Prime Venture Partners Podcast

What makes a restaurant worth backing when 80% of them fail?

Hotshare, an F&B investment platform that backs restaurant businesses at the outlet level, evaluated 41 brands in its first year and invested in just three.

So what made those three worth backing?

For Lavanya, Founder and CEO of Hotshare, the answer is not just great food, a packed dining room or a strong brand.

She wants proof that the outlet itself works.

That means profitability. Clean operating data. Healthy unit economics. Repeat demand. Tight execution. And a clear reason to believe the same economics can hold when the business opens its next location.

In this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Jerome Manuel sits down with Lavanya to understand how Hotshare decides which restaurant businesses are ready for capital, why traditional venture frameworks do not always fit F&B, and what founders need to prove before asking someone else to fund outlet #2.

00:00 Introduction to Lavanya and Hotshare

03:35 How Hotshare evaluates F&B brands

10:03 Capital flowing into India’s F&B sector

15:32 Hotshare’s “missing middle” thesis

22:57 How Hotshare thinks about outlet-level returns

30:16 The numbers behind a healthy restaurant

34:02 Common mistakes restaurant founders make

38:21 Market research and the data gap in F&B

43:19 Profitability and CapEx benchmarks

53:06 Can hospitality become an investable asset class?

59:12 Red flags and green flags Hotshare watches for

1:01:38 Rapid fire: discipline vs talent, food vs unit economics

1:10:16 BeyondBurg founder Anas joins the conversation

1:13:07 Why Hotshare invested in BeyondBurg

1:28:29 Restaurant recommendations from Lavanya and Anas

Hotshare does not fund first outlets. Lavanya wants to see at least one profitable outlet, backed by operating data, signed financials and ongoing MIS, before considering the next one.

She also gets specific about the economics, from COGS, EBITDA and rent to profitability and CapEx recovery, and why a strong month matters far less than the trajectory of the business.

The conversation also gets into Hotshare’s “missing middle” thesis: many restaurants need ₹50 lakh to ₹5 crore to expand, an amount that can fall between informal funding and traditional institutional capital. Lavanya explains why outlet-level cash generation and yield can offer a different way to think about returns in F&B.

Then BeyondBurg co-founder Mohammed Anas joins the conversation.

BeyondBurg started in 2017 as a four-seat kiosk selling around 40 to 50 burgers a day. At the time of the podcast, it was doing roughly 3,000 burgers a day and preparing to open its sixth location.

Lavanya and Anas talk about what Hotshare saw in the business, from disciplined unit economics and operating data to a focused product, strong systems and a hospitality culture that could hold up as the brand expanded.

For F&B founders thinking about raising capital and investors trying to understand what makes a restaurant worth backing, this is a detailed look at how those decisions are actually made.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lavanyajayashankar

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mowglikima/

X: https://x.com/LavsJS

Follow Jerome Manuel

X (Twitter):https://x.com/JeromeAndManuel

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromermanuel

Read the transcript for the entire podcast here:

https://bit.ly/Hotshare

About Prime Venture Partners

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm backing exceptional founders building category-defining technology companies across SaaS, fintech, AI, healthcare, consumer internet and enterprise software.

Learn more: Prime Venture Partners

Follow Prime Venture Partners:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2780448/admin/dashboard/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/Primevp_in

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primevp_in/

Learn more about:

Hotshare:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hotshare.in/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hotshare/

BeyondBurg:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondburginc/?hl=en

#F&BInvestment #Entrepreneurship

How was Puma India built, how did Virat Kohli’s one8 come about, and what is Agilitas trying to build in India’s sportswear market?

Abhishek Ganguly spent 17 years at Puma, joining when the brand was virtually unknown in India and helping build it into the country’s largest sportswear brand. Puma India went on to cross ₹2,000 crore in revenue, ahead of Nike and Adidas combined in India. Then, after nearly two decades in the industry, Abhishek chose to start again.

Today, as Co-founder & CEO of Agilitas, he is pursuing a much bigger idea: can a sports brand from India compete with the best in the world?

In this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Amit Somani speaks with Abhishek about the journey from Puma to Agilitas and one8, how Indian consumers have changed over the last two decades, why past success can become a disadvantage, and what it takes to build a brand people genuinely care about.

00:00 Introduction

00:59 Building Puma India From Scratch

05:29 How the Indian Consumer Has Evolved

12:06 Staying Close to the Consumer

16:36 Why Consumers Don’t Need More Products

18:33 “Made in India, Unfinished on Purpose”

21:19 Why Start Agilitas?

