Their first customer paid them before they even had a bank account.

Before Amresh started Pluto, he went to Bengaluru apartment societies, put up standees, talked directly to commuters, and asked:

“If I build this, will you actually pay for it?”

One of the commuters he met was Jyothi, a working mother who needed to be home around 1 PM, when her child returned from school.

Every minute lost to find another driver or sitting in Bengaluru traffic increased the chance that her child would reach home before she did.

If a cab was cancelled or she couldn’t find one during peak hours, the rest of her schedule got affected.

She agreed to try what Amresh was building.

Pluto didn’t even have a company bank account then, so Jyothi paid the first subscription directly to Amresh’s personal Google Pay.

Jyothi’s schedule made the problem unusually costly, but the underlying problem is common.

Most commuters still rely on Uber, Rapido and other ride-hailing apps.

They work well when you need an occasional ride. But for something as repetitive as the trip to work, the experience can still be unpredictable.

Prices change from one day to the next, and drivers can cancel at the last minute. During peak hours, both problems get worse.

Pluto describes the difference well:

If the same trip happens at roughly the same time, on the same route, every week, Pluto’s bet is that it can be planned instead of being booked from scratch every morning.

Office commuting is already a large business in India.

MoveInSync launched GetToWork in Bengaluru back in 2019 around almost the same pain: fixed-time office rides without surge pricing or last-minute availability problems. [Business Standard]

Cityflo took another route: scheduled premium buses. Today, it says 120 of its 150 routes are cash-positive.

MoveInSync and Routematic mainly sell to the employer. Cityflo sells directly to the commuter, but uses fixed bus routes and stops.

Pluto sells a door-to-door cab subscription directly to the commuter.

The team behind Pluto

Amresh has spent more than 13 years building consumer technology products and was previously Director of Engineering at Eloelo, where he helped build products used by millions of Indian consumers.

His co-founder Shahid brings the mobility experience. He has more than nine years of experience across consumer and mobility technology, including Dunzo and Porter, and built Pluto’s rider app, driver app, dispatch system, payments and backend.

Amresh brings the experience of building consumer products at scale. Shahid has already worked on the technology behind urban mobility.

Pluto needs both.

Early traction

Pluto is still operating with only four cars, so these are early signals rather than proof that the model works at scale.

But four numbers stand out:

1. Monthly revenue grew from ₹84,000 in March 2026 and peaked at roughly ₹2.3 lakh in June 2026.

By June 2026, rides per day had also increased 56% compared with April.

2. 81% of ride requests came from East Bengaluru.

In the latest 30-day period reported in June 2026, Pluto received more than 1,400 ride requests, with most of that demand concentrated in East Bengaluru.

3. 82% of the May 2026 cohort renewed after their first subscription.

That was up from 64% in February 2026. For a product built around a recurring commute, whether customers continue paying after the first cycle matters more than how many try it once.

4. By June 2026, Pluto had completed more than 3,000 rides.

Its June 2026 deck also reported 146 paying riders over the preceding 90 days, while running the beta with four cars.

What Pluto needs to prove next

With only four cars, Pluto says it had more than 300 ride requests it couldn’t serve.

Adding more cars solves part of that problem. But those cars also need enough subscribers travelling through the same corridors at similar times for the economics to improve.

As of October 2026, Pluto is raising a $500,000 seed round to scale its Bengaluru operation before moving into other cities.

The current plan is to spend roughly 45% on fleet and supply, 30% on acquiring subscribers and building density in existing corridors, and 25% on operations and technology.

The company wants to grow from 4 to 25 EV cars and from 35 to 250 subscribers, while gradually moving proven routes from leased vehicles to driver-owned cars.

As of October 2026, Pluto is targeting roughly ₹16 lakh in monthly revenue and profitability around month 10 of this expansion plan.

GVP Take

Pluto has shown that some commuters are willing to pay in advance for a more reliable way to get to work.

Now it has to show that the same demand can produce a good business.

That depends heavily on where the next 200 subscribers come from.

If many of them travel through the same corridors at similar times, Pluto can carry more paying customers per car and improve the economics of those routes.

If they are spread across Bengaluru, the company may need to keep adding cars to serve them, which makes the business much harder.

So over the next year, we would pay less attention to the total number of users and more attention to how many riders Pluto can serve per car, what each car earns after its costs, and whether customers continue renewing as the fleet grows

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See you next week

In India’s startup ecosystem, a founder’s college can open doors. But it can’t build the company for them.

So what can founders outside the IIT network do to earn an investor’s attention and show they’re the right people to solve a meaningful problem?

Join Global Venture Play for a live conversation with Anagh Prasad, VP at Accel, on how investors assess early-stage founders.

We’ll get into questions many non-IIT founders are asking:

• Does your college shape an investor’s first impression?

• What can founders show when they don’t have a familiar network or pedigree?

• How do investors assess a founder’s understanding of the market and customer?

• What signals demonstrate that a team can learn, adapt, and execute?

• What should a founder do after a VC says “not now”?

This isn’t about pretending credentials never matter. It’s about understanding what else can earn an investor’s conviction and how founders can make those strengths visible.

Register before it's too late.

A live, podcast-style conversation with Anagh Prasad, VP at Accel, hosted by Jay Lee.

📌 Register here and bring questions with you

Mon, Sep 28, 7:30 - 8:30 PM

https://www.linkedin.com/events/7508531142258704384?viewAsMember=true

If you’re new here, welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 680 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

Dear fellow investors,

The problem EdTech never really solved

In 1984, education researcher Benjamin Bloom wrote about a problem that still matters today.

Students taught one-to-one could perform far better than students taught in a normal classroom.

But the problem was it’s impossible to deliver at mass scale.

You can give one student a great tutor. You cannot easily give millions of students one.

For the next 20 years, EdTech solved a different problem. It recorded good teachers once and distributed their lessons to millions.

EdTech got very good at distributing lessons.

It never figured out how to give every student individual attention.

AI may be the first real shot at that.

In a 2025 Harvard trial, students using a purpose-built AI tutor learned more in less time than students in an active-learning classroom.

SpeakMonk is trying to bring that model into Indian schools.

Their product changed after watching students stay silent

The company is initially focused on students in Grades 5–9.

A student selects a curriculum chapter.

SpeakMonk explains the concept using voice and visuals.

Then it does something most EdTech products did not.

It asks the student questions.

If the answer shows a gap in understanding, the AI can follow up instead of simply moving to the next lesson.

SpeakMonk then turns those interactions into a report showing parents and teachers where the student struggled.

That feature came from watching students use the product.

Across more than 120 early interviews and demos, the company says it repeatedly saw students get stuck without speaking up. Himanshu Yadav says their research has since grown to 200 conversations.

So SpeakMonk is not only trying to answer more questions.

It is trying to notice when the student does not ask one.

Schools could change the economics of EdTech

SpeakMonk is not starting by selling subscriptions to individual parents.

It wants schools to distribute the product.

At its current founding-partner pricing, schools pay roughly ₹300 per student per month. SpeakMonk says the marginal serving cost of its text tier is around ₹50, giving it roughly 80% gross margin at that level.

Students can then upgrade for more advanced at-home tutoring.

The timing helps.

CBSE now has a Computational Thinking and Artificial Intelligence curriculum for Classes III–VIII, with dedicated student and teacher resources for the 2026–27 academic year.

SpeakMonk is using STEM and coding as an entry point into schools, then wants to expand into broader curriculum learning.

According to the founder, the company has now worked with three schools, with another seven showing interest for the next academic session.

That is still very early.

A software engineer and a classroom teacher are building it together

Himanshu Yadav has more than eight years of technology leadership experience and currently lives in Munich.

His co-founder and younger sister, Kajal Yadav, has more than five years of classroom teaching experience and a Bachelor of Education. She leads the academic review and teaching methodology behind the product.

Himanshu’s connection to the problem goes back further.

Around 10 years ago, he visited a government school in his village where a teacher dismissed the children as poor students who did not care about learning.

Himanshu asked all 17 children to come back at 10 AM the next Sunday if they genuinely wanted to study.

All 17 came.

He has been thinking about the teacher problem ever since.

GVP Take

SpeakMonk is still early, but its positioning addresses two of EdTech’s historical weak points:

Massive customer acquisition costs and static video distribution.

The key metrics we will watch next are learning efficacy and B2B2C conversion:

1. Measurable Learning Gains: Can students demonstrate better concept mastery after using SpeakMonk compared to traditional instruction?

2. School Renewals & Parent Upgrades: What percentage of parents upgrade to the live-voice at-home tier once the school adopts the foundational tier?

AI tutoring itself will not be a moat. ChatGPT, Gemini, Khanmigo and others will keep getting better.

SpeakMonk will need to build its advantage in the layers around the model: curriculum grounding, pedagogy, school relationships, local languages and the learning data it collects over time.

EdTech has already proved that one lesson can reach millions of students.

SpeakMonk is betting AI can scale something much harder:

the feeling that the lesson is paying attention to you.

Want an intro to the founders? Just reply to this email.

P.S. One last thing…

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Most founders think of LinkedIn as a place to find customers, hire talent, or build a following.

But there’s another use for it that doesn’t get talked about enough: during a raise, it’s one of the few channels where an investor can get a real feel for you and your startup before you’re ever in the room together.

That’s what this session is about.

Jay Lee and Shamil are running a live webinar on September 6:

GET ON INVESTORS’ RADAR
A LinkedIn Fundraising Playbook for Founders

Here’s what we’ll actually cover:

• What investors are trying to figure out about you before a first call

• How to frame your founder profile and startup narrative so it lands

• What’s worth posting while you’re actively raising

• How to talk about market, traction, and your own story without it sounding like a pitch deck

• How to stay visible to the right investors, consistently, without overdoing it

To be clear: this isn’t about follower counts or chasing viral posts. It’s a practical look at how to use LinkedIn as one real lever in your fundraising strategy.

A bit about why we’re qualified to talk about this: Jay has featured 56+ Indian AI startups through GVP and helped nearly 10 of them get in front of investors. Shamil and the Blowlin team have worked with 30+ founders and investors across five countries, and their content has generated 10M+ LinkedIn impressions.

Between the two of us, we’ll walk through what actually catches an investor’s eye, and how to turn that into a story worth remembering.

