Ankur Sinha

Excited and looking forward to discussing the evolving challenges of raising capital for early-stage startups at SAASCON24. Join me as I dive into the current trends, what founders need to know, and how we can navigate this more challenging environment. #SAASCON24 #StartupFunding #EarlyStageStartups #SaaS #Entrepreneurship

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CLSA published a detailed research report on India quick commerce. Recommended reading. Who will be the first to create a $50-100Bn company in India internet? #Zepto #Zomato #IndiaInternet

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Like to order deliveries from the comfort of your own home? Zepto's recent $665 million funding will now allow the company to set up even more store across India to serve you better. Read all about it only in my new article at Entrepreneur India. . . . Follow and connect for more industry news and updates . . . #News #Update #Zepto #Funding #Investment #EntrepreneurIndia #AdityaPranMahanta https://lnkd.in/gYvATrUE

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Traditional loan repayments don’t reflect the reality of India’s workforce today, and rigid EMIs often lead to stress, penalties, and ultimately, costlier credit. CLOU opens up the possibility of a new approach - one that aligns repayments with actual cash flows and simplifies the entire process for both borrowers and banks. In this blog, I delve into how CLOU can transform credit repayments, making them more flexible, inclusive, and in tune with the needs of Indians. Check out the insights here: https://lnkd.in/ec5mCTKh #creditlineonupi #digitalcreditwithzeta #financialinclusion

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India’s Oyo, once valued at $10 billion, is finalizing new funding at a $2.5 billion valuation. This marks a steep decline from its $10 billion valuation in 2019. The startup, which has raised over $3 billion from backers like SoftBank, Peak XV Ventures, Lightspeed, Airbnb, and Microsoft, has struggled to attract institutional investors. In recent months, it has aggressively pitched to high-net-worth individuals after withdrawing its IPO application twice in the past four years. Once a red-hot Indian startup active in markets including the U.S. and Europe, Oyo has now scaled back its international presence. #venture #downround https://lnkd.in/gE2GjYnM

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Shashank Bijapur co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, our portfolio company, ran a terrific panel at the Arkam Innovation Summit. He covered a lot of ground with Manish Jethani Co-founder and CEO of Hevo Data Data, and Gaurav Sharma Founder, and CEO of SaaSLabs .    Here are some key takeaways that stayed with me: Initial journey of identifying the problem statement and figuring out the solution during the early days at SaaS Labs and Hevo Data After selling his first company in the US, Gaurav returned to India. All he wanted to do was make $4-5 K living in India, so he started out by building tools for Shopify users. But when those tools rapidly grew to half a million in recurring revenue, Gaurav realized that he could build anything, be anywhere in the world, and sell it worldwide. Manish believes that your product has to solve a personal problem in addition to an industrial one. Once you start the journey as an entrepreneur, financial success will not satisfy you. “What one problem can you solve even if the financial outcome is not that great?” Deciding whether to validate the product in India and move to the US versus taking a US market-first approach Selling in India is hard, especially in the early days. As Gaurav said, "if you sell a $10 product, you must create an invoice, and then they’ll make the payment in 60 days. So, it became very hard to make a profit. From this, I realized that India is not ready to buy software yet, so the best model would be to build it in India and sell it across the world" Manish believes customer needs and expectations are completely different across India and the US. It's quite challenging to build a product for India and expect it to succeed in the US. So, from day one, he focused on the US market-first approach. Establishing product differentiation during the early days of growing in the US market? Initially, the number one challenge for Manish was to sell a product that their target audience could build themselves. Hevo Data needed needed financial and operational data from companies, which nobody shares easily. Most companies prefer to build a product in-house and work with that tool. So, Manish decided to find initial customers who meet three criteria: they should not want to build a product in-house, they should be fine with sharing the data, and they should be from the US. Aspects of the business that changed from 0-1 to 1-10 journey and beyond To get initial customers, Gaurav decided to integrate his product into larger companies to get more eyes on it. To sustain this growth, Gaurav bet on excellent customer service, which is “an unfair advantage for Indian SaaS,” as he says. His customer service and fast responses became the talk of the town amongst his customers. Here’s the full video video. Well worth your time to listen to three $10M+ ARR SaaS founders at the top of their game.   Arkam Ventures https://lnkd.in/gP_YT-gV

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Super fun catching up with one-time arch-rival, co-conspirator, and now good friend Sanjay Swamy. Thanks for having me on the show Prime Venture Partners. It was fun looking back on how our journeys in fintech began before the term was even coined. Life is tough as an entrepreneur, sometimes it's good to look back and see how far we've come. #startups #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #nostalgia #earlydays #OGs #fintech #mcommerce #payments

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Infrastructure scaling at beast scale is a different ball game altogether. Learn from this insightful series penned by Ajay Choudhary on how we rewrote the playbook and how we stumbled upon hard limits of various infrastructure layers - overcoming them one by one. Don't miss this one!