24:20 The Risk of Past Success

25:12 “Disruptors Don’t Disrupt Again”

28:16 Building With Virat Kohli

32:09 Why India Needs a Global Sports Brand

34:16 Why Virat Kohli Backed Agilitas

36:45 Building a Brand From India

37:32 Virat Kohli Rejected 17 Prototypes

39:28 The Future of one8

41:35 Advice for Entrepreneurs

A major thread in the conversation is Abhishek’s long-standing relationship with Virat Kohli. He goes back to 2016, when he proposed that Virat should build a brand of his own rather than remain only a brand ambassador. That idea became one8.

Years later, when Abhishek left Puma to start Agilitas, Virat became one of the company’s early believers, investing in the business and merging one8 with Agilitas.

The conversation also explores why Abhishek believes Indian consumers are evolving too quickly for old global playbooks, why founders need to stay close to the consumer, and why experience can sometimes become baggage. His own reminder to himself is simple: “Disruptors don’t disrupt again.”

At the heart of Agilitas is a larger ambition: to build a sports brand from India that can compete with the best in the world, not on price, but on product, performance and brand.

Read the transcript for the entire podcast here: https://bit.ly/Abhishek-Ganguly-Agilitas

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm backing exceptional founders building category-defining technology companies across SaaS, fintech, AI, healthcare, consumer internet, and enterprise software.

Learn more: Prime Venture Partners

Follow Prime Venture Partners:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2780448/admin/dashboard/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/Primevp_in

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primevp_in/

Website: https://agilitas.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/agilitas-sport/home/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agilitas_sports/?hl=en

#SportsEntrepreneurship #BrandBuilding

What does it take to build original deep tech in India, get some of the country’s largest companies to adopt it, and eventually take the business to a ₹1,000+ crore IPO?

In 2007, Professor Shashikanth Suryanarayanan started @SEDEMAC Mechatronics out of an IIT Bombay lab. Nearly two decades later, SEDEMAC has become one of India’s standout deep-tech success stories. The company crossed ₹1,000 crore in annual revenue, ships around 1 million motor controllers every quarter, and its ISG (Integrated Starter Generator) technology is now on an estimated 12 to 13 million vehicles on the road.

It also reached a milestone very few Indian deep-tech companies do: the public markets, through a ₹1,087 crore IPO that was entirely an Offer for Sale, with no fresh capital raised by the company.

In this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Jerome Manuel sits down with Shashikanth to explore how SEDEMAC went from building proprietary control technologies to creating products adopted by major two-wheeler and generator manufacturers.

00:00 Introduction

00:59 What Does a Motor Controller Do?

03:53 What Is Control Technology?

08:43 The Sensorless Commutation Problem

16:55 How Technology Creates New Markets

22:44 How Sedemac Reached Millions of Vehicles

27:33 Why India Needs More Original Technology

31:34 “You Will Not Produce a Virat Kohli in Spain”

41:50 What Made Sedemac Work?

47:40 Building a Technical Team

54:53 From Professor to Founder

1:00:27 Getting OEMs to Adopt Deep Tech

1:09:19 ₹36 Crore to ₹1,058 Crore

1:20:08 Competitive Advantage, Profitability & ROCE

1:22:44 The Road Ahead

Shashikanth explains SEDEMAC’s work in sensorless commutation and Integrated Starter Generators, but the bigger story is how a technology moves from an engineering breakthrough to something millions of people actually use. SEDEMAC had to demonstrate something customers were not asking for, convince large OEMs to test it, validate it over years, and gradually earn adoption across multiple vehicle models.

That leads to one of the central ideas of the conversation: technology creators do not always enter existing markets. Sometimes they create the market itself.

Finally, Shashikanth breaks down SEDEMAC’s growth from ₹36 crore in revenue in 2016 to ₹1,058 crore in FY26, and makes a provocative argument: if a technology company has genuinely created something differentiated and reached scale, that advantage should eventually show up in pricing power, profitability and capital efficiency.

A rare look at what it takes to turn deep-tech innovation into a scaled business in India.

Follow Jerome Manuel

X (Twitter):https://x.com/JeromeAndManuel

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromermanuel

Read the transcript for the entire podcast here: https://bit.ly/SEDEMAC-Mechatronics

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm backing exceptional founders building category-defining technology companies across SaaS, fintech, AI, healthcare, consumer internet and enterprise software.