Who this is for: early-stage B2B, SaaS, tech, and AI founders who are raising now or will be in the next few months.

📅 September 6, 12pm IST
👉 Save your spot: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7500540918609887232/?viewAsMember=true

If you’re new here, welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 661 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

Quick commerce’s paradox: huge growth, ugly economics

Fast delivery is expensive. India’s quick-commerce companies have spent years proving that.

Zepto’s delivery cost was still around ₹46 per order in FY26. Swiggy’s quick-commerce contribution margin fell to -5.6% in Q4 FY25 as it opened more dark stores and spent more to acquire customers.

The faster you promise to deliver something, the more infrastructure you need sitting close to the customer.

More stores, more riders, more idle capacity, more money. Now imagine replacing the delivery rider with a trained phlebotomist.

And replacing a packet of groceries with a blood sample. That is the business Zet Health is trying to build.

The Bangalore startup says it can send a phlebotomist to your home in 10–20 minutes, 24 hours a day.

More interestingly, it says it is doing this with a 25% contribution margin.

If that number holds as the company scales, that may be more interesting than the 10-minute promise itself.

Their competitor already proved Indians will pay for faster diagnostics.

Zet is not the first company to make diagnostics faster.

Orange Health has built one of India’s best-known on-demand diagnostic businesses around the same basic consumer promise.

It currently promises home sample collection within 60 minutes and reports for many tests within six hours. Unlike Zet, Orange owns automated laboratories in the cities it serves.

Investors have backed that model heavily.

Orange has raised about $78 million, including a $30 million Series C in June 2026.

So there is already evidence that investors believe Indians want faster diagnostics.

Can it offer that speed without building the expensive laboratory infrastructure behind it?

Zet chose the opposite model from its biggest competitor

Zet doesn’t own diagnostic labs. It partners with trusted labs and owns the last mile instead.

Its phlebotomists operate inside roughly 5 km clusters, collect samples from patients, and take them to a nearby partner lab. Zet says this lets it collect samples in 10–20 minutes and return many reports within a few hours.

The small radius matters.

Inside a lab, a phlebotomist can move from patient to patient. Once they start travelling between homes, productivity drops sharply. One industry report estimated roughly 35–40 collections a day inside a lab versus 4–5 through home collection.

Zet’s bet is simple: pack enough orders into a small area, cut travel time, and keep each phlebotomist productive.

Just like quick commerce, the economics depend on density.

25,000 tests later, the economics are starting to get interesting.

Zet says it has now completed more than 25,000 tests for roughly 8,000 users. Monthly revenue is around ₹8 lakh, with an average order value of roughly ₹800.

Its current cost structure, according to the company, looks roughly like this:

• 30% to partner labs

• 20% logistics

• 5% consumables

• 15% customer acquisition

• 5% technology and operations

• 25% contribution margin

The deck also claims CAC payback in under 30 days.

One care provider needed 24/7 diagnostics and was already using a larger, established provider. According to Zet’s founder, they switched to Zet and have now stayed for more than a year.

That kind of switch is a meaningful early signal.

This team covers the three things Zet needs to get right

Ashutossh Dash spent more than a decade across finance and financial services.

Mohit Mishra spent roughly 13 years in healthcare and pharma, including roles at IQVIA and Novo Nordisk.

Navneet Surana previously worked on technology at Meesho and Trell before joining Zet. There is also a small detail from our conversation that we liked.

After joining, Navneet did not stay behind a laptop. He learned from Zet’s phlebotomists how to measure blood pressure and blood sugar himself.

For a business where software and field operations have to work together, that matters.

GVP Take

Zet says the model currently delivers a 25% contribution margin.

What we’d watch next is collections per phlebotomist per day. If that rises as each five-kilometre cluster gets denser, travel costs should fall and margins should improve.

The next few clusters will show whether the model can repeat without losing speed or economics.

Orange Health has already proved there is demand for fast diagnostics. Zet now has to prove it can deliver that convenience with a lighter model.

Want an intro to the founders? Just reply to this email.

P.S. One last thing…

See your next week

If you want me to make a warm intro with this startup founder, feel free to reply to this email!

Email: jaylee@globalventureplay.com

If you’re new here, welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 657 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

There’s some happy news:

Dear fellow investors,

Before Utkarsh Verma built Upride, he was the customer it exists for.

At 21, studying computer science at RV College in Bangalore, he found a driving school on Google, called it several times, and got no answer.

The owners were too busy to pick up. He travelled three kilometres to a physical shop, sat with the owner, and asked which car he would train on, whether he would learn parking or highway driving, and what the schedule was.

The owner could not answer any of it. The only conversation available was price.

He was quoted $100 (₹8,800) for ten sessions. He paid $150. The extra $50 had a name. Gurudakshina, the offering a student traditionally gives a teacher after learning, collected here as a charge disclosed after the fact.

Ten sessions meant to run across two weeks stretched to two months. The license, normally a 45-day process, took six months. In the end, he could not drive a car.

India loses about 180,000 people a year to road accidents, and the transport ministry attributes a large share of them to untrained drivers.

The World Bank puts the country short of 2.2 million skilled drivers. The training layer that should fix this runs out of unmarked shops owned by men who left school around eighth standard.

Nobody had tested whether Indians would pay more

Every incumbent competes on price, because price is the only variable they can describe.

Utkarsh started Upride by becoming an instructor. He fitted a camera into his own car and drove out to teach whoever booked on the website. In month one, he taught 10 to 12 learners. In month two, he hired one instructor, and it went to 20.

The videos are still on the company’s Instagram if you scroll back far enough.

What he found in that passenger seat was the thesis. A customer paying around $200 converts in a 30-minute call, with no haggling, in a market where converting an Indian consumer at that price point usually takes weeks.

Anyone with a car can become a supplier

Upride sells through three lines. Training delivered by its own operations and partner driving schools, training delivered by certified freelance instructors, and RTO services covering the license itself.

The freelance line is the scaling mechanism. You own a car or a scooter, you get certified through Upride Partners, take bookings through the platform and start earning. Upride adds capacity without buying a vehicle.

That is why the company owns no cars and no bikes after 18 months. It runs 80 instructors and 33 partner driving schools, trains around 270 people a month, and has delivered close to 750+ licenses.

Here is where an investor should slow down. Upride reports profitability every month, at an average ticket near $100, on a single angel round of $15,000. Utkarsh’s framing is that if no investor ever funds them, they survive, because nobody else is in the market and they can wait.

The company sits at roughly $250,000 (₹2.2 Cr) ARR and is raising $230,000 (₹2 Cr) to move across Bangalore and beyond.

A new rule is about to close the small operators

Accreditation norms from the transport ministry require a driving training centre to hold a test track of roughly two acres. In a major Indian city that land costs $560,000 to $1.1 million (₹5 to 10 crore).

Legacy operators cannot finance it, and some are attempting cooperative structures to survive the requirement.

The operators under that pressure are the ones Upride has spent 18 months onboarding.

Trucks are the reason he started with scooters

India trains heavy vehicle drivers through what Utkarsh calls the guru-chela system. An existing driver teaches four or five people in his family or friend circle. No syllabus, no standard, no certification, and no commercial layer of any kind.

The result is 6 million trucks on Indian roads against 3.6 million active drivers. The truck-to-driver ratio has fallen from 75:100 to 55:100 in a few years, leaving a quarter of the fleet idle while quick commerce and warehousing keep adding demand for heavy vehicle and forklift operators.

The same shortage exists abroad. The IRU counts 2.9 million unfilled truck driver positions across 18 markets, with around 502,000 in Europe. Utkarsh named the Gulf, Canada, the US, Russia and Ukraine as sources of inbound demand for trained Indian drivers.

Upride’s asset-light model breaks at this point. Nobody teaches a truck on a freelancer’s own truck, and heavy vehicle training needs a track, equipment, and certification infrastructure.

The route through it is public money. The transport ministry has committed $506 million (₹4,500 crore) to set up 1,600 driver training institutes, and the scheme guidelines allow private partners to handle establishment, curriculum, and day-to-day management of an IDTR. Government carries the capital cost, and an operator like Upride runs it.

That is what sits at the end of the company’s roadmap in late 2027, alongside the supply of trained commercial drivers into logistics. Upride has not won an institute, signed a fleet operator, or placed a driver.

Meet the team

Utkarsh Verma, CEO. Computer science at RV College, Bangalore. Freelanced through Upwork after COVID and started building in 2023. Upride is his first company, and he had never held a job before it.

Vedant Jha, CTO. School friend of Utkarsh. Fintech and open-source background across Zeta, scade.io and stipop.io.

Harshit Beria, COO. College batchmate. Operations and consulting, previously at SAP and Eka Software Solutions.

Our take

Monthly profitability is the strongest signal in the business. An Indian consumer startup that makes money on every unit after a $15,000 angel round has solved something structural about the category. The next test is whether that holds under paid acquisition in a second city.

The supply relationships are harder to copy than the product. Any competent team builds a booking app. Onboarding 33 independent driving schools onto shared SOPs took 18 months of ground work, and the accreditation squeeze makes those relationships more valuable each quarter.

Nobody learns to drive twice, so every dollar of acquisition cost has to be recovered on one transaction. This is why the reported 30x return on Meta spend matters and also why it needs verification. It is the founder’s own attribution in a category with almost no competing advertisers.

Utkarsh argues the answer is adjacency: that learning to drive is the first paid moment in a person’s automotive life and the cheapest point to earn trust before the dash cam or the used car. Ornikar proved a version of this in France, moving from driving education into insurance and finding that 80% of early insurance buyers had never been students. They bought on brand alone. Ornikar has raised $175 million against that thesis. Upride has not started it.

The commercial driver business carries the valuation and has no revenue behind it. The right investor brings fleet operators, logistics platforms, and overseas recruitment channels rather than capital, because those relationships decide whether that line becomes a business or stays a slide.

Upride is attempting something harder than digitising driving schools.

It is trying to own the first paid moment in a person’s automotive life, then convert that operating knowledge into the training layer for a commercial driver market that has never had one.

If it can prove the second transaction exists, this stops being a driving school platform.

Want an intro to the founders? Just reply to this email.

P.S. One last thing…

If you forward this newsletter to 3 investors who subscribe, we’ll make a warm intro for you to any family office or VC in our network you’d like to meet.

