Viraj Gupta

Who controls the rails of digital access? 🇮🇳 ​Critical insights on why India needs a localized, open app ecosystem to sustain its massive digital growth. ​A great read on the work we are doing at Indus Appstore. Priya Narasimhan breaks down the problem and articulates our commitment to broadening the app economy through openness and choice. ​Read the full article below 👇 ​#IndusAppstore #AppStoreForIndia #DigitalSovereignty

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If you're venturing into the world of D2C brands in India and seeking guidance on product development, marketing strategies, and navigating online marketplaces, this podcast featuring Sushank Arora is a valuable resource for your journey. Sushank shares insightful tips on harnessing consumer behavior to boost sales, offering a roadmap to establish a robust D2C brand. Tune in to gain actionable insights for your brand's success. #D2C #BrandBuilding #ConsumerBehavior #SalesBoost

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Agilitas x Virat Kohli partnership is one of the masterstroke deals I have seen in recent times. Virat invests 40 CR in Agilitas for a 1.94% stake, putting Agilitas’s valuation around 2000 CR. 📈 In turn, Agilitas acquires one8world, making Virat a co-founder and shareholder. They now get two very important growth levers: ⬇️ 1. A powerful manufacturing (via Mochiko Shoes - a 600 CR+ footwear brand that Agilitas acquired in 2008 ), 2. India’s biggest athlete — exclusively aligned. Easily becomes a 4000 CR revenue brand in the next 5 years. Footwear + retail scale requires capital — but this partnership compresses customer acquisition, product cycles, and brand-building like few others. Even Virat said in his podcast with Abhishek Ganguly, the co-founder of Agilitas that, “I didn’t want a brand deal… I wanted to build something that outlives me.” And Abhishek said something even beautiful - “An ambition to build from India but be globally relevant.” This isn’t marketing. This is legacy building with shared skin in the game. And that is how startups work - shared ambition with one goal (to make the company big) and food (read stake) in the table for everyone! A company that can be built in the long term with culture, capital, and conviction aligned. This might be the first time in India, where an athlete joins hands with a sport company to re-imagine and build the sport ecosystem of India - truly revolutionalising the game with a clear vision. 🙌

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Cloaked has raised a $375M Series B led by General Catalyst with participation from HUMAN CAPITAL and Lux Capital. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to work alongside Arjun Bhatnagar, Abhijay Bhatnagar, and the team at Cloaked to fight against surveillance, spam, & identity theft.

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This article, co-authored by Vardaan Ahluwalia and me lays out India's significant new Research Development and Innovation Fund initiative in the context of other successful interventions: when governments and the private sector work together, they can make a transformative difference to deep technology entrepreneurship. Equally, initiatives to help manage financial risk should be followed by structural reforms in areas ranging from intellectual property regulation, ease of clearances for start-ups, tax rationalization in capital gains and options that helps start-ups attract talent, and a visa regime that attracts leading global researchers. https://lnkd.in/gk92YSZa

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Thoughts on using AI for Company Planning/Strategy As I plan for Acme Technology's 2026, was inspired by a convo with Caesar Sengupta, who pointed out that AI is really good at market sizing/market potential, which is a god sent for founders as we look for our next hill to tackle. What used to take a few weeks and a lot of work can now be done in minutes. Over the past 2 weeks, I have spent a lot of time with ChatGPT and Claude: 1/ Uploaded our current customers + details to do a revenue analysis, what types of businesses are good for us, spotting trends etc. 2/ Proposed potential areas we can expand into, size the market, compare that to our current opportunities to see which we should focus on. 3/ Refine our approach to customer and bank account management. Here are some general thoughts: 1/ Claude is far superior to ChatGPT for any work that involves numbers, parsing through excel or PDF sheets. Claude is magical in this regard. Eg. in a dirty excel sheet, it can recognize which are customers that are signed, which are prospects, and which are random calculations at the side (vs ChatGPT, which took the calculations as a revenue line and that messed up its averages). Claude's ability to derive context is amazing. 2/ Claude tends to be more concise and fact driven. I like that it generates a report on the side and has it as an artifact. ChatGPT is more verbose. A lot a lot a lot of content and less straight to the point. The comparison is as such: ChatGPT gives you some info, and then asks, would you like me to do A, B or C, just say the word. You then go through this 6 times. For Claude, it just goes from 1 to 6 automatically and gives it to you. Very different experience! 3/ The key to using AI well is to organize it well. For me, using the Projections functions. Uploading shared artifacts is a must. 4/ After using ChatGPT for a very extensive convo (600 pages+), I wanted to send it to Claude to stress test it, and also let Claude have all of the context of the convo. Guess what.. it was nearly impossible to do that. I ended up going back to the old school way -- printing out 600 pages in a PDF, then splitting it into 6, and then copying and pasting and waiting for Claude to compact it (waiting for it, which explains this post). EDIT 5/ One of the biggest differences in usability btw Claude and ChatGPT for me is that for Claude, chats within projects can reference each other, but for ChatGPT, chats are isolated and rely on whether you have committed it to memory. That is a huge usability gap! Curious: Any founders using it for strategy extensively?

