Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, it's Monday, the final one of the last financial year. And we have two awesome guests today. We're starting off with gaming and then we're covering FinTech in BC with our next guest. Today Dhruv is taking a break. So I have my colleague Sahil stepping in. He's our in-house DJ as well. So feel free to hit him up for good latest tunes as well. But let's welcome our first guest Parth to talk about gaming. Parth, welcome to the show.

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: Thanks. Thanks everyone. Thanks for hosting me.

Utsav Somani: Do you want to introduce Stan to everyone who's listening about Stan for the first time?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: Yeah, sure. So Stan, it's basically a hangout place for gaming. So you can consider it like your companion app for gaming. So people were looking forward to a platform where they can find friends to play and not get matched with random bots while you're playing. So it's a place where you come and find friends, you follow your favorite influencers, creators, and then you play. And people love video games, they basically download Stan. We are about 40 million users now, primarily in the Indian market.

Utsav Somani: And your journey is also pretty exciting. You've done JPMorgan, then you started this company called eWAR, which was in real money gaming, scaled it to 5 million people. And now you're doing Stan, what are the learnings across this exciting journey of yours?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: Yeah, I think gaming came to me while I was in college days, I used to build hyper casual games, HTML5, Cocos, 2D types, like your Tappy Bird kind of games. And then JPMorgan happened because I used to go for a lot of hackathons back in college and one of the hackathons with JB organized, which was Code for Good. I found it pretty fascinating that 24 hours we spent in the office, it's a pretty interesting vibe and they offered me a job and I didn't sit for the campus placement. I felt that, you know, the office vibe is interesting, let me try it out. Although it turned out to be pretty boring back then because gaming and banking are like two different ends of the spectrum. But fortunately, like internally, something interesting happened in the bank. I did some crazy stuff. I mailed a couple of people in the organization and they got to realize that there's some crazy guy who has joined us from college. So they put me in an innovations team, sort of where we had some interesting work coming. And I was working with a Chinese guy who was based out of US. So very hardworking kind of background. And he used to like ping me on Saturdays and Sundays. So that basically led me to feel like I'm working for a startup inside JPMorgan. So a lot of good learnings, stayed at the bank for about three and a half years. I think a mix of corporate and startup vibe, understood how, you know, the financial world works and capital risks across kind of hit me that finance is key to what everybody's doing while we enjoy building games and media, right? So we and then back to building games, because I never stopped doing it while I was at J.B. as well. What happened because I, me and my co-founder, we built a game and then we went out to sell that game. And interestingly, we felt that there were a couple of platforms which were operating in the RNG space back then. It was, you know, officially legal in the recent ban came in. But what we really enjoyed was serving casual games to the audience of India and ran it pretty much like pretty, pretty like frugally, very less capital raised and then scaled it to a 5 million users, understood how the Bharat economy works, built it for the larger India, you know, folks in Bhopal, Indore, Jaipur, Meerut, these kind of like regions I had users coming from. And that is where I really enjoyed understanding that what can be done to build a platform, you know, was it profitable, EOR was profitable, close to profitable, we were not burning too much. But the angle of RNG, real money gaming was always in front of us with all these taxation issues and, you know, a lot of regulatory hurdles which were coming our way. But while building EOR, we started realizing that communities is like community is the king, right? Like whenever you're building a product, this was in COVID days, we realized that if you can start building audience who really enjoy and passionate about what you're building and you can build them in a smaller groups of communities, you can actually see repeat purchases and true business, sustainable business coming up. And especially as gamers, we've always hung out in groups and, you know, felt relatable audiences could be staged together. So that's how Stan's inception happened. Stan, we started in 2022. And since then, it's been a journey. You know, all these users were hanging out on WhatsApp groups and telegram channels and still suffering to find the best, you know, friends to play by influencers, creators, they were finding difficulty to monetize their YouTube audience. YouTube works in the fair, the algorithm works in the favors of very few creators, while there's a large pool of, you know, creators who love creating content and who love, you know, sharing videos around how to play a game, how to, you know, engage with audience and stuff. So we just gave them home and we just gave them tools to monetize. And then, you know, we started seeing the flywheel getting created and that creators were bringing their fans and users, users were getting fine, you know, finding more players and more, you know, relatable audience to play with. And then they were all building that value loop for us on the platform.