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If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 650 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

Dear fellow investors,

When Gaurav Sandhya started selling TTN Garage, his workshop management app, in Pune, the biggest objection he heard wasn’t about price.

Mechanics didn’t want to touch a phone screen with greasy hands.

India has more than 400 million registered vehicles, and roughly three-quarters are two-wheelers. After the warranty year ends, most owners leave the authorised service centre for the local garage because it’s cheaper and closer.

India’s independent repair channel was worth $11.9 billion in 2024, larger than the authorised network, and almost all of it still runs on paper.

Software companies have circled this market for years. Reaching the customer means reaching a man who does not read English, has never paid for a subscription, and is holding a spanner.

Tight The Nut launched TTN Garage just before COVID and got nowhere with it. Operations stopped during the pandemic.

What kept garage owners up at night

When the team restarted in 2021, they stopped asking how to get a garage onto a phone and started asking what a garage owner worries about.

The answer was repeat business.

When a customer collects a repaired bike, the work is already hidden. The panels are back on, and the part is inside. There’s no bill listing what was replaced and no way to check the mechanic fitted what he said he fitted.

So the customer tries a different garage next time, and the owner never finds out why.

TTN Garage was rebuilt around that. Job cards, itemised invoices, service histories, and reminders that go out when the next service is due.

A missing spare part created the second business

Running inside the garage showed them a second problem.

A mechanic opens the bike, finds the broken part, and knows exactly what he needs. If it isn’t on the shelf, the repair stops. The bike sits on the ramp, the bay is blocked, the customer waits, and the owner sends someone out to hunt for the part.

TTN tested this with engine oil and found garages didn’t want a month of stock. They wanted the right product for the bike already waiting.

That became TTN Retail, which delivers parts and lubricants to garages within 30 minutes, inside the same app. When a mechanic logs the diagnosis, TTN sees the demand before the order exists.

Here’s where an investor should slow down. TTN Retail covers four Pune pincodes at roughly 150 orders a month, with an average order near $250 (₹22,000). 76% of its garage buyers have ordered again.

Tight The Nut is raising $2 million (₹18 Cr) to reach three cities and 12 micro-hubs.

The app had to speak nine languages before anyone used it

Mechanics were not comfortable in English, so TTN Garage runs in nine Indian languages including Marathi, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

The harder call was data entry. Mechanics use local names for parts that don’t map to a standard catalogue, so TTN Garage lets them type whatever they say and standardises it at the backend.

Selling changed too. City-level garage associations made the introductions, and an endorsement from one carried weight no demo could.

Around 22,000 workshops have registered since. That shows reach rather than usage, and the number that matters next is how many still create job cards every week and pay for it.

A leading two-wheeler manufacturer told them the data stops at year three

In 2022, the team worked with one of India’s largest two-wheeler manufacturers, who mentioned they hold about two and a half years of data on any given vehicle. After the warranty ends and the owner moves to a local garage, the bike leaves their view for good.

Sandhya was already collecting what happens next. Every job card on TTN Garage records which part failed, at what mileage, on which model, in which city.

That is why he calls Tight The Nut aftermarket infrastructure rather than a garage app, and why he has turned down three acquisition approaches.

He hasn’t sold any of it yet. The obvious buyer is the manufacturer who lost sight of the bike, and that conversation hasn’t happened.

Meet the team

Azam Shaikh, co-founder. Seven years in after-sales at Tata and Bajaj, which is where the understanding of procurement bottlenecks and workshop economics comes from. He is the automotive depth in this company.

Gaurav Sandhya, co-founder. Founding member of Bhookkad.com, a food delivery business. His experience is building in fragmented, high-frequency markets rather than in automotive.

Ashay Kohad, tech head. Runs engineering.

Our take

• The repeat rate is the clearest early demand signal. A 76% reorder rate suggests that garages find operational value in TTN Retail. The next test is whether this behaviour continues without excessive discounts or credit and produces a positive contribution margin.
  

• The distribution layer is harder to copy than the software features. Nine-language workflows, garage-association relationships, and five years of operating knowledge give TTN access and context that capital alone cannot recreate quickly. The three acquisition approaches suggest that strategic players also recognize value in this position.
  

• The real thesis is the connection between software and commerce. TTN Garage captures demand when a mechanic diagnoses a vehicle. TTN Retail fulfils that demand while the vehicle is still on the ramp. If active software usage lowers customer-acquisition costs and improves inventory planning, the two businesses can reinforce each other.
  

• The opportunity is national, but the commerce model remains locally proven. TTN Garage has registrations across India, while TTN Retail currently operates across four Pune pincodes. The next phase must demonstrate that hub-level economics, order density, and repeat behaviour can be reproduced across three cities without allowing working capital and fulfilment costs to outrun growth.
  

• The right investor should bring more than capital. Strategic and global investors with automotive, distribution, supply chain, or aftermarket experience could accelerate partnerships and market access. The priority should be investor fit and execution value, not geography alone.

Again, Tight The Nut is attempting something more difficult than building another garage application or spare-parts marketplace.

It is trying to connect the workflow inside an independent garage with the supply chain that serves it.

TTN Garage helps a workshop understand and manage the repair.

TTN Retail brings the required part to the workshop within 30 minutes.

If TTN can prove that this combination produces stronger retention, better inventory efficiency and profitable hub-level economics, it could become something neither a pure software company nor a conventional distributor can easily replicate:

The operating and fulfilment infrastructure for India’s independent automotive garages.

Want an intro to the founders? Just reply to this email.

P.S. One last thing…

GVP has 650 investor subscribers — including partners at Accel, principals at family offices in Singapore and Dubai, and angels across the US, Australia, and Europe.

If you forward this newsletter to 3 investors who subscribe, we’ll make a warm intro for you to any family office or VC in our network you’d like to meet.

Share Global Venture Play

See you next week

If you want me to make a warm intro with this startup founder, feel free to reply to this email!

Email: jaylee@globalventureplay.com

If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 650 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

Dear fellow investors,

After 8 days of distributing pamphlets of his startup, Abhishek Kumar got an unusual call at 11pm.

He told him

“I have liver pain. The doctor prescribed 4 medicines; two of them are not available online. Two medicines were saying they would get delivered the next day. But I need the medicine right away to eat that part because... I am suffering from my stomach pain.”

After this call, Abhishek searched for the medicine for 2 hours.

He got 3 out of 4 medicines. He rode himself and delivered the medicine.

That medicine was almost certainly sitting in a shop nearby within 3 km, and nobody could tell him which one. This week we’re looking at a startup trying to fix that.

In India, finding a medicine is like selling door-to-door

You’ve got to knock on all doors until you get a yes.

A cardiologist writes seven medicines for your father. The pharmacy at the hospital has six.

So you spend the next hour walking into shops asking the same question until someone finally says yes. The medicine was probably sitting a few streets away the whole time, in a shop you
had no way to search.

For a heart patient, that seventh medicine is not optional, and it is not occasional. He takes it every day for the rest of his life. The same is true for roughly two in five Indians living with a chronic condition.

Tata 1mg, owned by the Tata group, and Apollo 24/7, run by the Apollo hospital chain, both answered this by building their own supply. Warehouses, central stock, their own pharmacy counters. It worked. Tata 1mg holds roughly 31% of online medicine sales in India today.

But India has about 8.5 lakh chemist shops, and almost none of them are searchable from a phone. That’s where most Indians still buy their medicine.

The medicine arrives with the shop’s license number printed on it

Upload your prescription, and a pharmacist on their team checks it.

The order goes to whichever partner shop near you actually has what you need, a rider collects it, and they aim to have it with you in thirty minutes.

The part worth noticing is what arrives with the packet. The invoice carries the shop’s name, its address, and its drug licence number.

You find out exactly whose shelf your medicine came off, which is something you never learn when the order ships from a warehouse.

KwikMedi also books lab tests on the same app. A Phlebo comes to your house to draw the sample, and Redcliffe Labs runs the test and sends the report back digitally.

They own no stock and no shop. The whole business is knowing where a medicine is and going to get it.

Before they built anything, they printed pamphlets

They ran a pilot for three months in Gurugram, and it cost almost nothing.

They only used pamphlets.

The orders came in by call and WhatsApp, and the delivery radius was two kilometres.

September brought 96 orders.
October brought 177.
November brought 241.

18% of orders were repeat requests.

He found out people wanted this before spending a rupee on building it. And every one of those orders came from someone the apps had already turned down.

They make money without ever buying a medicine.

The shop owns the stock and sells it at the same price you’d pay walking in.

KwikMedi takes a cut from the shop on every order it sends them and charges you a small delivery fee on top. Lab tests work the same way, with a cut of each booking.

The pilot moved about $1,690 (₹1.5 lakh) of medicine across those three months, at an average order value of $4.30 (₹380).

Those are small numbers, and the model is built for a different customer. A chronic patient orders the same medicines every month for the rest of their life.

Get enough of them onto a subscription, and the revenue stops depending on whoever happens to fall sick this week.

One in four orders never got delivered.

Of the 514 orders that came in during the pilot, 124 went unfilled. Most of those were medicines that simply weren’t there.

That number is the whole company. KwikMedi’s pitch is that it finds what the apps couldn’t. When the answer comes back no, the customer has got nothing they couldn’t have got by walking to the chemist, and they waited longer to get it.

This was also the easy version of the problem. Two shops, a two-kilometer radius, a few orders a day. The honest question is whether adding pharmacies fixes the misses or whether the misses are the tail brands nobody stocks anyway.

Our take:

• Founder-market fit. Abhishek’s father is a heart patient. A cardiologist wrote him seven medicines, and the hospital pharmacy had six, so the family went shop to shop looking for the seventh. Abhishek searched on his own platform, and it was there. He only found out which shop it came from when the packet arrived with the invoice.

• The demand test is as clean as you’ll see at this stage. He found out people wanted this before spending a rupee on building it, and every order came from someone the apps had already turned down.

• The fulfilment rate is the open question. One in four missed at two shops, and nobody knows yet what it looks like at 22 or at 150.

P.S. One last thing…

GVP has 650 investor subscribers — including partners at Accel, principals at family offices in Singapore and Dubai, and angels across the US, Australia, and Europe.

