Evolution Of The Indian Startup Industry With Sasha Mirchandani, Kae Capital

If you have been bootstrapping and think you are ready for investors, you need to learn how investors think. First, please study our free Bootstrapping course and Investor Introductions page. Then start looking for entrepreneur – investor fit. Today I introduce you to Sasha Mirchandani.

Sasha Mirchandani is Founder and Managing Director of Kae Capital, an early stage fund focused on India. I’ve known Sasha for over a decade, and we discuss the evolution of the Indian startup industry at length. You can listen to the podcast interview here and the roundtable recording here:

Sramana Mitra: We are going to start today’s session with Sasha Mirchandani who is the Founder and Managing Director at Kae Capital. Sasha has been here before. I have known Sasha for a very long time and I’m looking forward to catching up. Let’s start with an overview of the Indian startup ecosystem and the trends that you have observed. You’ve been at this for a long time. What has happened during the time? We can dialogue a bit to understand where we are in the evolution of the Indian startup movement. 

Sasha Mirchandani: The Indian startup ecosystem has been going for quite a while. If I remember correctly, it started very early in the early 2000s, around the time of the dot-com era.

A few VC firms stood up to put their flags down, but most of them disappeared post dot-com era. The second bucket started in 2006. This has been the serious bucket. People started coming back to India. We had several different firms that wanted to come.

One of them was Global Suitcase VC. They would show up from the Valley with a suitcase and look for deals and go back to the Valley. The second bucket set up shop in India by having one person in India and had management committees and partners mostly in the US and other markets.

You had a third bucket which was Indian firms like Nexus. Around the same time, you started having global firms. They had Indian outposts with Indian management and partners partnering with these firms like Matrix and Lightspeed. Sequoia started around 2006.

After that, we had many more firms come into the ecosystem. That was the first time when large firms came to India and started investing with the Indian capital that they had raised. Today, it has evolved quite a bit. It’s a very large industry.

You have pretty much every top-tier US VC now in India. You have a bunch of the Indian homegrown funds that are scaled up. Each of them is managing well over a billion dollars. We have a bunch of seed funds like Bloom that have come up. There’s also a whole bunch of private equity that have come up.

It’s a robust ecosystem and still growing. It’s quite exciting right now.

Our conversation continues here.

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