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🧭 If one of the reasons for the leadership change was “missing AI opportunities,” that would be disappointing. Venture has always been about taking calculated risks, not chasing every trend. Even the best firms will pass on some winners; the real test is whether they stay disciplined enough to find the ones that fit their conviction. Sequoia’s strength has always been long-term focus and pattern recognition through cycles. The danger is not missing a single AI deal, it is losing the ability to think independently amid the noise. https://lnkd.in/eVKiCEtD #VentureCapital #Leadership #AI #Governance #Startups #SequoiaCapital

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Rozana founded by Ankur D., Adwait V. and Mukesh Christopher has raised fresh funding, pushing its valuation close to $200 million as it expands its platform serving rural and small-town consumers. While urban e-commerce markets are becoming saturated, rural commerce remains vastly underpenetrated. This segment represents: • Hundreds of millions of consumers • Rapid smartphone adoption • Increasing digital payments usage • Growing demand for organized supply chains But rural commerce requires fundamentally different business models. Companies must rethink logistics, pricing, distribution, and community engagement strategies. Investors are increasingly backing startups that can build last-mile distribution and trust networks in smaller towns and villages. At Alacrity EXTN LLP, we help companies exploring emerging markets: • Conduct deep market research in underserved segments • Design expansion strategies for tier-2, tier-3 and rural markets • Evaluate strategic investment or partnership opportunities The next generation of Indian unicorns may well be built beyond metro cities. #RuralCommerce #Ecommerce #DigitalIndia #StartupFunding #EmergingMarkets #ConsumerTech #RetailInnovation #MarketExpansion #BusinessStrategy #VentureCapital #IndiaStartups #AlacrityEXTN

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When 𝗡𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝘆 conversations begin to echo hypotheses you framed nearly a decade ago, it is both validating and humbling. At 𝗔𝗜𝗠 𝗦𝘂𝗺𝘃𝗮𝗮𝗱 hosted by the Atal Innovation Mission Official in New Delhi, leaders discussed structured performance frameworks, governance models, and measurable impact for 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗜𝗻𝗰𝘂𝗯𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 (𝗧𝗕𝗜𝘀). The themes felt deeply personal. A decade ago, my PhD focused on Performance Indicators of Technology Business Incubators in India, well before performance-led incubation became a national priority.  Supported under projects of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, the research asked a simple but fundamental question: 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘢 𝘛𝘉𝘐 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘶𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘧𝘶𝘭? Unlike the traditional academic route, I entered academia after industry. I worked with Dabur, Ranbaxy Laboratories, and YES Bank, building and scaling within systems before studying them. I was a practitioner first, aligning closely with the University Grants Commission’s “𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲” philosophy. My research advocated: • Outcome-led incubation over infrastructure-led models • KPI-linked public funding • Strong governance accountability • Structured academia–industry–capital integration • Measurable socio-economic impact What were once research hypotheses are now policy discussions. Today, beyond academia, I support Deep Sciences and DeepTech commercialisation as an angel and venture enabler across 40+ companies, translating research into revenue and laboratories into market-ready innovation. I continue to bridge academia and industry, not as a commentator, but as an 𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗿. Because innovation is not just published. It is built, scaled, and sustained for public impact. Atal Innovation Mission Official | Aligarh Muslim University | Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi | Department of Science, Technology and Innovation #AtalInnovationMission #AIMSumvaad #InnovationPolicy #TechnologyIncubation #DeepTechIndia #ResearchToImpact #ViksitBharat #DPIIT #StartupIndia #FundOfFundsForStartups #DST #NIDHI #BIRAC #BIGGrants #SBIRI #BIPP #ICMR #SIDBI #AtalInnovationMission #NITIAayog #MeitY #TIDE20 #DBT #NABARD #TechnologyDevelopmentBoard #TDB #StartupIndiaSeedFund #SISFS #SAMRIDH #DigitalIndiaInnovationFund