If you forward this newsletter to 3 investors who subscribe, we’ll make a warm intro for you to any family office or VC in our network you’d like to meet.

Share Global Venture Play

See you next week

If you want me to make a warm intro with this startup founder, feel free to reply to this email!

Email: jaylee@globalventureplay.com

If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 650 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

The most valuable voice-AI company in India may not build an AI model

My dear fellow investors,

When most investors hear “voice AI,” they think about the model.

How natural does it sound?
How many languages can it speak?
How accurately can it understand a customer?

Those are important questions. But they may not be the most important ones.

For banks, hospitals and government agencies in India, the first question is often much simpler:

Where does the customer’s voice go?

If the answer is “to somebody else’s server”, the conversation may end there.

That is the problem Orvnix, a four-person company in Kolkata, is trying to solve.

It is not building another foundation model.

It is building the infrastructure that turns existing speech and language models into phone agents that can operate inside the customer’s own environment.

That sounds like a technical distinction.It may become a valuable one.

India has built digital systems millions of Indians still struggle to use

India is rightly celebrated for its digital infrastructure.

UPI changed how the country pays. Aadhaar gave more than a billion people a digital identity. Cheap mobile data brought hundreds of millions of people online.

But access and ability are not the same thing.

A large part of the country still struggles to navigate digital products independently—especially when those products require reading, typing or operating in English.

So they do what people have always done.

When people cannot complete something online, they usually do not stop needing the service.

They call the bank. They call the hospital. They call customer support and explain the problem in the language they are most comfortable using.

That is why multilingual voice AI matters in India.

But these are not ordinary conversations. They can include bank details, medical information, identity records and payment data.

And most voice-AI products process that information on infrastructure the customer does not control.

Most voice AI runs on rented technology

Most voice-AI startups pay outside providers every time a call is processed.

That helps them launch quickly. But costs rise with usage, and customer data may pass through systems they do not control.

This is an excellent model for getting a product to market quickly.

It is less attractive when the customer is a bank, hospital or public institution handling millions of sensitive conversations.

The institution loses control of where the audio travels. The startup loses control of its cost. And both remain dependent on companies that can change their pricing, policies or availability.

Orvnix is taking the opposite route.

It can install the system inside the bank’s own infrastructure.

Think of it as the difference between paying for a taxi every day and owning the car: more expensive upfront, but cheaper and easier to control once usage becomes large.

The audio stays inside the customer’s environment. The prompts, workflows and escalation rules remain under the customer’s control.

This matters for banks, hospitals and government agencies handling sensitive conversations.

The unglamorous work may be the moat

A voice agent has to handle interruptions, silence, weak phone lines, language switching and transfers to human agents.

Orvnix says it has already built much of this layer. During our call, Kuntal Roy demonstrated the platform in Bengali, although one part of the demo failed.

The company has also tested a metro-rail agent across 18 failure conditions.

The product is still pre-production.

The team

Orvnix is a four-person company led by founder, a software engineer with prior product-company experience and an AI background going back to college.

A co-founder, part of the leadership team, while another team member leads technology. The company is now looking to add marketing talent.

Traction and economics

Orvnix is still pre-revenue and has no signed pilots.

But the product has been built and tested. The team has created a metro-rail calling agent, connected the system to customer databases, and tested how it responds when real calls do not go as planned.

The economics are straightforward.

Orvnix plans to charge around ₹4 per minute.

Using outside AI providers, it expects gross margins of about 40%. If it runs more of the system on owned infrastructure, it estimates the cost could fall to roughly ₹0.90 per minute, taking margins closer to 80%.

The catch is volume.

Owned infrastructure is expensive at the beginning. It only becomes cheaper once enough calls are running through the system.

So the margins look attractive, but they are still projections. The commercial proof is not there yet.

GVP Take

The market is starting to move.

In June 2026, Sarvam raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation to build sovereign AI for Indian enterprises and government. HCLTech alone invested $150 million. Sarvam is also targeting banking, insurance and government use cases—the same buyers Orvnix wants to serve.

That matters because it shows two things:

First, investors are willing to put serious capital behind AI systems built for Indian languages and sensitive data.

Second, banks and public institutions are becoming real buyers, not just a future market. IBM has also partnered with Sarvam to build sovereign AI for government and regulated sectors.

Orvnix is making a much narrower bet.

It is not trying to build India’s largest AI model. It is building the system that lets banks, hospitals and public institutions run multilingual voice agents inside infrastructure they control.

That is interesting because the demand is being validated by much larger players.

Watch this one.

Want an intro to the founders? Just reply to this email.

P.S. One last thing…

GVP has 650 investor subscribers — including partners at Accel, principals at family offices in Singapore and Dubai, and angels across the US, Australia, and Europe.

If you forward this newsletter to 3 investors who subscribe, we’ll make a warm intro for you to any family office or VC in our network you’d like to meet.

Share Global Venture Play

See you next week

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Email: jaylee@globalventureplay.com

She hears it in almost every meeting.

When someone brings up her age, she doesn't say a word, she just shows the numbers. Revenue and capital raised

At 23, Ga-won Kwon started EduSync. Three months later she shipped her first product. Two months after that, she raised her first round of funding.

But the product didn't start with a pitch. It started in classrooms.
Before she started EduSync, she spent months sitting with teachers, watching how they actually ran a class.

She asked a lot of them the same question: what's broken?
What she found was a gap nobody had filled.

Schools had the hardware, the smart boards, the tablets, but no software tying it together. The teacher's screen, the board, and every student's tablet all lived separately

So she connected them.

What the teacher writes shows up on each student's screen. What a student writes flows back to the board. The whole school day runs through one system.

Teachers noticed the small things first.

One said the best part was not having to carry a USB drive around anymore. Another liked being able to see, at a glance, which students were actually connected.

At 24, that approach has paid off.

Three schools signed on. A national broadcaster hired her to build a safety alert system. She filed a patent, and lined up her first export deals in Vietnam and Central Asia

Now she’s bringing EduSync to India next.

.

📌 If you're interested in collaborating in EdTech, or can connect Gawon with a live online lecture platform, drop a DM or comment.

📌 Tag anyone you think might be interested!

--
It was our first episode of Korea Founder, Going India.
Thanks to

Gawon Kwon, 에듀싱크

Love to hear your thoughts🇮🇳🇰🇷

If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 650 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

My dear fellow investors,

Sunil George Solomon spent 12 years building a garment manufacturing and export business. He’d scaled it past US$15 million (₹150 crore) in annual revenue.

Then in January 2025, someone close to him was assaulted on a work trip.

That event left a big black mark in his life.

When an assault like this happens to someone very close to you,

“I was too angry. This shouldn’t happen to anyone. She was on a work trip.”

Within months, he started stepping away from the business he’d spent over a decade building.

Today, I’m going to show you why he walked away from the business he’d built for over a decade and why his background might be exactly what this problem needed.

Then he met his co-founder…

Sunil didn’t jump straight in. He joined forces with Rohan Shaji Thomas, who had spent 10 years building packaging solutions.

They spent months on market research before they incorporated in April 2025.

Then they spent six more months exiting their old companies. They’ve been full-time only since February 2026.

That patience matters. So does what they are building

Hardware startups often stumble in two places: manufacturing and operations.

Turning a prototype into a reliable, certified product at scale is brutally hard, and many founders learn that through expensive mistakes.

Sunil has run garment factories. Rohan has built packaging solutions and precision machinery.

Between them, they bring two decades of manufacturing and operational discipline—experience that becomes especially valuable when a hardware company starts moving from prototype to production.

They found lots of apps, but no hardware.

When they looked at existing solutions, they found the same gap Sunil had just lived through.

“They have to go into their bag, take out the phone, unlock it, find the app, click SOS. And during all this, they go through the cognitive freeze. The body does not even allow them to take the phone out.”

So they built for that moment instead.

Wualt is a smart ring. Pressing it three times discreetly sends the user’s location and an alert to their chosen guardians.

The team also plans to connect the system with local response networks and law enforcement once the required partnerships are in place.

Why should women wear this device?

A single-utility safety gadget solves one problem: safety. So when nothing bad happens for six months, it often ends up in a drawer. And a device in a drawer protects no one.

So Wualt adds daily wellness tracking through the ring’s biometrics, including cycle patterns, sleep, resting heart rate, and stress.

Sunil put it simply: “Safety is why you buy it. Wellness is why you wear it.”

That daily wear is also what quietly builds something bigger.

Why is this the moment?

Three things lined up at once:

• The tech finally fits. AI models are now small enough to run on a ring’s battery. That means the ring can send real context to responders, not just a bare alarm.

• Capital is moving in. A UK personal-safety wearable recently raised $2.7M at this same stage, a sign that investors now see this as a real category, not a science project.

• India is wide open. Millions of women work late shifts in hospitals, call centers, and corporates. It’s a huge at-risk population with no clear category leader building for them.

Is there a real B2B opportunity?

They have two business models.

1. Consumer (D2C)

A woman buys the ring for safety and wears it daily for the wellness features, paying once for the device and monthly for the subscription which covers only the health and wellness features.

This is the long-term brand play, but it doesn’t launch until 2027 because custom hardware takes time.

2. B2B

This is the near-term engine, and it’s where Sunil has an edge. Instead of selling to individual women, they sell to institutions: corporates and hospitals These buyers are already on the hook for worker safety through compliance and duty-of-care rules.

Their first step is a planned police-backed pilot involving 250 units across corporates, schools, and hospitals in tier-one cities in North India, scheduled for October 2026.

Meet the Team:

Sunil George Solomon — Co-founder & CEO. Spent 12 years running his own garment manufacturing and export business, scaling it past ₹150 crore (US$15.5M) in annual revenue. An operator who’s actually run factories.

Rohan Shaji Thomas — Co-founder & COO. Spent 10 years building packaging machines, precision hardware manufacturing for bottles, sachets, and cartons.

Anjana Nair — Brand & GTM Lead.

Anoop V Nair — Chief Product Architect.

Yashwanth Kotha — Chief Design Officer.

Advisors

ElsaMarie D’Silva — Founder of the Red Dot Foundation and Safecity; 15 years in women’s safety, working directly with law enforcement.

Col. Amit Dabas (YSM, Retd.) — Heads the Global Security Board at Indian Hotels Company (Taj group); decorated defence veteran.