Sahil Talwar: That's pretty sick. Even like, I think for Stan, you're majorly seeing your activations in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, like you also mentioned for Evo games also happened. Is that, was that like a conscious choice to build for that audience or has that happened just by the virtue of coincidence?

Utsav Somani: I think so. I think everyone's like busy in that hustle mode of daily life.

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: I can tell you a funny thing. When we look at building business, it's all about the average revenue per user, right? And every, back then, tier 1 used to be like metro cities or let's say people who end up paying more, but the definition has changed. We can call it, let's say the metro cities and non-metro cities. Metro cities, you are right that people are busy hustling and doing their everyday jobs. But if you go to the rest of India, like even a city like Ghaziabad or Meerut has a tier 1 audience who has very high average revenue per user. So if you can crack the Bharat vibe of building, like if you can get people to understand your platform, hyper personalize it to where the users are coming from, you can actually end up acquiring users from throughout the country. And even on our platform, we have almost 19 to 21% average coming from metro cities also because they also love to play games and video games has always been like a thing which people really enjoy. And I think with the recent trend of sharing experiences with each other, people have started sharing, what are you playing? And that vibe still exists very extensively in even metro cities for that matter. So we just focus where we can capture most of the market and we went very regional as well, like a lot of stand clubs, which is the biggest feature on the app, which is where people hang out and play, like talk to each other. We see people, folks communicating in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, all kinds of languages. And even the influencers who bring their audience, they're very regional and very close to each other, close to their language.

Utsav Somani: And what kind of games are we talking about? Sorry, it's a side.

Sahil Talwar: No, go for it.

Utsav Somani: I had a similar question, actually. What kind of games are we talking about is like hardcore Call of Duty, FIFA, or like, is it more like casual like PUBG and stuff on the fly?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: It's like a mix of everything, whatever trends in India starts getting played on Stam. That's what we've seen. Or rather, we also start trending games on our platform. So they play Roblox, Minecraft, BGMI, Free Fire, Among Us, Pictionary, which is like drawing guests. So they play all kinds of games and we don't build games. We help games get to their right audience. So it's like a pyramid. So it's like users, influencers and game publishers slash game developers. So because we have so many users and influencers, these publishers partner with us and they spend a lot of money on acquiring the right sort of users. So we give them a very cohorted audience. For example, if it's a shooter game, we only promote it to shooter games clubs on the app. So they play all kinds of games. So whatever is getting viral, they just come into a closed group of game room and then you invite your friends. You can also start doing like, not necessarily that you have to be a YouTuber to build your community on Stam. Like people like us who can just click on plus, go live and then they bring up the game and invite like 10 people and then they start playing together. It's like kind of like your childhood when we used to go to these gaming parlors where there used to be these curtains. So we go inside and then we'll see which new game Bhaiyya has installed, like that big console machines you'll see with the joysticks, right? So I would make my best of friends there. I would like spend hours there. So it exactly is getting replicated on the Stam club on our platform in like huge scale.

Sahil Talwar: A follow up question to that actually, one of the gaming founders himself actually once told me that most gaming founders are non-gamers. So I want to ask you, are you a gamer and are you also streaming on Stam?

Utsav Somani: What are your favorite games?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: I mean, I have been an avid gamer from a social perspective, not from a competitive because I've never been great at my reflexes in the games on the shooter one specifically, but I really play racing games well. That's why I'd never miss out on playing Asphalt and all these racing games. I do love to play FIFA, Brawlhalla. I like to always try the new games which are coming in, but now I don't get enough time. But we have these gaming hours as well in the company where we try to spend some time playing games. A lot of the game partnerships team, they play a lot of games in the office as well. But me personally, I have always enjoyed the feeling of making friends when you're playing. So it's been very social to me, like we had like CS LAN nights in college, like we would sit in a room and we would attach our laptops and we'll play Counter-Strike. So I used to love the headshot map. I used to snipe a lot back then. That's the only thing I learned in college.

Utsav Somani: A weekly anti-sniper.