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🎙️ 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐞? On the Venturis Stories Podcast, I (Palash Somani) dove deep with Gaurav Vaid and Arjun Ghatak to unlock the powerful lessons from India's historic T20 World Cup win and translate them into actionable strategies for YOU to level up your product management game! 🏏🌟 My non-traditional journey to Director of Product at Dream11 (civil engineer > finance > subscriptions > product!) is living proof that 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬. 💪🚀 Here's a 𝐬𝐧𝐞𝐚𝐤 𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐤 of what we discussed: ↳  𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐯𝐬. 𝐇𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐥𝐞: Growth mindset trumps having a traditional background.🧠 ↳  𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 + 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 + “𝐢𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐟” = 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡. Balance data with a touch of "irrational belief" to spark innovation. 📊✨ ↳  𝐅𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬 & 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫: Instead of “what” to build, focus on “why” - the desired outcome. 🎯 ↳  𝐀𝐝𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐊𝐢𝐧𝐠: Be the ultimate all-rounder, just like a cricketer! Learn to shift gears and conquer any challenge. 🏆 ↳  𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦: India's World Cup win reveals the secrets to a high-performing product team (shared purpose, trust, and celebrating wins are key!). 🌟🤝🎉 ↳  𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 & 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈: How AI will transform the product landscape and the two paths for product managers. 🤖🚀 Huge thanks to Gaurav and Arjun for having me on the Venturis Stories Podcast! Ready to become a product management champion? Listen to the full conversation here: 🔗 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gd_FYFra 🔗 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gse-yVQq 🔗 Apple: https://lnkd.in/ga3vS4zA Let me know in the comments what resonated most with you! 🗨️ #productmanagement #growthmindset #dream11 #cricket #generativeAI #careerdevelopment ------------------------------------------------------------------- Enjoying my content? 👍 Like and ♻️ repost if your network will find it useful! 🔔 Every Mon-Fri at 10:30 AM I talk about Product, AI and Growth Mindset. Follow to 10x your growth. 📆🕥🚀

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Zepto cap table - less than 1% ownership with each founder and 6-8% each with their UAE based family members. Looks like highly optimized tax structuring in case of a liquidity event (IPO). With this ownership, pushing nationalism narrative is a lost battle. Introduction of nationalism narrative in the internet consumer categories is typically not a good sign. Amazon is preferred because of its faster deliveries and better customer experiences, and not because of being American or Indian. Grocery + FMCG market has a fixed TAM at a local level with very minor increase y-o-y. It would be unreasonable to assume that because of economy growing or onset of quick commerce, an individual household will start consuming more fruits, cereals etc or food habits/lifestyle will change drastically in a short period. It will not. This means that the demand which earlier used to get fulfilled by Kiranas and other hypermarkets is getting shifted to QC. One doesn't need market reports/data to arrive at this conclusion. Hopefully, everyone could find a middle ground in this reality.

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INDstocks by INDmoney saw almost 3x scale of concurrent users using the application through the last 3 days. As #India was getting prepared for its much awaited #generalElectionResults, the Engineering team at INDmoney embraced this challenge of getting ready for humungous scale. While many brokers had issues scaling for this traffic surge, primarily on June 3 (Monday), #INDstocks was quite resilient and gave all it's users highly reliable trading experience on all the three days (June 3 - 5). We have achieved this through a lot of best practices in #Engineering. All our Backends are independently scalable micro services, which gives us greater flexibility. We decoupled core components to a large extent, which allows seamless experience to our users on both Apps and website, even in the events of unprecedented scale. On days when volatility hits through the roof, an ultra-efficient square-off system which protects users from going into dangerous circuits and thereby losing money, is of paramount importance. Through our #INDprotect feature, our users' square-off orders were sent to exchanges in under 5 ms, which helped users reduce their losses significantly! At the market open, we saw close to 50% more price ticks from exchanges on June 4 and INDstocks users didn't have to face any latency in viewing the live prices on their web / mobile devices. Our #superFast #Pricer delivered all the ticks to users in under 1ms. #INDmoney #INDstocks #Election #Buzz #IndianEquities #Stock #Market #Economy Ashish Kashyap Nikhil Behl Mourya Venkat vasu choudhary Ashwin Sreekumar Sonu Singh Tejas Chhotani Deepak Gupta Kartikay Aggarwal Tushar Kumar Singh Deepak Pandey Nikhil Choudhary Sivajee Battina Pooja MD Harsh S. Aniket Pathak

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Listen in to this meaningful podcast 'Hard Thing about Hard Launches' , where I speak with two founders - Akshar Shah of Fixerra and Trivesh D. of Tradejini open up on the opportunity set of the Indian fintech market. It's a very interesting contrast as Akshar is focusing on building a fixed deposits marketplace and Trivesh is building out discount broking tapping the equities. What we discussed : a. Fintech is not a winner-takes-all market - why and how? b. Is verticalization better in financial services space. Why? c. Is frugality a good strategy? d. The fear of compliance and what does it mean to be a fintech founder now ?