Rekha Nair — Former CXO at Adani and GVK Airports.

The GVP Take

This is a rare case of founder-market fit on all three axes.

1. The founder has lived the problem, so he won’t quit.

2. He and Rohan are proven hardware operators, in a category that kills founders who aren’t.

3. The third axis is the sharpest. Their go-to-market model is B2B2C: they sell the ring to corporates and institutions, which then provide it to employees, students, patients, or other members of their communities.

They’re also honest about their blind spot. Not being safety experts themselves, they brought in advisors who are, which is exactly the right correction.

Now the honest risks. This is early: 5 prototypes, pre-revenue, and the pilot hasn’t run yet. The auto-detection AI they describe doesn’t exist today, and the response network that turns an alert into someone showing up still depends on partnerships being signed.

ElsaMarie D’Silva founded the Red Dot Foundation and Safecity, and has spent 15 years in women’s safety, working directly with law enforcement. Col. Amit Dabas, who heads the IHCL Global Security Board, advises on the security side.

Now the honest risks.

This is early: 15 prototypes, pre-revenue, and the pilot hasn’t run yet.

The auto-detection AI they describe doesn’t exist today, and the response network that turns an alert into someone showing up still depends on partnerships being signed.

The best early-stage bets are on founders, not products.

You’re betting on the person building it. If that’s a bet you’d make, just reply, and I’ll connect you with Sunil.

Watch this one.

Want an intro to the founders? Just reply to this email.

P.S. One last thing…

If you forward this newsletter to 3 investors who subscribe, we’ll make a warm intro for you to any family office or VC in our network you’d like to meet.

Share Global Venture Play

See you next week

If you want me to make a warm intro with this startup founder, feel free to reply to this email!

Email: jaylee@globalventureplay.com

If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 643 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

My dear fellow investors,

Elon Musk looked at rockets and asked one simple question. Why build a brand-new rocket every time, then throw it away? Reuse it, and space travel gets cheap.

A 21-year-old from Ahmedabad is asking that same question about AI.

Every time you send a prompt to a chatbot, a data centre burns more power than whole countries. And AI is making them burn far more.

So the world is racing to build more power. New grids. Nuclear plants. Hundreds of billions of dollars.

But almost no one is asking the real question. A huge chunk of that power, up to half of it, is wasted. It runs computers that mostly sit idle.

We keep building new power instead of saving the power we already waste.

This 21-year-old decided to fix that.

His software plugged into an enterprise and helped them reduce the cloud bill by $400,000.

And he built a team of senior engineers who left Microsoft and AWS to work with him.

He knocked on 14 bank doors before one said yes, then saved that client hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Today I’ll show you what he’s building, how he did it so young, and what happens to all of us if this waste keeps growing.

The Founder with skin in the game

Two years ago, Garv Goyal was running his first startup and couldn’t afford his cloud bill.

So he did the only thing he could.

Every few days he sat down and compressed his own data by hand, squeezing it smaller just to keep the bill from climbing.

Slow, boring work. The kind most founders would hire away or ignore.

But sitting there one night, a question stuck with him.

“AI was already writing my code. My data was moving every second of every day. So why was keeping all of it lean still a chore I had to babysit?”

His first company didn’t make it, because the co-founder left, and they shut it down.

And when he went looking for what to build next, he realised the annoyance he’d felt as a broke student was quietly costing the biggest companies on Earth billions of dollars a year

.

What is Garv Goyal building in SmalBlu?

Most companies waste a big part of their cloud bill without knowing it.

A cloud setup has six layers stacked together.

Each can be tuned to save money, but they affect each other.

Fix one, break another. Doing it right needs an expert who costs over $150,000 a year, so most companies never do it. The waste just sits there.

His company, SmallBlue, is software that does that expert’s job on its own.

It watches all six layers around the clock, finds the waste, and cuts the bill by up to 40%.

There are other tools that only fix one layer or just show you a report.

SmallBlue fixes the whole thing. And it couldn’t exist 18 months ago. AI only recently got smart enough to reason across all six layers like a human would.

How did he land his first customer?

Getting a bank to trust a 21-year-old is almost impossible. He did it anyway.

He knocked on 14 doors before one said yes.

Two things got him in. His senior advisors showed up on calls and went into offices with him, which gave him instant credibility.

And he made the first deal easy, taking only a share of the money he saved them.

That first bank shaped the product.
Once he delivered, other banks were suddenly willing to talk.

How did he build his team?

Garv is 21.

The average person in his team is around 33, with eight years of experience. People left Microsoft, AWS, and NPCI to join him.

He also brought in the former CEO and CTO of Comviva, a telecom software company.

Why follow someone so young?

The problem was big and new, and the idea pulled them in. His rule says it all. Compromise on anything, but never the team and the product.

Their business model and Traction

Pay $1, save $4 on your cloud bill. That’s the deal.

Most tools like his take a cut of what they save you. Garv said NO to that.

He saw the trap. The more you save the client, the less you’re allowed to earn, and you end up making their engineer look bad for missing the waste in the first place.

So he charges a flat fee plus usage credits, the way Claude and Cursor do.
And it’s working. In just 10 months,

- He’s signed 10+ enterprise letters of intent
- Done $40,000 in paid pilots with banks
- Cut one client’s bill by $400,000.

He raised a small first round and is now raising up to $500K to deliver the bigger contracts already lined up.

GVP’s take

We featured SmallBlue for one reason. The problem is real, huge, and almost no one is working on it.

The world is spending billions to build more power for AI, while up to half of what we have is wasted. The cheapest power plant is the one you never build. Garv is going after that.

The honest risk: his edge today is being first, and first doesn’t last. The same AI that unlocked this for him unlocks it for others.

His real moat has to become the banks he works with and the data he collects, not the tech alone. He’s also very early, and some results are still under NDA.

But the core idea is simple. AI is about to make wasted power one of the most expensive problems in the world.

SmallBlue is one of the few teams trying to win it back, led by a founder who felt the problem himself.

P.S. One last thing…

If you forward this newsletter to 3 investors who subscribe, we’ll make a warm intro for you to any family office or VC in our network you’d like to meet.

Share Global Venture Play

See you next week

If you want me to make a warm intro with this startup founder, feel free to reply to this email!

Email: jaylee@globalventureplay.com

If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 636 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

This investment banker helped SME / SMB companies raise millions.

Hey there,

Five weeks in a row, Sapan Karia drove into Jamnagar, walked up to a factory he had no appointment with, and knocked on the door.

He’s 30. He didn’t have to do this. He spent his career in investment banking and lending, the kind of work where you sell over the phone in a nice office.

He’d left Bangalore, a comfortable life, and an office five minutes from home to sit across from factory owners in a manufacturing town 1,200 kilometres away.

In his own words, he had to “rewire my brain to be shameless again.”

At 22 he’d done door-to-door sales without thinking twice.

At 30, with a tech co-founder and a real company forming, he made himself go back to knocking, because he’d figured out something about Indian exporters that almost nobody else had noticed.

There’s a leak in how they move money. It’s invisible, it’s been there for decades, and as of January 2025, it finally became legal to fix.

Let me show you what he is building

This wasn’t allowed until one and a half years ago.

For decades, an Indian exporter legally could not hold dollars abroad. You earned dollars, you brought them home, you converted them. No choice.

In January 2025, that changed. Indian exporters were allowed to open real bank accounts overseas and keep their dollars there.

So now that same textile factory can hold its dollars in the US, and pay its Chinese supplier straight from them. No rupee in the middle. No two conversions. The leak just closes.

Almost nobody moved on this. Sapan did, within months.

He spent his whole career one step away from this problem.

Sapan didn’t stumble into exporters. He’d been circling them for years.

He started in investment banking, doing IPOs for small manufacturers – going factory to factory in Gujarat to pitch them.

Then he moved into lending, then into helping Indian brands set up supply chains abroad.

Every job put him in the same rooms, with the same owners, hearing the same complaint about money lost in conversion.

He comes from Gujarat. He has cousins and friends who run these exact factories. So when the rule changed, he wasn’t reading about a market. He was thinking about people he already knew.

He picked one kind of customer and refused to widen it.

This is the part that surprised me most. Most founders cast as wide a net as possible. Sapan did the opposite.

He’ll only work with a factory that fits all of this:

• It both exports and imports, not just one

• It’s in textiles, auto components, engineering, pharma, or chemicals

• It does $5M to $50M (₹40 crore to ₹400 crore) in revenue a year

• It’s a real manufacturer, not a trader

• It’s a second-generation family business, run by someone in their 30s or 40s who studied at a good college in India or abroad

• And right now, it’s based in one city: Jamnagar - a cluster for brass products manufacturing (sub category of engineering goods)

That last filter is the whole strategy. He isn’t trying to win India.

He’s trying to win one cluster of customers completely, build a playbook that works there, and then carry it to the next one.

By his count there are a dozen-odd clusters like this in Gujarat alone. Win two, he says, and it’s a real company. Win the cluster, and the math gets very large.

He’s closing deals by hand, on purpose.

The product isn’t fully built yet, and that’s deliberate.

Today, Sapan’s team matches companies with financing options manually, running eight mandates through buyer’s credit, factoring, and LC discounting.

Tomorrow, much of that could be handled by AI: evaluating counterparties, comparing financing structures, assessing risk, and recommending the lowest-cost option for a given shipment.

The manual work isn’t separate from the product. It’s generating the knowledge the product will eventually automate.

His team has already turned that instinct into an asset: a trade database covering 5 million companies across 120 countries, pulled from public shipping records, so an exporter can check exactly who they’re dealing with before they ship.

The plan is to own one narrow wedge first, saving exporters their forex costs, then build it into an AI-native services company for cross-border trade.

GVP’s take

Four things made us stop on this one.

• He’s an ex-investment banker who sold to these exact factories. He’s not learning the customer, he already knows them.

• The problem, market, and customer are unusually clear. Most founders are fuzzy on one. He’s sharp on all three.

• He’s finding his first customers the hard way, by hand, in person, before building.

• He quietly built a 5-million-company trade database as a byproduct.

If you know a manufacturer in India, in textiles, auto parts, engineering, pharma, or chemicals, who exports and imports? This is worth a five-minute intro. They’re exactly who Sapan helps.

If you know a digital-first bank in Singapore, South Korea, or the US that works with cross-border SMEs?