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: Exactly. So I was good at that. So I would hide myself and just snipe from a distance. So that's what I've enjoyed and like making friends while we play games, that's like the best kind of, you know, experience which one can have. And that's what I try to build on the app platform as well.

Utsav Somani: Let's talk about your latest raise as well. So you've announced 17.9 million. Your investor list is just spectacular. Google AI Futures Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, Bandai Namco, Square Enix. I mean, super, super strategic. I mean, how did you get so many strategic investors in one single round? And do they work with you beyond just capital as well?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: That's a great question. So the round size was 10.5 million. Totally, cumulatively, we've raised about like 16 and a half. So fortunately, I have got a chance to like, you know, spend time with all of these good publishers and strategics of the ecosystem. So, you know, a funny thing is a lot of VCs when we had these interests, they were like, hey, you know, why are you raising from strategics? Why are you diluting your cap table, getting all these guys in? But my thought was gaming is an ecosystem play. If you happen to bring the, you know, guys who can really help you grow your revenues and even scale your business in any shape and form, it will be amazing. Like, for example, you're doing a lot of stuff with Bandai Namco with, you know, with the other guys as well. Like with Google AI Futures Fund, we have so much going on. The platform is extensively using Gemini 3. Even Sundar mentioned Stan in his LinkedIn post and his Twitter post. So we've been using Gemini for a lot of content moderation, creator assist tools that has helped us even boost our efficiencies on converting a free user to a paid user, leveraging all the infrastructure of the team. And, you know, a lot of help they have given us with Sony. It's an interesting play, like they have so much going on in their own world. Like they have PlayStation, they have Crunchyroll, a lot of IPs and, you know, ecosystems inside the Sony's world. So we are stitching a lot of it with Stan right now as we speak. So my thought process was that can I, you know, leverage these global organizations and take Stan to a global market also with a very, you know, frugal mindset and also build revenue pipelines? And, you know, the great thing which Stan has established over a period of the last four years is we have become a very good GTM partners, a partner for a lot of global gaming companies. So like if you see we've got Square Enix, Riazon, we've got Bandai Namco, all these guys, they have a lot of interesting gaming titles, which they distribute in the U.S. and Japan market, but they really find India difficult. And they have never tried, they've never got the nuanced insights of how can I make a game successful in India. Kraft has, you know, been doing that, spending millions of dollars, and now they have started understanding how it can really work out. Like how do you define your first purchase, SKU size, pricing, distribution, content strategy? So we've become a very good partner to these guys. So a lot of game publishers who are global, they want to come and partner with us and, you know, use us as a GTM partner. So it's not just investment in the company, it's much larger than that. It's revenue partnerships, it's strategic thinking. And I go to them as well to understand how it's happening in the global market with these guys.

Sahil Talwar: Nice. But Discord sort of, if you can talk about like your counterpart, your Western counterpart, if I may call it. Discord built that Western gaming community layer, but it's largely PC first, tech first, and not designed for like India's mobile first, you know, behavior. What is TAN doing differently that actually, you know, fits how Indians game?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: So absolutely right that they've cracked the PC market, they still continue to do that. While PC is very small in India. And also, you know, when I was, funny thing, when I was doing EVO or games, a lot of my users were not on Discord. Like, you know, we used to find it difficult to create community because a lot of influencers would say, I don't understand. So experience on mobile was not that great. Second, a lot of influencers who used to build these communities, they'd never had tools to monetize as well. Like I just posted on LinkedIn as well. Like one of my users was a sari shop owner in Jaipur and he used to be part of WhatsApp groups rather than joining a Discord server because Discord never offered you even discovery. For gamers, discovery is very important. Like, if I want to understand which new games are coming, I don't go to a Google Play store and see which is the top trending. I go to my friend or I see the influencer's video on YouTube and understand that a new game has come on Roblox. Right? So we felt that discovery needs to be solved, creator monetization needs to be solved. And definitely the first and foremost thing is mobile experience needs to be solved. And in India, people still have a lot of phones which are less than 5GB RAMs. And you know, your bandwidth is not 5G right now when you go to the tier 2, tier 3s. And then even the size of the APK matters when you're building in India. Like people are very memory conscious about their phones. Right. So we really, from engineering standpoint, we cracked a lot of these things and it started working in favor. And we started beating these platforms which are existing. But Discord continues to build revenues from the Western market, which is primarily PC. And they're close to about a billion dollars in revenue going to an IPO in the US.