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Last week, I sat down with Fazal Gupta, co-founder of Logik.io, to talk about monetization in digital businesses. Having worked for BigMachines, then Oracle, then Workday, prior to co-founding Logik, Fazal has observed firsthand the evolution of software monetization over the last 15 years. 🕒 Every time I speak with Fazal, I gain insights, not just about building & monetizing enterprise SaaS, but also about the deep consideration he gives to the customer experience. In this 3-minute snippet, we discuss: 1️⃣ The 3 pillars of complexity SaaS businesses must manage. 2️⃣ Introducing products to customers in commercially viable ways. 3️⃣ Why monetization approaches must vary for different customer segments. 🎥 The full episode is live on youtube. Link in comments. 🔗 #pricing #packaging #b2bsaas #monetization #cpq #q2c

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We recently launched a brand new season of Propel – a global business accelerator for startups in India. First started in 2021, this program sits at the intersection of three key areas – startups, exports and technology adoption – all important for India as a nation. The program has already helped 70+ brands from different parts of India make their debut in global markets with many of them witnessing strong and consistent business growth. In this season 4, I expect even more entrepreneurial energy. At our end, we continue to focus on making exports easier for entrepreneurs and small businesses across India as we move closer to our goal of enabling $20B in cumulative exports from India by 2025. Read More: https://lnkd.in/gVYvXGwU #AmazonIndia #Exports #GlobalSelling #Propel #Startups #SmallBusiness #Entrepreneurs Vivek Somareddy | Bhupen Wakankar | Chand T. Mazumdar | Srinidhi Kalvapudi | Aditia Bhalla | Amazon Global Selling

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Interestingly, in the light of recent antitrust rulings, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has expressed the company’s commitment to vigorously defend its business practices. He emphasized that Google’s success is rooted in continuous innovation and delivering superior products that consumers and partners choose willingly. In August 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google violated antitrust laws by maintaining a monopoly in the online search market. The U.S. Department of Justice is considering structural remedies, including the potential breakup of Google’s business units such as Chrome, Play, and Android, to address anticompetitive practices. Despite legal challenges, Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, reported a 34% increase in profit, earning $26.3 billion in the July-September quarter of 2024. 1) Can Google balance regulatory compliance with its commitment to innovation and user experience? 2) What impact would a potential breakup have on the broader tech industry and consumer choice? 3) How should companies in dominant market positions prepare for increasing regulatory scrutiny in the evolving digital landscape? These developments prompt a broader discussion on the future of big tech and the balance between market dominance and fair competition. Your thoughts please… #google #antitrustlaw #innovation #firsttimeceos #ceosgurukul https://lnkd.in/dGFD-qAP

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Finsire has recently started its learning series - Ideally by chatting with the best folks in the Industry. Here, with Siddharth Shetty, Co-founder and CTO of Account Aggregator (AA) from DigiSahamati Foundation, we speak about the data exchange's inception, growth, and future in India. - We use AA for various reasons, including pushing boundaries in India's data exchange layer with various use cases. - It's been about three years since it went live, and over 70 million cumulative Indian accounts are linked. - One-of-a-kind data sharing network from India that is not seen anywhere across the globe, baring Singapore with https://lnkd.in/gyrCQtVQ - Different approach to protect consumers as compared to the previous models that existed to attain consumer data by various methods used by Plaid or Salt Edge Onemoney Finvu (Cookiejar Technologies) Protean eGov Technologies Anumati by Perfios AA NADL - Account Aggregator Computer Age Management Services Limited KFin Technologies Ltd. Enjoy - Please click on the link below and watch the video!

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To all founders, CTOs, Vp Engg... if any company/individual approaches you with the following claims 1. We will build ML solution even if you don't have enough data {data synthetic will not work unless you have enough evidential data to create} 🛑 2. We have built LLMs or we will help you build LLMs 🤥 3. We will provide AI solution for very cheap 😥 4. We will improve efficiency/ROI/CR by 50% from day 1 using our AIML solutions Then please RUN 🏃‍♂️ 🏃‍♂️ 🏃‍♂️ .... All these are nothing but diet pill ads 💊 #CTO #CIO #VP #AIML #GENAI

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Final AMA for AIR5 For the @AntlerIndia Residency #5, apps from individual founders are due Aug 2nd. Existing teams can continue to apply (rolling decisions). Nandini Vishwanath & I are doing one final AMA this evening (July 29, 6-7 pm IST). We cover all things Residency - the best way to move from your -1 to 0 phase to an investment decision. https://lu.ma/7n35d1z5

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Here is a conversation with Arvind Saraf, Niki Parmar and me that throws light on how to think about small models along with larger models - https://lnkd.in/gGqiDHVV

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