That’s the other door he’s opening.

P.S. Reply and we’ll make a warm intro to Sapan, whether you’re a factory, a bank, or just know the right person to forward this to.

If you forward this newsletter to 3 investors who subscribe, we’ll make a warm intro for you to any family office or VC in our network you’d like to meet.

Share Global Venture Play

See you next week

If you want me to make a warm intro with this startup founder, feel free to reply to this email!

Email: jaylee@globalventureplay.com

If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 634 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

My dear fellow investors,

She identified this problem fresh out of college.

Fresh out of college, Aisha Peenwal walked into her first job at a fintech company in Chennai.

On her first week, a new RBI circular landed. A dense, 40-something pages, full of legal references to documents from years ago.

Her manager told her to figure out what it meant for their product.

It was a major regulation, the kind that touched almost every partnership and product running in Indian fintech at the time.

She went to four senior colleagues. She got four different answers.

Nobody was sure. Everyone was guessing. And somewhere in that room, a small process gap was turning into a compliance risk.

She filed it away in the back of her mind and got on with her career.

What made her believe this was finally solvable?

Aisha spent six and a half years in fintech product management, working on loan origination systems, working capital engines, and business rule management at companies including Credable.

In 2024, she saw a large NBFC get fined 50 lakh rupees and decided the problem was now solvable with AI.

She had taught herself Python over five years of weekends, calling friends at odd hours when she got stuck on a syntax error, staying up until something worked.

She built the first version of ReQL herself.

Her first client didn’t pay her in money. She asked them to pay her in feedback.

Two hours, sometimes three, sitting with the CEO of a small NBFC, mapping out every compliance use case the company faced from the inside.

Why is this problem getting worse, not better?

India has 9,000 registered NBFCs, 140 scheduled commercial banks, 57 insurers, and over 70,000 CA firms advising regulated clients.

Together they face over 1,200 new regulatory circulars every year across RBI, SEBI, IRDAI, MCA, PFRDA, and other regulatory bodies in India.

That’s roughly 80 updates a day.

Every entity reads those circulars separately. Every entity draws its own conclusions. Every entity hopes it got it right.

In December 2025, India’s central bank shut down 35 finance companies all at once.

The reason: these companies had been breaking small rules for months, and nobody caught it in time.

Nobody is breaking these rules on purpose. They are struggling to keep up with the updates.

How is ReQL solving this big issue?

ReQL is a small language model trained on India’s regulatory corpus.

Tell it what kind of entity you are, and it maps every obligation that applies to you across every regulator.

When a new circular arrives, it tells you what changed, what it means for your specific business, and what you need to do next.

Every answer comes with a citation — the exact circular, clause, and obligation — so you can show a regulator the proof, not just the intention.

The platform covers 28 use cases today. It is deployed with two NBFCs. Aisha is in active conversation with one of India’s three largest private banks, a connection she made through the Plug and Play cohort at GIFT City.

What do we like, and why are we featuring this startup?

• The founder has six and a half years of insider knowledge of exactly the problem she’s solving.

• She built the POC herself. Her first two deployments came from personal relationships, which means she can sell.

• The enforcement data is moving in her direction 35 NBFCs lost licenses in one month, and that number is only going up.

• India’s RegTech market is projected to grow from roughly $600 million today to over $5 billion by the early 2030s.

That growth is being pulled by 9,000 NBFCs, 140 banks, and 70,000 CA firms who all face the same problem and currently have no shared solution.

What we’re watching: this is pre-revenue. The enterprise sales cycle in Indian banking is long.

The private bank conversation is promising but not closed. The real proof of concept is the first paid client.

P.S. One last thing…

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My dear fellow investors,

For ten years, Indian cab-hailing has been a race to the bottom.

Uber, Ola, and Rapido all chase the same rider, the one counting every rupee, the one who will switch apps to save twenty.

So they slash prices, pour money into discounts, and burn cash to win him over.

What none of them built for is the second rider. The one who would gladly pay more for a clean car that actually shows up on time.

For a long time, that rider had nowhere to go. Then came BluSmart. It gave that rider exactly what they wanted. It put 8,700 electric cabs on the road, gave more than 25 million rides, and made close to $98 million (₹820 crore) in a year.

Their promise was a fixed price, no sudden surge, a clean car, and a driver who would actually show up.

Then it shut down… due to some financial fraud.

But the people who wanted those rides did not go away. It proved that india has a market for premium cabs.

That is the market Naviget is going after

Where are these premium customers?

There is a myth that India will not pay for premium.

It is half true and going out of date fast.

India is not one market, but three countries stacked together.

India 1 is the small top layer, made up of tens of millions of people who earn, spend, and consume like a rich country.

India 2 is the large aspiring middle, with hundreds of millions of people who want better products, better jobs, and a better lifestyle, but still need strong value for money.

India 3 is the largest layer, where people have very limited disposable income and most spending goes toward basic needs like food, housing, healthcare, education, and transport.

The cab giants all fight over India 2, where price wins every time.

But it is India 1 that happily pays more for convenience, and nowhere more so than for the trip to the airport.

That is where Naviget started, in Bangalore.

The city’s airport handled 43.82 million passengers last year, making it the second busiest in India, and on its busiest day, more than 137,000 people passed through.

It sits about 35 km from the city, which is too far for anything but a cab for most travellers.

By our estimate, somewhere between a quarter and a third of those passengers take a taxi, which works out to roughly 30,000 to 40,000 airport cab trips every day at this one airport.

A ride between the city and the airport runs ₹700 to ₹1,100 ($8 to $13), and that is before Uber’s surge pricing kicks in during peak traffic.

So that is the slice Naviget began with, one high-value lane where the rider already wants something nobody sells well.

What makes them different

When you schedule a cab on Uber, it feels reserved, but it is not.

The app waits until your pickup time and then looks for a driver, the same as any normal booking. That is why a driver can still cancel on you, and on the big apps most riders have faced exactly that.

Naviget works the other way around. It does not offer your ride to drivers and hope one accepts. It assigns the ride, and an assigned ride cannot be declined.

If a driver has a real emergency, the trip moves instantly to another driver in the same fleet, so your booking never collapses.

Every driver comes through a verified fleet operator who has already checked them, which is why the car shows up clean and nobody cancels.

Their business model

Naviget owns no cars and employs no drivers.

It sits on top of professional fleet operators who already own the vehicles and gives them the technology they were missing.

The partners bring the cars and the people. Naviget brings the app, the fixed pricing, and the standards.

The money comes in two simple ways:

• A small cut from the fleet operator on each ride.

• A flat platform fee from the rider on top.

There is no surge and no last-minute jump, just a fixed price the rider sees before booking.

And if Naviget ever cancels on you, it pays back double.

Anmol Sharma (Co-founder, strategy and operations). Started building young. His first company, Meal24, was a food-delivery startup he scaled past ₹1 crore in revenue before it shut down. He has been a founder twice over.

Yash Garg (Co-founder, technology). An IIT-BHU graduate who worked at Amazon before this, with hands-on experience building tech-driven systems.

What stands out is how they found this idea.

They did not start with cabs. They first built a simple tool to compare cab prices across apps, and it pulled in 5,000 users in a single day.

But watching those users taught them something that changed everything.

People were not really hunting for the cheapest ride.

They wanted a ride they could trust to show up. So they stopped building a tool that finds the cheapest cab and started building one that makes sure a good cab actually arrives, every time.

That one shift in thinking is the reason Naviget exists.

The traction

Naviget has done all of this without spending a rupee on marketing.

In about three months it completed more than 2,500 rides, almost entirely in Bangalore.

The number that matters most is repeat usage.

Around 70% of riders came back for another trip, which is the clearest early sign that the service is keeping its promise. People do not return to a cab out of loyalty. They return because it worked.

The average ride is worth about ₹1,400, so these are high-value trips, not cheap hops. And the early validation goes beyond individual riders. Naviget already serves as a mobility partner for concierge platforms like HULP and CREW by Swiggy, which use it for premium airport and executive travel.

So far it has never cancelled on a rider, and it backs that with a 2x refund if it ever does.

GVP TAKE

A lot of founders would look at BluSmart’s collapse and see a warning. Naviget’s founders looked at it and saw a map. That is the thing that gives me conviction here.

BluSmart already ran the expensive experiment and proved the hard part, that millions of Indians will pay more for a cab that simply works.

It died from fraud in the company that owned its cars, not from weak demand.

Naviget is chasing that same proven demand, but it owns no cars and carries no fleet debt, so the exact thing that killed BluSmart cannot kill them. They kept the promise and threw away the part that was fragile.

Two more things stand out:

• They started in the one place where reliability is worth paying for. A missed flight costs thousands, so paying a little more for a cab that shows up is an easy yes. It is a narrow wedge, but it is the right one.
  

• The early numbers point the right way. A 70% repeat rate with zero spent on marketing is the strongest signal a young, reliable business can show, because people only come back when the promise is held.

The gap will not stay empty. The giants can move the moment it looks worth defending.

P.S. One last thing…

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If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 565 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

The metal everyone owns and nobody can clean

My dear fellow investors,

In February 2023, India announced it had found 5.9 million tonnes of lithium in Jammu and Kashmir. The headlines went wild. India is a lithium giant now.

Two years later, India still lacks meaningful domestic refining capacity, and depends on foreign processors for nearly all of it. The reserve just sits there. The government tried to auction that block twice. Both times, not one serious buyer showed up.

Here’s the part nobody told you. Owning lithium rock means almost nothing on its own. It comes out of the ground dirty, and before any of it can go into a battery, someone has to clean it.

That step is called refining, and refining is where the power sits.

China figured this out twenty years ago. It owns only about 8% of the world’s lithium, but controls roughly 70% of global refining capacity. It barely owns the rock. It owns the cleaning. That’s how it sets the price for everyone.

So when people ask if India will be the Saudi Arabia of lithium, they’re asking the wrong question. The crown was never the rock. It was the refinery. Every gram India uses still gets shipped out, cleaned abroad, and shipped back.

That’s the gap Daratha Technologies is going after. India’s need for its own battery-ready lithium by 2030 sits between 12 and 15 billion dollars. What India makes today is almost nothing

The market hiding under the mines

In 2025, India brought in 18,200 tonnes of cleaned lithium worth 1.2 billion dollars.