Utsav Somani: That's awesome. And let's talk a little bit about monetization. You mentioned 40 million users. In terms of daily actives, monthly actives, you have various revenue streams as well. Creator subscriptions, brand activations, and I think in-app game rewards as well. So a whole bunch of different things. Which of these are a major revenue stream for you right now and look very promising?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: Yeah, so the biggest is in-app purchase. So people come and buy the stand passes, which they end up spending in these clubs for experiences. Like you can imagine it like your Soho house membership or let's say your pub crawling experience. I would just buy and I would start spending wherever I feel like being part of it. Or even someone launched a membership program for his latent IP back when it was going like crazy on YouTube. So people buy stand club passes and go ahead and spend in different clubs. A biggest trend on the app is game exploration. Like there are creators influencers who find out different games from different parts of the world. And they will play in the stand clubs and they will want you to spend like a dollar or two dollars to be part of that experience. So that they can share the link and code with you. And they are all in that one game and they are hanging out and having fun for like 30-40 minutes of time. So that is where we make the most of our money from. I mean, you can imagine it everything. So what we build is very close to offline experiences. So I used to buy these coins to play Tekken and Pac-Man in the gaming cafes when I was six, seven years old. So exactly what the coins were, this is the stand club pass on the app. And discord had nitro feature.

Utsav Somani: How much time is a power user spending on the platform daily?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: Oh, it's even like six, seven hours a day. Like they love the platform so much. So we actually had to put up some sort of, you know, like this thing, like warnings. Yeah, warnings. But I think power users, they really care about where is my world sitting. And it's exactly like I used to spend four hours in the gaming cafes when I was, you know, six, seven years old. And these guys spend six, seven hours on the platform every day, just hanging out and making friends. They keep crawling different stand clubs, by the way. They keep going to my club, your club, and then see what's going on inside. And then they can be free listeners in the clubs. And then if they want to participate, they spend these currencies on the app. So that's the largest chunk of how we make money. The second is obviously the advertisements and promoting games on the platform, because we have the true users and that is growing rapidly. Like all the brands in India, your IDCs, your Flipkart, Amazon, Swiggy, everybody is spending with us in different shape and form. Like your programmatic ads, your download campaigns for these games on the platform. So that's where is the second source of revenue. And the third is commerce. Like we sell games also directly. Like if you want to buy a Pipa, like your Steam marketplace, we have a stand shop inside the app where you can end up spending and buying these different sort of games and gaming gift cards.

Sahil Talwar: What percentage of your total users are like usually that you call as your power users? Can you like break those numbers down for us? And like your DAU numbers as well?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: I mean, the definition keeps evolving. I remember we used to call a power user who's spending more than 200 rupees. But today it is way higher than that. It's like average ARPU is more than like six, seven dollars. So I would say that more than a million users on the platform today in a monthly basis are power users. We have close to about eight to nine million monthly active users. And when I say active, it's like either they have engaged for a five minutes time or 10 minutes time on the clubs or hosted a game lobby or or let's say played inside a game lobby with friends on the app. So this is how broadly the power users are structured.

Sahil Talwar: So maybe one final question before we let Parth go. Do you have anything? No, I actually good. Any game that you want to recommend?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: I was asking what games are you guys playing?

Utsav Somani: Yeah, I used to play a lot of Age of Empires in my school in college days, then switched to Counter-Strike. And now I think it's FIFA and Call of Duty whenever the time allows it.

Sahil Talwar: I played a lot of Counter-Strike during school days, especially used to host these inter-school competitions in our school with like Land Connected, like you mentioned, right? We had a whole computer lab ready to go. So shooter games for sure. Yeah. So if you have any new good recommendations, I would love to. I actually also played the Ghost of Yote very recently. Quite nice.

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: I mean, India is definitely going to see a few more popular titles being developed here. There are a lot of interesting titles which Indian developers are building. There's Scarfall, there's 4G.