Learn more: Prime Venture Partners

Follow Prime Venture Partners:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2780448/admin/dashboard/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/Primevp_in

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primevp_in/

Learn more about:

Website: https://www.sedemac.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/sedemac-mechatronics

#DeepTech #OEM #Innovation #Entrepreneurship

India’s alcohol beverage industry is worth around ₹5 lakh crore, and spirits make up roughly three-fourths of the market. But building a successful alcohol brand in India involves much more than making a good drink.

00:00 Introduction

01:21 How Big Is India’s Alcobev Industry?

02:13 Why Spirits Dominate India

04:00 The Alcobev Ecosystem & Jobs

07:00 India vs Global Alcohol Markets

10:00 How the Indian Whisky Market Has Changed

14:00 Premiumisation & Changing Consumer Preferences

18:00 Building Premium Indian Alcohol Brands

24:54 How Radico Kaitan Built Categories

27:46 Are Alcohol Companies Profitable?

29:05 What Does It Take to Launch an Alcohol Brand?

35:00 Building a Brand Beyond a Great Product

40:00 Distribution, Retail & Getting on Shelves

45:00 Why Every Indian State Is a Different Market

50:00 Regulation, Excise & Government Control

55:00 How Alcohol Brands Scale Across India

1:00:00 Indian Whisky vs International Brands

1:10:00 The Future of Premium Indian Spirits

1:18:29 Ankur’s Favourite Spirits

1:21:52 Final Thoughts

Ankur Sachdeva has spent around 25 years in the Alcobev industry, with stints at William Grant & Sons, Radico Kaitan, the Kajaria Group and Allied Blenders & Distillers. He was also involved in bringing Glenfiddich and The Balvenie to India, and today is building premium Indian whisky brands of his own.

In this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Jerome Manuel sits down with Ankur Sachdeva, Co-founder & CEO of Uppal Brewers and Distillers to understand an industry that most people consume, but few understand as a business.

They start with the scale of the Indian market. Ankur explains why India's alcohol industry looks very different from global markets, where beer is the largest category, while spirits dominate India and account for around three-fourths of the market.

The conversation then moves into the rise of premium Indian spirits. Ankur discusses brands such as 8PM, Magic Moments, Jaisalmer, Rampur, Indri and Royal Ranthambore, and how Indian companies have identified gaps in the market and built brands around them.

But a good product is only the beginning.

Ankur explains what it actually takes to launch an alcobev brand: from having a clear idea and building the product to manufacturing, capital, distribution and getting consumers to pick it off the shelf. He also talks about why a clever bottle or an unusual flavour may make an interesting product, but that alone does not necessarily make a successful brand.

The episode also gets into the economics of the industry, including why established Alcobev businesses can operate at strong EBITDA levels, and what makes the category attractive once a business has established its model.

For anyone interested in consumer brands, whisky, premiumisation, distribution, regulation or building businesses in India, this conversation gives a detailed look at how the alcobev industry actually works.

Follow Jerome Manuel

X (Twitter):https://x.com/JeromeAndManuel

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromermanuel

Read the transcript for the entire podcast here - https://bit.ly/Prime-Venture-Partners-And-Uppal-Brewers-And-Distillers

About Prime Venture Partners

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm backing exceptional founders building category-defining technology companies across SaaS, fintech, AI, healthcare, consumer internet and enterprise software.

Learn more: https://www.primevp.in/

Follow Prime Venture Partners:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2780448/admin/dashboard/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/Primevp_in

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primevp_in/

Learn more about:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uppal-brewers-distillers/

Website: https://soorahi.com/

#IndianStartups #Alcobev #Whisky #ConsumerBrands #Entrepreneurship

Subrata Mitra, Co-founder and Partner at Accel India and co-author of Down But Not Out, shares what decades of backing Indian startups have taught him about building companies that survive setbacks, adapt through uncertainty and keep going long enough to succeed.

00:00 Introduction

01:01 Why Subrata Wrote Down But Not Out

03:08 The Founder Stories Behind the Book

09:29 The Map, the Compass & “Long-Term Greed”

13:44 What Makes a Founder Resilient?