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In the days following my last post, I had conversations with two consumer brands building in the D2C space. Both were operating in the same market environment. Both had found product–market resonance. Yet their realities could not have been more different. One brand was struggling for survival, mainly due constrains in working capital, inconsistent supply, and fragile distribution. The other was in the middle of a capital raise, not to fund experimentation (which is a rare sight), but because demand had outpaced its ability to supply. The contrast was instructive. What became clear, once again, is that in D2C, brand building alone does not determine outcomes. Execution across supply chain and distribution often becomes the real bottleneck. A few observations from these discussions: -> Demand is not the same as readiness. -> Early traction can be deceptive. A growing order book exposes weaknesses in procurement, manufacturing, and logistics far more quickly than slow growth does. Brands that scale demand faster than operational depth, more often than not find themselves capital-starved at precisely the wrong moment. -> Supply chains are strategic assets, not backend functions For the growing brand, early investment in supplier relationships and capacity planning creates optionality. In D2C, supply chains shape margins, customer experience. -> Distribution decisions compound over time Channel choices, be it your own website, marketplaces, offline partnerships cannot be treated just as growth levers. They define cash cycles, data ownership, and brand control. Misaligned distribution can strain working capital even when topline growth looks healthy. -> Capital efficiency is operational, not just financial Both brands spoke about capital, but the difference lay in how it was absorbed. One needed capital to survive structural inefficiencies. The other needed capital to support an already disciplined operating engine. What these conversations reinforced for me is that D2C success is rarely about a single breakthrough. It is about alignment between brand promise, supply reliability, and distribution economics. As capital becomes more discerning and markets more competitive, brands that treat operations and distribution as core strategic decisions will find it easier to sustain growth, attract long-term capital, and weather inevitable cycles. These are not prescriptions, just observations from the ground. Curious to hear how other founders and operators have navigated these trade-offs while scaling consumer brands. eFuture Ventures Post (2/52)

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"If AI can now write performance reviews, analyze engagement data, and even predict attrition - what's left for leaders to actually lead?" The answer isn't in the tools. It's in the judgement calls no algorithm can make. At the CLO Summit in Mumbai recently, I joined Kumaar Bagrodia, Krishnan Narayanan and Lt Col Sanjeev Malik to discuss this question. The conversation reinforced something I've been observing: while organisations rush to adopt AI tools, they're struggling with basic questions about when to use them and when not to. The technology is available. The judgement framework for deploying it isn't. Leaders need three capabilities today: understanding what technology can do, maintaining human-centricity despite pressure for speed and scale, and anchoring decisions in org. purpose rather than just performance metrics. The paradox is real. The same companies automating operations are simultaneously investing in "high-touch" customer experiences. The same leaders celebrating AI efficiency are quietly worried about org. culture. Technology should support human goals, not determine them. That distinction will separate effective organizations from efficient ones. How do you decide when human judgement should override algorithmic efficiency? #leadership #futureofwork #ai #beyondtheplaybook

