 – Knowing when to quit vs when to push through 

1:16:47 – Beyond shell eggs: frozen patties and B2B 

1:20:03 – Inside the supply chain, egg to doorstep 

1:24:03 – Advice for young entrepreneurs  

Watch the full episode to see how a founder took India's most unbranded protein staple and built a national brand around it.  

#AbhishekNegi #Eggoz #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #IndiaStartups #AgritechIndia #D2CIndia #QuickCommerce #BlinkitZepto #IndianEggMarket #BrandedEggs #StartupFailureLessons #SupplyChainStrategy #D2CUnitEconomics #HowToSellOnQuickCommerce #IITKharagpurFounder #KiranaDistribution #ProteinIndia #SeriesCFunding #IndianFoodBrands 

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

Eggoz Founder Abhishek Negi: The Business Funda Behind India's Egg Brand

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

Financing Electric Trucks and Buses in India | 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)

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 clu

Founder Thesis · Zencastr

Founder Thesis

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. 