Most of it, 68%, came from China. Every bit of lithium India uses gets shipped out, cleaned in someone else’s factory, and shipped back.

Think about what that means.

India is building electric scooters, solar batteries, defense gear. Every one of them runs on lithium that passed through a foreign factory first. If that supply ever gets cut, India has no backup.

None….

That’s not a small problem. It’s a hole in the country’s energy independence, and it’s been sitting in plain sight while everyone talked about the rock.

A couple of Indian companies have started building refineries in the last year, so the space isn’t totally empty anymore.

But it’s close. India’s need for its own cleaned, battery-ready lithium by 2030 is somewhere between 12 and 15 billion dollars. What India makes today is almost nothing.

That’s the gap. Not the digging. The cleaning.

How a fintech founder got into this industry

Gaurav Kaushik is a mechanical engineer.

Before this, he built and ran a fintech company called Pay4You. It put banking into rural India, in villages where the nearest bank was ten kilometres away. It worked. It still runs today, doing over 4 crore in transactions every month.

And he walked away from it.

Someone else runs it now. When I asked him why he’d leave a working business behind, his answer was simple.

“The impact felt too small. Deep tech is what pulls at him, and this lithium problem felt like something India needed, not just a nice opportunity.”

There’s one detail he almost let slip after our call, once the serious questions were done. He grew up in a small village.

“The first fridge his family ever owned was made by a foreign company, not an Indian one. He said it like small talk. But it’s really the whole reason he’s doing this. He wants to build something Indian that the rest of the world depends on.”

Why can no nation break the monopoly of China in this market?

Two reasons a 12-billion-dollar gap is still sitting empty.

Cleaning lithium is a money-losing trap, on purpose.

China didn’t just build factories. It built so many that it flooded the world with cheap, clean lithium and crushed the price.

Prices have fallen more than 80%.

So when a rich country like Australia does the math, the answer is don’t bother.

Huge cost to start, nasty waste, slow permits, and then you’re selling into a market where China can drop the price below your cost any time it wants and wipe you out.

So Australia just digs up its rock and ships it to China to clean. The dirty, low-profit step turned out to be the throne, and the West handed it over without a fight.

The old way of cleaning is filthy and costly.

The traditional method dumps in mountains of harsh chemicals and spits out piles of toxic waste while using huge amounts of water.

And because rock, salty water, and dead-battery scrap are all so different, you normally need a separate factory for each one. Three factories, three times the cost. The few who try it stay too dirty and too expensive to matter.

What Daratha is actually building

Why hasn’t someone already done this?

Lithium refining is one of the most technically challenging separation processes in the critical minerals industry.

1. One factory for any source.

Dirty lithium shows up in three forms: hard rock, salty water, and the black gunk left over from recycling dead batteries. Daratha’s plan is to do a little prep on each one so they all come out looking like the same liquid.

Once they match, one factory can finish all three. Build it once, feed it anything. One times the cost instead of three.

2. Electricity instead of chemicals. Instead of dumping in harsh chemicals, the final cleaning uses special filters and an electric current to pull the lithium out. Way less toxic waste. Over 90% of the water gets reused. Zero of the nasty leftover salt.

3. A real shot at a low price. Lower startup cost, plus reusing the heat the process already makes, means a price that could survive even when China leans on the market. That’s the whole bet. Not bigger than China. Cheaper and cleaner, at small scale, made in India.

Their long-term vision: India’s first feedstock-agnostic refining platform, processing hard-rock lithium, brines, and battery black mass through one shared system.

The team

Gaurav Kaushik, Founder and CEO. Mechanical engineer. Former CEO of Pay4You, the rural fintech he built and left, still running at 4 crore in monthly transactions. Started Daratha in April 2026.

That’s the team. One person. He’s in talks with CSIR for the filter tech and with IITs for lab access to build the first test version. No co-founders, no chemists, no operations people yet. I’m telling you exactly what’s there, because at this stage that honesty is the whole point.

My take

The timing is rare. Lithium was on India’s restricted list until 2023. The legal door to private refining is barely a year old, backed by a 1.88 billion dollar critical mineral budget. This market is young by law, not by luck.

His honesty is a feature. He isn’t claiming he’ll beat China. He’s building a backup so India isn’t stuck if it gets cut off. He told me his own ceiling before I had to dig for it.

The risk is just as real. His exact way of chaining all four steps is unproven and unbuilt. A solo founder, one month in, against a problem twenty-year-old global firms still wrestle with. Back this today and you’re backing an idea and a person, not a product.

What makes it worth your time is the size of the hole. A country handed a treasure it can’t use, a gap worth billions, and almost nobody building toward it. Whether Gaurav fills it, I don’t know. That the gap is real, I’m sure of.

Most weeks I’d point you toward a funding conversation. Not this one. Daratha is too early for that, and Gaurav would be the first to tell you so.

What he actually needs right now isn’t a check. It’s a lab and a shot.

So here’s my ask. A lot of you have deep networks. Some of you have ties to chemistry labs, research institutes, universities, or battery and EV companies running pilot projects.

If you know a lab that could give him bench space, or a company that could hand him a small pilot to prove his process, that single intro is worth more to him today than money he can’t use yet.

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If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 565 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

The Great Indian Cab Bloodbath.

My dear fellow investors,

In the last ten years, Indian cab-hailing has burned more venture capital than almost any consumer category in startup history.

Uber India lost $165M (₹1,407 crore) last year alone.

Ola’s revenue is shrinking and it’s slipped to third place.

Even Rapido, the one company close to profitability, did it only after switching its business model entirely.

It’s funny that the real moat in Indian cab-hailing was never technology. It wasn’t the drivers. It wasn’t brand. It was the ability to lose money longer than everyone else.

That market is the one Macro Rides is going after.

The Market Hiding under Uber

In Delhi, millions of people use the Metro train every day to get to work.

The Metro is fast and cheap. The problem is getting to the Metro station from home that last 2 to 3 kilometers.

That distance is too far to walk and too short to take a regular taxi like Uber.

So people use a small electric three-wheeler called an e-rickshaw.

But the e-rickshaw system is broken.

In the current situation, it takes 20 to 30 minutes for what should be one 10-minute ride.

People skip the Metro entirely because of this.

A WRI India study of 7,200 commuters found that 70% of people who could use the Metro avoid it, mostly because of this last-mile mess.

Macro Rides wants to fix it.

They want to build a phone app where you can book one e-rickshaw, it comes to your house, takes you straight to the Metro at a fixed price, and you are done.

• India has 1.5 million e-rickshaws on the road today. None of them are on an app.

• The total spend on this kind of short e-rickshaw travel is roughly $1 billion a year.

• The Delhi Metro alone carries 4.6 million people every single day — most of them dealing with broken last-mile rides just to reach the train.

This is the largest passenger-mobility category in India by trip volume. And it is not organized.

How the founder understood the riders market working amazon ops team?

Alok Jha grew up in Rohini, in northwest Delhi. For eight years, his daily commute to the metro meant catching two separate e-rickshaws, haggling on price each time, and paying twice for one short ride.

He dropped out of a computer applications degree at 19.

He took a sales job at 17, then HR at a consultancy, then two years inside Amazon’s delivery operations.

The Amazon role is the one that matters. He spent two years watching how delivery drivers get paid, why they quit, and what makes a driver loyal versus disposable.

So he paid ₹800 to drive an e-rickshaw himself

Earlier this year, Alok rented a rickshaw from a driver in Rohini for ₹800 — about what the driver normally makes in a 12-hour shift. He worked the route himself for 8 hours and ran 30+ trips.

What he learned in one day:

• Drivers spend 40% of their day empty, rolling between fares

• Passengers wait 10–15 minutes at stands for a ride to start

• Fare haggling burns over a minute per pickup

At the end of the shift, the driver asked him one question.

“Bhaiya, yeh roz ho sakta hai kya?” (Brother, can this happen every day?)

The driver wasn’t asking about ride volume.

He was asking about predictability. The real product Macro Rides has to build isn’t a marketplace. It’s a guaranteed paycheck for someone who’s never had one.

Why did everyone else get this market wrong?

Two failure patterns explain why this category is still wide open.

1. The cab-hailing model doesn’t fit a 3-km ride.
   
   Uber and Ola priced for 10+ km trips in cars. A ₹35 e-rickshaw ride generates less margin than their driver incentive payouts. Uber India spent ~$295M (₹2,516 Cr) on driver incentives last year alone to retain captains who were defecting to Rapido. The economics don’t work below a certain trip length.
   
   

2. The one VC-backed company that tried e-rickshaws bought too much.
   
   OyeRickshaw raised $13.2M from Matrix Partners, Chiratae, and Xiaomi between 2017 and 2022. They built 15 battery-swapping stations, scaled to 400 employees, and added hyperlocal delivery. Last year’s revenue: ₹57,500 (~$680). They became a fat company in a category that needed a light one.
   

The model that is working in India right now is the daily-subscription one — Rapido and Namma Yatri both took zero commission and charged drivers ₹20–₹30 a day. Rapido is now operationally profitable. Namma Yatri did 130 million rides on $5M.

Macro Rides is applying that model to e-rickshaws.

What is the opportunity here?

Three numbers matter here.

1. India has about 1.5 million e-rickshaws on the road today. They are everywhere. None of them have any technology. No app. No GPS booking. No fixed prices. Just drivers, vehicles, and stands.

2. The total amount of money spent every year on this kind of short e-rickshaw travel is somewhere around $1 billion in India. That is a big pie, and right now nobody is organizing it.
   

3. The Delhi Metro alone has 4.6 million people riding it every single day. Most of them have to deal with this last-mile mess.

So the opportunity is: take the messy, offline e-rickshaw system, put a phone app on top of it, and become the company that helps millions of people get to the Metro every day.

There is also a bigger pattern in India that helps explain why this is interesting right now.

What Macro Rides is actually building?

One app. The rickshaw comes to your door. The fare is fixed before you get in.

Three things make it work:

1. The rickshaw comes to you. No walking to a stand. No haggling. Pickup in 2-3 minutes.

2. Drivers earn more. They pay a small daily fee (₹50-150) and keep every rupee passengers pay. Rapido and Namma Yatri proved this model works. Nobody has tried it with e-rickshaws yet.