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Mansi Kanuga Deepak Kumar Abhishek Prasad India’s growth story is no longer cyclical, it is structural. As capital markets deepen and innovation compounds, access to high-quality private market opportunities must evolve alongside it. Thoughtfully structured Fund of Funds models can play a pivotal role in broadening participation, enhancing diversification, and enabling disciplined exposure across stages - from early thematic bets to pre-IPO opportunities. Exciting to see focused efforts emerging that aim to combine strategic asset allocation with India’s sustained growth momentum (~7% GDP trajectory). The next decade will belong to those who build access intelligently. 🎯 🚀 ✨ 🎉 #IndiaGrowth #PrivateMarkets #VentureCapital #AlternativeInvestments

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For this Fintech Leaders episode, I sat down with Chen Amit, CEO and Founder of Tipalti, a global fintech platform that processes billions in payments globally and has achieved a remarkable 99% gross revenue retention rate by focusing on an often-overlooked segment: companies with 100 to 1,000 employees. With licenses across 50+ jurisdictions and a clear path to capturing significant market share of what Chen describes as a $100 billion opportunity, Tipalti is very well positioned to continue growing fast. In this conversation, Chen shares insights on everything from the art of saying no to customers to building moats that AI can't replicate. https://bit.ly/4kAWicT

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This development is particularly encouraging for #privateequity and #venturecapital in India. For a while now the flywheel that led to startups going #IPO has been broken in US markets. The primary exit for most startup investors has been acquisition. But the trend of startups like UrbanClap and others going IPO on the #BSE allows investors to redeploy their invested capital. #finance. https://lnkd.in/gHhzukbf

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EXCLUSIVE: Mastercard has announced it is taking a $300m minority stake in Corpay’s cross-border payments business, valuing the division at $10.7bn. I spoke with Mastercard's Pratik Khowala and Corpay's Mark Frey for my latest Forbes column with all the details. The deal not only marks the first time a material outside investment has been made in Corpay’s cross-border unit, but also significantly strengthens Mastercard Move’s offering for corporate and Financial Services clients. It brings exclusive partnerships between the two companies for high-value payments and FX risk management, offering new capabilities to both large and mid-sized financial institutions. With demand for corporate cross-border solutions growing, this partnership could prove highly impactful for both companies’ growth strategies. Article link: https://lnkd.in/dSyYQZfQ #Payments #CrossBorderPayments #Fintech #Mastercard #Corpay Thank you to Giang Nguyen and Lucy Ingham for all the support on this.

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Rahil Rangwala and I took a moment at the start(ish) of the year to lay out the trends we're watching at Accion Ventures in 2026. In fintech, where easy money has faded and capital is more disciplined, it's the most resilient founders and impactful business models that are winning. Some of the trends we're watching: 🔹 Fintech infrastructure is foundational, not just for fintechs but for financial inclusion globally, unlocking access through better rails, data systems, and compliance layers. We wrote more about this last year, and are excited to see the space develop further this year. 🔹 AI has moved beyond experimentation to practical impact, powering underwriting, fraud detection, credit for thin-file populations, and more. We're seeing this across our portfolio and pipeline, and look forward to see the space mature, both in terms of opportunities and risk mitigation. 🔹 The ability to operate through volatility is now a competitive advantage, not a luxury, as founders and VCs factor macro uncertainty, tighter capital, and exits into every strategy. Read more 👉https://lnkd.in/e9Xj9qbm Matt Schaar Khalid Alzubi Sebastian Molina Gasman, CFA Paolo Limcaoco Jasiel Martin-Odoom Akhil Gupta Devraj Hom Roy Semra Ezedin Diego Torres Katie Hallaran Urja Doshi Hardik Kapoor #VentureCapital #Fintech #AI #Infrastructure #Startups #Investing #Innovation

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No LPG. No kitchen. No business. What looks like a global war headline is now hitting India’s daily consumption economy. Across cities: a. Restaurants are shutting down b. Menus are shrinking c. Costs are rising d. Jobs are getting impacted In some places, 30–40% outlets are already affected. And this isn’t a demand problem. It’s a supply shock. Are we underestimating the real impact here? . . . . . . . #LPG #Energy #Crisis #India #Economy #Restaurants #Hospitality #Inflation #Supply #Business #Markets #Macro #Geopolitics #Oil #Consumption #Jobs #Growth #Disruption #Trade #Volatility

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