Utsav Somani: And I think even Madan Maya is doing something, right?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: Yeah, that seems quite interesting, actually. The first AAA game of India. Exactly. Exactly. There's some people building a cricket, which is a FIFA alternative. Yeah, so there's a bunch of them, but yeah, you're saying something?

Utsav Somani: I think somebody from Unacademy is doing that, right?

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: Yeah, he's doing that. So, I mean, we help a lot of these guys because we have the right engine now. I mean, you can launch a game through our platform because we have about 40 million users and a million plus influencers who really understand how to distribute games. So that's something. And we see a lot of different variety on the platform every day. We saw a guy build a quick game through Chajipati and he's making people play on the club. It's called like a mystery box and the club started trending. We had 700 people playing that mystery box game. So people are doing like amazing content through AI as well. That's the new trend. What we are trying to capture as well.

Utsav Somani: Naini, more power to you. And Sahil and I will sign up on stand today. Yeah. Thank you for coming on the show.

Parth Chadha - Founder & CEO, STAN: Thanks. Have a good one.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, that's it from the gaming world. But now we have our next guest who's going to talk about FinTech and investing. Let's welcome Vikram. Vikram, welcome to the show. I think you're on mute. Good to see you. What's up? Long time. Long, long time. You're wearing the branding as well. So let's introduce Aitai. Let's start with that. Sure, sure.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: We are building India's best seed fund. One step at a time. One sector at a time. Our primary focus is FinTech, followed by consumer, e-commerce, and of course, now AI.

Utsav Somani: And I mean, your journey is fairly interesting as well. So I think we should, I mean, spend a few minutes on that. You sold a company to HP, built mobile commerce when it was not even common. And then I think I had a $300 million exit, if I'm not mistaken. And one of the rare breed of VCs or investors who has sold a company before and built it to a certain scale. How does that give you an advantage? Like a lot of people answer this question, operator VCs, and ask this question from their VCs, are you an operator? This word operator, I think also became popularized. So how do you view this question? And how do you like sort of pitch this as an advantage that you have?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: Well, I'll preface that, you know, I don't want to take up too much time just on the history. I was fortunate to do my first venture. At the birth of the dot-com cycle, pretty much early, I don't know, late 90s. I raised a bunch of money, almost $20 million. We got dot-bombed, didn't have product market fit. We sold it for IP. I moved to California. I joined a company which had also been dot-bombed and was in its 2.0 journey. So I joined as head of mobile. I was not the guy who sold the company, but yes, I joined at a fortuitous time. What was really interesting for me that I was in the second company, we arrived at the same decision points I had gone through as a first-time partner. I could see almost a clear juxtaposition of me doing the wrong thing. And this is the crack team doing everything right, right? That stays with you. And I think fast forward so many years later, you know, as we sort of seed companies, you realize that the early stages of a company are messy. There is no, like, you know, a lot of people think that there is some growth, which will just extrapolate at 30% a month. It doesn't happen. Reality doesn't happen like that. I don't wake up feeling 30% happier every month or every day. You have high days, you have low days, and companies go through that, right? So you've got to be careful in terms of what your expectations are and not push the founder to the point they start to manufacture product market fit by throwing money. So, you know, you want to basically get to a point where the founder has true product market fit, you stay patient and make all the right decisions. So when we get involved with some early on, we focus a lot on just building the right foundation. And what I mean with that is that, look, the smartest founders don't need VCs. We just need in terms of the platform VC, in my opinion, is for founders who should not be founders. It's like saying, you know, I want to groom my child to be an Olympic cyclist. I'm going to start you with training wheels. That doesn't work out like this, right? We are in the business of grooming Olympians, as simple as that. To build a company to dominate against all odds, you have to be an Olympian of some kind, right? So some people need help hiring. Some people need help with some GTM or some Rolodex. Very few of them actually need help with product. So it depends, you know, some people help with fundraising, getting the story right, and so on and so forth. So you have to be very, very prescriptive. You're fine tuning. You know, our job is basically to support our companies. Typically, you know, like our goal is to get a company to an IPO. And even at seed, we start to visualize that. But we bring that step down, right? So we will keep funding a company till it gets 1% of its real addressable time or SAM or whatever you want to call it, right? 1% is the tipping point. You get to 1% of the time, the market explodes, which typically nobody owns more than 20, 30% at best in a market. Most markets, 10% is a market leader, 12% is a market leader. The moment you hit 1%, you've taken 5, you know, 10% of their market share. Your visible capital floods in. From there, it's really scaling to, you know, complete market domination. So I would say up to series B is probably where we get involved. So I think we've pretty much crafted the playbook from seed to like a $100 million valuation or a $5 to $10 million revenue. And after that, there is explosive, you know, capital and growth that's coming. If there's a real note, it becomes a unicorn or close to it in the next two to three years. So we've had companies go from seed to what I offer them in about as low as two and a half years. Some of them will be four years. This is in fintech particularly. We expect them all to be, you know, hitting unicorn status in about six to seven years. So that's something we've done repeatedly across all our funds.