15:46 How Investors Evaluate Founders

17:21 How Founders Learn, Adapt & Evolve

21:12 The Role of Mentors, Coaches & Family

25:13 Finding Your Mission Beyond Money

27:32 From Generalist to Specialist

30:01 The 2 Things Founders Should Focus On Every Day

30:50 Why Relationships Matter More Than Grades

36:55 Find Your Unique Skills & Double Down

39:08 Why Startup Culture Should Make Room for Joy

43:01 What Subrata Would Tell His Younger Self

44:40 Why No Startup Goes Straight Up & Advice for Young Founders

When Subrata Mitra wrote the first cheque to Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, he says a $200 million outcome would have made them happy. Flipkart crossed that milestone so quickly that nobody stopped to treat it as a major marker. It eventually became one of India’s biggest startup success stories.

But the more interesting story is everything that happens before the outcome: ideas that do not work, difficult decisions, founders who have to change, co-founder challenges, unexpected opportunities and the resilience required to stay in the game for 10 to 15 years.

On this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Amit Somani sits down with Subrata to discuss the ideas behind his book Down But Not Out, which brings together stories of Indian founders who experienced major setbacks but continued to build. Subrata explains why entrepreneurship is more like a Test match than a T20: you need the stamina to stay long, but you must also recognise the right opportunity and hit the ball when it comes.

The conversation explores what Subrata looks for in founders, why it can take eight to nine months to understand whether a founding team has what it takes, and why the ability to evolve may matter as much as what a founder knows when they start. They also discuss coaching, mentorship, family support, complementary co-founder skills and the transition from being a generalist founder to becoming a more specialised leader as the company grows.

Connect with Subrata Mitra

https://www.linkedin.com/in/subratamitra/

Follow Amit Somani

X (Twitter): https://x.com/amitsomani?lang=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thesomani/

Listen/Watch this podcast on

Spotify:

Apple Podcasts:

Read the transcript for the entire podcast here - https://bit.ly/Prime-Venture-Partners-And-Accel-India

About Prime Venture Partners

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm backing exceptional founders building category-defining technology companies across SaaS, fintech, AI, healthcare, consumer internet and enterprise software.

Learn more: https://www.primevp.in/

Follow Prime Venture Partners:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2780448/admin/dashboard/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/Primevp_in

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primevp_in/

Learn more about:

Accel: https://www.accel.com/news/portfolio

#IndianStartups #VentureCapital #StartupInvesting

Piyush Shah, a legendary Indian Founder of 2 Unicorns (InMobi & Glance) shares why India's AI strategy has to look nothing like Silicon Valley's or Beijing's, and what founders should build instead.

00:00 Introduction

00:48 Why the Country That Invents AI Rarely Wins

02:16 US vs China vs India: India's AI Opportunity

03:55 How China Is Winning the AI Race

09:38 AI Startup Ideas for India

12:52 Consumer AI vs Enterprise AI

14:20 Why Consumer AI Can Bankrupt You

16:45 Why Enterprise AI Will Win First

19:57 Distribution Is Still the Biggest Moat

21:43 How AI Startups Should Go to Market

25:14 Physical AI Startup Opportunities

28:37 What US Enterprises Want From AI Startups

32:45 Why Purpose Is a Competitive Moat

35:58 How InMobi Uses AI Internally

37:47 AI Sales, AI Agents & Enterprise Automation

42:16 How Leaders Should Drive AI Adoption

44:50 AI Won't Replace You. Fear Will.

46:09 The Fastest Way to Learn AI

47:32 My AI-Native Chief of Staff

48:52 How AI Changed My Personal Life

52:38 Final Thoughts

Every general purpose technology gets invented once and scaled somewhere else. Germany invented the printing press. Britain built an industry on it. America turned that industry into an economy. Piyush Shah, Co-founder of InMobi and Glance, thinks the same pattern is repeating with AI right now, and he's convinced most founders are drawing the wrong lesson from it.

On this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Amit Somani sits down with Piyush to make the case that copying America's invention-first approach or China's industrialisation-first approach would be the wrong move for India entirely. Instead, Piyush lays out what he believes India's real opportunity looks like: not the smartest AI for the world's most sophisticated users, but AI that raises the floor for a billion people who've never had access to a tutor, a doctor, or a financial advisor in their life.

The conversation doesn't stop at strategy. Piyush and Amit get into why consumer AI has a cost problem nobody's fully solved (he calls it inference CAC), why distribution remains the real moat even in an AI-native world, and why "purpose" might be the one advantage that's genuinely hard to copy. Piyush also opens up about how InMobi and Glance have rebuilt themselves around AI internally, and how AI has changed the way he runs his own life, from an 18-year-old AI-native chief of staff to using AI to understand his family's health reports.

If you're building an AI startup, thinking about India's AI strategy, or trying to figure out whether your business model can survive the AI shift, this conversation offers a real framework, not another hype-cycle.