3. The company owns nothing. OyeRickshaw bought rickshaws, batteries, and a 400-person team. They died. Macro Rides owns zero vehicles. Just the app.

Pricing is simple: ₹35 for a shared seat, ₹50 for a private ride.

They launch one zone at a time. Rohini first. Then corridor by corridor across D

The team

Alok Jha (Founder & CEO). Rohini-local. 8 years lived the problem. Sales, HR, and two years inside Amazon’s delivery operations. Bootstrapped Macro Rides since June 2024.

Pooja Kushwah (Co-founder & CTO). Built platform engineering at group.one and enterprise systems at Amdocs. Built the company’s mobility dashboard solo.

Vikas Sha (Senior Operations). Six years across Emotorad, Baaz Bikes, Yulu, and Wicked Ride. EV mobility ops stack.

Advisors: Abhishek Bohare (GTM, Tohands) and Siddharth Sanghvi (Finance, Renee Cosmetics). Both IIFT alumni.

Our take

Three things stand out about this bet.

Uber and Ola can’t enter this market. A 3-kilometer ride at ₹35 is too small for them. The commission they would earn on that ride is less than what they spend to acquire a customer. The math doesn’t work for big players. That means the category is protected from the giants by default.

The business model is already proven in India. Rapido and Namma Yatri don’t take a cut from rides. They charge drivers a small daily fee instead. Rapido is now operationally profitable. Namma Yatri did 130 million rides on just $5 million. Macro Rides is copying that exact playbook — but for e-rickshaws, the one category nobody has applied it to yet.

The Delhi Metro is building 21 new stations. Each new station opens up a new neighborhood that needs last-mile rides. Every station = one more zone Macro Rides can launch in. The expansion is funded, under construction, and on schedule.

P.S. One last thing…

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Eight years later: 8 outlets across Kerala and Bangalore. Daily Bakehouse at 25% EBITDA.

“Eating out in India is still considered an occasion. We want to make it a habit.”

I sat down with Vishnu Menon, CEO of Tableset Pantry, the parent company behind Just Love and Daily Bakehouse. I took some notes and have added them below.

1. Start Before You’re Ready

Vishnu and his six co-founders launched a food truck with no F&B experience and no consultant. They were engineering and architecture students running the truck from evening to 3am, then heading to class the next morning. The hardest part wasn’t the hours. It was learning an industry they had already entered. That forced speed of learning is now their operational edge.

2. The Engineering Mindset in F&B

Every co-founder came from a technical background. That turned out to be an advantage, not a liability. Where most founders see a restaurant, Vishnu saw a system: central kitchen, supply chain, replicable formats, predictive ordering. Eight years in, that systems thinking is what makes a 300 sq ft outlet with 2 employees operationally viable at scale.

3. Occasion-Led to Habit-Led

India’s F&B market is massive but culturally underutilized. Eating out is still treated as a special event, not a daily norm, held back by the gap between affordability and quality. Tableset Pantry’s entire thesis is closing that gap: engineered pricing at $0.60 to $2.40, hot food (Indians don’t eat cold sandwiches), and formats small enough to be everywhere. Turn dining out into routine, and the TAM rewrites itself.

4. The Daily Bakehouse Model Is the Bet

300 sq ft. 2 employees. Grab-and-go. Products supplied from central kitchen. Three visits per customer per day, breakfast, lunch, evening, each under $2.40. This is the brand they’re raising to scale, not Just Love. Just Love generates 90% of current revenue and anchors the brand. Daily Bakehouse is the expansion vehicle.

5. Location Is Not a Soft Decision

After 8 years and bad locations, Vishnu runs a three-filter process: Is this an F&B hub where people cluster to choose? Is our target audience here? Do the rentals fit within our hardcoded percentage of revenue? Daily Bakehouse doesn’t go into malls or high streets. It goes into airports, railway stations, and tech parks, where people are already moving and need fast, affordable food. The product is strong enough that the wrong location is the only way to lose.

6. Starbucks Is the Warning, Not the Benchmark

400 outlets. 10 years. Still not profitable in India. That’s what happens when you price coffee at $4.76 in a tea-drinking country. Tableset Pantry’s brands are affordable by design, not by discount. No coupons, no offers. The price is just right for the market. Premium formats in India are losing because they solve a Western problem. Vishnu is solving an Indian one.

7. AI Is an Operations Tool, Not a Story

Vishnu isn’t building an AI startup. But he’s using it: production planning, consumption forecasting, staff quality monitoring via cameras, internal reporting summaries. The ambition is to predict order patterns by outlet by hour using 24 months of data, reducing waste and improving efficiency. AI tightens the engine. The engine is still food.

8. Family Offices First, IPO in Ten Years

The Phase 1 raise is $1.4M, too small for most VCs and right-sized for family offices. Vishnu isn’t chasing institutional money or a quick exit. The target is full India coverage across both brands, then a public listing in 10 years. Cure Foods, which acquired multiple F&B brands and is now heading to IPO, is the local proof point that the playbook works.

If you’re new here, Welcome.

Welcome back to GVP. Every week we meet one Indian founder, verify the traction, and write the story so you can make faster investment decisions. We added 32 new subscribers last week — now at 550 investors reading weekly. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

“Your margin is my opportunity.”

— Jeff Bezos

Hey there!

Tata Starbucks lost $16 million in India last year. Other funded premium cafe chains in the country tell similar stories, with rents climbing faster than revenue.

The standard read on India’s cafe market is that

The bigger you scale, the more you bleed.

This week’s startup is the counter-example.

Seven school friends from a small Kerala town, with no F&B background, have spent eight years building two cafe brands that make money at the outlet level, where every funded premium chain loses money.

Here is their story:

Seven school friends with $8,000 and a food truck.

It started in 2018 in Tirur, a small town in Kerala.

Vishnu was studying IT and the others were doing engineering and architecture.

Between them they put in $1,200 each, bought a food truck, and started selling fresh burgers that nobody else in their town was making.

They went to college during the day and ran the truck till 3 AM.

By 2019, they had outgrown the truck format.

They converted it into a sit-down diner at the same location and called it Just Loaf. That original outlet remains in operation as the first Just Loaf.

Of the original seven, five remain in full-time roles after eight years.

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The Indian cafe market has a structural problem.

In India, eating out is treated as an event, not a routine.

The two options for most people are expensive premium chains or roadside vendors where hygiene is a coin toss.

There is no clean middle ground.

The premium chains have tried to fill that gap and hit a wall.

Tata Starbucks has 479 stores and $150 million in revenue, but the FY25 loss widened to $16 million on 5% revenue growth.

Other funded premium cafe chains in India tell similar stories of rising rent and widening losses.

Rent and staff costs eat the margin before the customer walks in.

One back-end, two brands

Tableside Pantry’s reframe is that they are not a restaurant company but a food infrastructure company that runs two brands:

• Just Loaf is an 1,800 sq ft neighbourhood diner with 52 seats. The casual sit-down anchor that generates 90% of current revenue.
  

• Daily Bakehouse is a 300 sq ft grab-and-go with six seats and two employees, where everything is pre-made in a central kitchen.
  

Customers grab hot idli, coffee, or quick lunch, all priced between $0.60 and $2.50.

Think the Indian Pret A Manger, except built around hot Indian food at a price point where one person can eat there three times a day.

Both brands run on the same central kitchen and supply chain.

They built it like engineers, not restaurateurs

The co-founders’ engineering and IT backgrounds shaped how they approached the business. They broke it into solvable systems instead of running on intuition.

• Logistics. They centralised the supply chain so multiple outlets share inventory and reduce per-unit cost as they scale.
  

• Recipe. They kept the menu short and standardised, so quality stays consistent and two brands run off one kitchen.
  

• Financials. They built the model around throughput per square foot, not seating density. A 300 sq ft Daily Bakehouse turns the same monthly profit as a 1,800 sq ft Just Loaf.

Meet the team

The company is run by five of the seven school friends who started the food truck in 2018:

1. Vishnu N Menon is the CEO. An IT engineer by training, he led the company’s transition from food truck to multi-brand operator.
   

2. Jasim Menattil is the CMO, leading marketing across both brands.
   

3. Nayeem Mallik C is the COO, running outlet operations, central kitchen, and supply chain.
   

4. Sarbas Ahamed TE is the CPO, owning menu and recipe development.
   

5. Mahroof Ahammed is the CBO, shaping brand identity for Just Loaf and Daily Bakehouse.

GVP Take

Tableside Pantry is one of the rare Indian F&B operators where per-outlet economics work without venture capital.

Two reasons we featured them.

1. Their origin story: Seven college students put $1,200 each into a food truck in 2018, ran it till 3 AM, and let customer demand build the rest of the business.

   
   They had no F&B background and no industry capital, but the food worked, and the customer pull turned the truck into a multi-brand operator.
   

2. The second is the engineering discipline. The co-founders’ engineering and IT backgrounds shaped every layer of the business: centralised logistics, short standardised recipes, and a financial model built around throughput per square foot instead of seating density.
   

   That is why two formats of different sizes deliver the same monthly profit per outlet.
   
   Eight years of discipline, two profitable formats, and a team that has stayed together since school.

That is why we featured Tableside Pantry this week.

P.S. One last thing…

If Tableside Pantry fits your thesis, reply to this email and we will introduce you to the founders. The intro is on us.

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P.P.S One last thing…

If this was useful, forwarding it to one person in your network is the single best way to support what we’re building.

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Our only promise is this: we will keep finding India’s best founders at the earliest stage, so you never miss a deal worth taking.

See you next week

If you want me to make a warm intro with this startup founder, feel free to reply to this email!

Email: jaylee@globalventureplay.com

Korean founders struggle to reach Indian corporates. Indian enterprises don't have a structured way to find Korean technology partners. That gap has been expensive for both sides.

Suneel Bandhu brings years of cross-border business development between India and Korea, connecting Korean IT companies with major Indian enterprises, with roots in the Tata Group network. He understands how large organizations make decisions.

Global Venture Play works the other side: early-stage founders, investors, and venture relationships across Asia.

Our strengths don't overlap. They connect.

Startup-to-corporate and corporate-to-startup are different motions.

Together, we're building a more direct path between the Korean and Indian innovation ecosystems.

MoU Signed: Global Venture Play × Luxavera Ventures