Utsav Somani: And what are the fund sizes now? The fund one, I mean, back to punch as well, with M2P delivering a good healthy return on that?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: Funds were very small. Our first one was about 13 million, 97 crores back then. Second fund was about 35, 36 million, depending on the rupee, about 309 crores. The third fund that we are unveiling will be about 80 to 100 million. So this will be about 800 crores. It's the same strategy. What happens is when our companies win, we literally run out of pro rata by series B. So we think a great company is cheap up to 100 million. You should not give up your pro rata, right? In a fast growing company, we can become dominant, at least in that range, right? Beyond that, I would say 250, 500, it's more like a PE play. We also look at the IRRs for the funds that we need. We typically will shoot for close to mid 30s IRR. So beyond that, if it falls below that, you can sort of let it run for a while, and then you start taking some money off the table. But broadly, we will exit all the way till an IPO in small chunks. You cannot tap the market.

Sahil Talwar: Sorry, I was getting an input on my framing. My first time here as well, Vikram. Great to be talking to you. But you've been a backing internet founder since 1999, through the dot-com buzz, the UPI era, and now the AI wave. What's fundamentally different about building in India now versus every other cycle that you've seen so far?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: Well, I think this is the best time ever. And I'll preface that by saying that, look, you've got 500 million people who can pay digitally. Yeah. That was the biggest problem. When I came back to India in 06, the problem was people didn't have credit cards. People didn't accept credit cards. There was no other digital payment. So how on earth are you going to run a digital economy with COD? It didn't make any sense, right? You know, we have been measuring digital payment adoption based on the data we get from RBI and NPCI very carefully since 2017-18. Jan 20, I have the numbers etched in my brain. We were paying digitally 20 billion a month through cards and UPI. That's about 240 billion, give or take, what, 25%, 24% of the retail GDP. Last month, I measured we are at 1.4 trillion. Wow. So if you assume our retail GDP to be at 1.8 trillion, we've gone from about 75% cash to 80% digital. We're moving towards a cashless society. So I'm actually surprised at the dearth of opportunity or the ventures that we're seeing. Why are we stuck on quick comms? Why are we not seeing a multitude of vertical e-commerce marketplaces and all sorts of things? Those are yet to happen. There is enough depth. But I would say that the one question to answer, what has changed? I think the depth of the digital economy is very deep. In fact, our view at FinTech at least is every friction point is hiding a billion dollar company. And we're proving it again and again. We go into companies solving some very specific pain point. It explodes. All of this story about Indians will not pay or you cannot have their own software or whatever B2B that needs more than 20 million. That's outdated. We're seeing companies which are hitting 20 million in like two and a half, three years tops. And these are B2B companies and there are a lot of runway ahead of them.

Utsav Somani: So let's talk about your investments. I think the two broad themes that stand out, FinTech and consumer. FinTech, you've done Slice, EaseBuzz, M2B, all FinTech intraplayers playing very well with all the numbers that you've just mentioned and highlighted. And then you've got Bovabhai and Bluetookai and Kodo on the other side, right? So these are extremely opposite consumer businesses. So is ATI Ventures a FinTech fund with the consumer lens or would you say that these are the two focus in terms of your growth areas that you want to play in when the India story is growing?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: See, some of it is we think every company is over time going to become a FinTech, right? There is an intersection happening. But you can argue that where is the FinTech and a Bovabhai today?