Connect with Piyush Shah

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/piyush-shah-0583412/

Follow Amit Somani

X (Twitter): https://x.com/amitsomani?lang=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thesomani/

About Prime Venture Partners

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm backing exceptional founders building category-defining technology companies across SaaS, fintech, AI, healthcare, consumer internet and enterprise software.

Learn more: https://www.primevp.in/

Follow Prime Venture Partners:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2780448/admin/dashboard/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/Primevp_in

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primevp_in/

Learn more about

InMobi: https://www.inmobi.com/

Glance: https://glance.com/?c=BAU&pid=Social_X_bio&shortlink=6md9fteh&source_caller=ui

What You’ll Learn:

00:00 Introduction

02:13 Why Marketing Owns Zero Board KPIs

08:54 There Is No Killer Marketing Campaign

15:41 Why Your First 10 Customers Matter More

24:16 The Biggest GTM Mistake Founders Make

33:48 How AI Is Changing Customer Discovery

43:11 Demand Generation Beats Chasing Leads

53:02 Why Value Wins Over Price

1:02:47 The New Rules of B2B Go-to-Market

1:11:26 Rapid Fire with Alon Waks

Rethink your B2B SaaS GTM strategy from pipeline to persona SpotDraft’s CMO Alon Waks shares the framework behind $100M raised and 450+ customers.

Ask a B2B founder about their killer marketing campaign and most will have an answer ready. Alon Waks will tell you that answer is wrong. There is no killer campaign. There is no one channel. And most of what founders think of as marketing is stuck in one-to-many land when it should be one-to-few.

That is where this conversation starts, and it does not slow down.

Alon is the CMO at SpotDraft, the AI-powered contract lifecycle management platform backed by Vertex, Qualcomm, Prosus, and P&G Invest, now serving customers across the US, UK, and APAC. In this episode with Prime Venture Partners, he opens up the playbook he actually runs day to day:

- How he defines persona versus segment (and why founders keep starting with the wrong one)

- What changes as a company moves from 0 to 1 to 10 to 100

- Why he thinks paid marketing has become a race to the bottom that most founders are still throwing money at.

He also opens up his playbook for B2B influencer marketing, an angle most CMOs will not talk about publicly. He explains why validation has quietly shifted away from Gartner and toward peer-to-peer conversations on Reddit, LinkedIn, and community forums. And for the Indian founders trying to crack the US, he lays out exactly which cities matter, what not to do on outbound, and when to make your first local hire.

Toward the end, Alon gets uncomfortably honest about what marketing actually owns on the board KPI list (spoiler: almost nothing) and why that changes everything about how you should measure your team.

If you are a founder, a marketer, or a CMO building a B2B SaaS GTM strategy from scratch, this is the one to bookmark.

Connect:

Alon Waks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alonwaks/

Spotdraft: https://www.spotdraft.com/

Prime Venture Partners: https://www.primevp.in/

Jerome Manuel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromermanuel/

About Prime Venture Partners:

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm partnering with exceptional founders building category-defining companies from India.

#GoToMarket #B2BMarketing

Akshayakalpa is known as India’s first certified organic dairy enterprise. But in this conversation, Shashi Kumar makes it clear that the deeper story has always been farming.

In this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Jerome Manuel speaks with Shashi Kumar, Founder & CEO of Akshayakalpa, about building at the farm level for 16 years, far away from the usual startup playbook of fast growth, quick scale and easy metrics.

Akshayakalpa began with dairy because farmers needed reliable cash flow. Once that started working, the model expanded into animal care, soil management, manure-making, beekeeping, backyard poultry and diversified farms.

Today, Akshayakalpa is a profitable ₹60-crore-a-month business working with 2,800 farmers, including 1,200 women farmers. Last financial year, the average monthly payout to each farming family was ₹1.28 lakh.

The conversation explores:

• Why Akshayakalpa raised no institutional money for 9 years

• Why Shashi refused to sell investors a hypergrowth story

• How Nithin Kamath invested ₹5 crore in 5 days during the pandemic

• Why 27 people took equity in the company when it was struggling

• Why each cluster takes nearly 7 years to build

• How 2,800 farmers produce what would conventionally need nearly 100,000 farmers

• Why 45,000 customers visited Akshayakalpa farms

• Why premium pricing is a value play

• What founders can learn from building with patience and truth

For founders building in India, this episode is a reminder that every great company does not have to be built by chasing the fastest story.