Utsav Somani: But Starbucks, I mean, Starbucks is a big FinTech company, to be honest. Look, I think. With a great car, with a car top of wallet, I think they hold what, some couple of billions in deposits every single time? Wow, that's great.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: Look, I think that, you know, every fund is a little bit different. We don't have any generous people in our fund. Like my co-founder, Vishy, Vishy is an ex-consumer guy, came from Unilever, worked at Warnick and Urban Ladder as head of marketing. He understands the consumer market better than most people I know. And he's also got a very good growth mindset in terms of even the FinTechs that we invest in. So I'm fully aware I'm a small fund. I'm an emerging brand. I don't have capital power. So why should the great founder come to me? Right? That's the question that we wrestle with every day. The reason the best founders, at least the ones we have come to us is because of domain expertise. So we have to have a prepared mindset. And what that means is that I should be able to spot opportunities which are not obvious to everybody. And we actually, as a rule, will never check with another VC if they have talked to a founder. If a founder is referred to us or comes to us through LinkedIn or through a founder network, we will never talk to anybody. In fact, we have very strict instructions with our analysts and associates as well, because I don't want our opinion tainted. If you want to really be first principle, you must pay attention to the founder with a pristine mind. It's the only fair thing to do. So we have bad companies which have been passed on by everybody. And they are like Eastbus. It's not a popular company at Redis. It's seed. I remember I got on the call with the founder in December 20. And he said, Vikram, you're probably my 99th call. And the reason he was raising is because there was an RBI requirement for certain networks by March 21. We invested in that company at about a $10 million valuation. I led the seed round. This month, the company crossed $100 million. Profitable like crazy. Highest gross profits. So had I talked to everybody else, I'm only human itself. What would I have done? I couldn't unhear or unsee some opinion. It would taint it. So I didn't talk to anybody. I heard the founder out. It took me 45 minutes to say yes. And that was the end of it. So I think that's the meaning of a prepared mindset. So as we get more partners on board, we have to build more competency. Certainly, we'll go deeper. But we're obviously seeing a lot of linkages between fintech and commerce. So there we can collaborate.

Sahil Talwar: Vikram, there's a school of thought that basically says seed stage investing in India is getting crowded. Do you see that happening?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: No. I think there are far more entrepreneurs than there is capital. I think we can absorb 10 times more capital. So I would say that, look, the larger funds are opportunistic at seed. They prefer to do A because there is product market fit. There are a bunch of pre-seed funds. And I'm happy to say that there are a lot of good ones. We work with a few of them. Nobody wants to be a dedicated seed fund, Sahil. You know why? Because it's AUM limited. The moment you say you're a seed fund, they're going to question, why do you need to raise a $250 million fund? Actually, you don't want to raise a $250 million fund. I want to generate the highest value from what I do. It's a very different muscle. So how many companies do I need to back in a fund anyway? It's like 20, 30 of them. Look at the number of companies which are born every year in India. Tremendous. I think the real challenge we face is a lot of founders are not very articulate. Like, you know, I lived in the US a long time. I was a founder. They're very articulate there. Education capabilities are very different, I would say, in the US, even compared to Europe. So I found very often a very passionate founder can describe the problem. Maybe to some extent, the early solution just cannot pitch to save their lives. You need to do that bit of polishing to get them sort of VC ready in the next few rounds.