Some are built by saying the harder thing early, and still finding the right people to believe in it.

Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction

00:38 - What Akshayakalpa is really building

02:06 - Why young people are moving away from farming

10:17 - Making farming economically viable again

15:37 - Scaling through role models, clusters and culture

32:16 - Why Akshayakalpa started with dairy

39:13 - The first 9 years: struggle, frugality and survival

46:02 - Building customer trust through farm visits

48:09 - Why premium pricing is a value play

51:08 - Organic food and the challenge of fundraising in farming

1:15:42 - Investor expectations, Nithin Kamath and long-term capital

1:18:10 - What still keeps Shashi up at night

Subscribe to the Prime Venture Partners Podcast for more conversations with founders building enduring companies in India.

#AgriCapital #FarmEconomics #FoodSystems

India’s UPI moment changed how money moves.

But that may only be the first chapter.

As millions of Indians become comfortable with digital payments, a bigger question is beginning to emerge: how will they save, invest, and build wealth over the next decade?

In this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Amit Somani speaks with Ambarish Kenghe, CEO of Angel One, about India’s shift from payment adoption to wealth creation.

From his journey across Google, Myntra, Google Pay, and Angel One, Ambarish has seen India’s digital consumer evolve up close. In this conversation, he talks about what changed after Aadhaar, Jio and UPI, why Indian consumers remain deeply value conscious, how SIPs are becoming a default investing habit, and where the next wave of fintech opportunities may come from.

The conversation also explores:

• Why 2015 became a turning point for India’s digital economy

• How UPI changed everyday money movement for consumers and merchants

• Why India’s wealth creation story still has massive headroom

• What is driving SIP adoption among new investors

• How AI could create a personal CFO or family office like experience for more Indians

• How Angel One is using AI across products, operations and customer education

• Why learning, unlearning and ownership matter when building teams

For founders building in fintech, wealth tech, AI, or consumer products in India, this episode offers a sharp view of where the market has been and where it may be headed next.

👉 Subscribe to the Prime Venture Partners Podcast for more conversations from India’s startup ecosystem.

Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction

02:22 - Why AK came back to India in 2015 after 18 years in Silicon Valley

06:26 - The ₹25 checkbox that Myntra shut down in two hours

09:41 - What UPI changed beyond transaction volumes

11:04 - The Google chef who used to get looted walking home with cash

13:12 - India now has million dollar millionaires. What does that mean for wealth creation.

15:57 - Where Indian retail wealth actually sits: 50% real estate, 15% gold, 15% FDs

16:37 - Equity investing at 5 to 8% in India versus 44 to 45% in the US

17:13 - Only 5% of Angel One users trade F&O exclusively

21:15 - The real opportunity for founders building in India's wealth space

27:30 - The family office for everyone and what agentic AI could make possible

29:35 - How Angel One is using AI today with Ask Angel

35:10 - What AK looks for when hiring: learn, unlearn, ownership

40:58 - The Indian founder worth a billion dollars who spends every Saturday on AI

Long before UPI, smartphones and Aadhaar transformed digital payments in India, mChek was trying to turn mobile phones into wallets.

The vision was ambitious.

The execution was complex.

And the ecosystem was still years away from catching up.

In this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Shripati Acharya speaks with Sanjay Swamy, former CEO of mChek and Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, about one of India’s earliest attempts at building mobile payments.

They discuss what it feels like to build ahead of the market, the hidden cost of ecosystem dependency, and why timing is often the hardest variable for founders to get right.

The conversation also explores:

• Why being early can sometimes look exactly like being wrong

• How telcos, banks and regulators shaped the mChek journey

• The operational chaos of building fintech in 2006 India

• Why distribution does not always lead to adoption

• What changed between mChek, Paytm and the UPI era

• Why products depending on too many stakeholders are harder to scale

• The difference between having the right idea and having the right timing

If you are building in a market that still feels early, this episode is worth your time.

👉 Subscribe to the Prime Venture Partners Podcast for more conversations from India’s startup ecosystem.

Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Intro

01:07 - “Unsuccessful” vs failed entrepreneurs

02:25 - Why timing is the hardest thing to judge

03:05 - The moment Sanjay saw phones as payment devices

05:40 - India’s telecom ecosystem in 2006

09:49 - The original thesis behind mChek

17:14 - The hidden problems nobody anticipated

27:35 - Building a payments app inside a SIM card

39:00 - The moment Sanjay felt it might not work

44:04 - The biggest lesson for founders