Utsav Somani: And where is this signal or clarity coming from? In this world of AI now, every pitch, at least what we see on email and stuff, and decks, everything is getting fancy and stuff. But do you think in India, there is enough effort being made by founders to clearly tell their value proposition in this world of noise that's coming up?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: India has always been a noisy country. So what is beautiful about India is what I hate about it. It's a fucking friction. Sorry for the French. It's a very high friction country. It can frustrate you or it can make you. So when I moved back in 2006, I hated living here. Six months in, I was like, what the hell am I doing here? You know, it's just like the user experience of India or citizen experience, completely broken. But then, you know, I had an epiphany, you know, what if we digitize the whole economy? Right, you could run a parallel universe of the economy. I saw the opportunity in money, particularly in tech, right? I had another epiphany. Usually, I will get these insights based on which I will form a decade-long thesis. And I'm still investing on two theses. One is, I remember trying to open a bank account for my company with a local bank, I wouldn't name, for my investment manager. It took them a month. They couldn't open it. KYC, this, that. And I ordered an Ola, which should have been three minutes. So it kind of hit me like, you know, there's a two-ton mass of atoms arriving at my doorstep in three minutes. They cannot take my, the banks are not able to take my data and verify in like more than three weeks. So something is broken, right? So two things came to me in terms of like, one is we are going to become a five-minute economy. That's the leapfrog. And the second is India will become cashless. I think we're kind of midway, at least through the, you know, we are the 10-minute economy. We'll get to five minutes. Eventually we have growth. We're almost 80% cashless. You know, now I think when I look at the, so I'm very problem-centric. So I don't really care what you're doing so much in the solution part. A good solution at best at seed stage is like the first draft of an essay, right? It'll change. As long as the founder is pointing in the right direction, you're fine. So we are very clear on the non-starter problem statement. If we resonate with the problem statement, we're good to go. And we don't actually worry too much about the size of the market. I'll give you an example. There's a company we see that which is kind of becoming the, you know, open banking layer for corporates. What UPI is for consumers, right? So it solves for consumer payments and consumer banking. Just like UPI does the same thing with this company, Transpac. So it's got now 45 banks integrated into it. And there's a whole corporate ecosystem connecting it.

Utsav Somani: No worries. What's the name of the company that you mentioned? Transpac.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: Transpac, yeah. Let me just, you know what, put my phone on airplane mode. So this company now, you know, we seeded this company because they wanted to build a digital escrow. A very small problem statement. But we knew this is a very vexing problem. Today it's emerging kind of like, you know, the connected banking layer for the entire business banking, right? That's what's going to unleash. So the entire UPI ecosystem that came for consumer, same thing is starting to get built on Transpac. This is a company, we will do 100x on our seed valuation in less than three years. Wow. 90% margins, explosive growth. And it's gone nuts. It's been profitable like for the last two years. It's insane. And nobody wanted to touch it, even at CBC.

Utsav Somani: But what real, like, I mean, UPI was built on, I mean, NPCI is pushed, right? But what was the real or the unique advantage that these guys had that nobody else identified?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: So the team itself came from banking. Verix Transaction Banking guys, they've never sold opportunity to the banking part. I mean, they never sold tech to the banking part. And I think the big mistake FinTech founders do is they go to a bank and say, my tech is better than what you have. You're in, you know, whatever, legacy tech is crap. And they start to get squeezed or time period to sort of even do a POC is very long. They don't do that. They say, listen, I have this huge ass client. I can bring them to you if you want to do some business with them, maybe do UPI auto pay or this and that. I said, yes. So, okay, you need to give me access, core banking. It's done in like a month. What has taken other companies a year and a half after pleading, these guys do in a month. And, you know, once one large bank does it, the second looks at more favorably. Next thing you know, you're on the default. So we've got 45 banks integrated into this. So I'll give you an example. I can, I have now three funds. I've got a few SPVs. I got, you know, a few entities, like a manager, this, that. Let's say I have eight companies spread across two to three banks. I can log into a single account, see everything. Now I can do the same thing on UPI. I can open my UPI app. I can check the balances across all my consumer balances. I can see my credit card balance. I can also pull the statement to some extent. In this, I can see everything. All my bank statements, all my debits, all my credits. I can even move money. It's never been done in India before. Now we're going global with this.

Utsav Somani: So the information layer, I think, can come from account aggregator framework also, right? No, we can't?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: Not yet. Because account aggregator has been designed purely for consumers. The moment you want to take data from a current account, you need a bank, you know, whatever board resolution. There's a lot more friction, you know. So you've got to remember business banking is a multiparty game. But it's built on a single party platform. So consumer banking is single party. It's me sending money to you. But very often in a business banking account, there are multiple parties involved, like escrow and this and that, like, you know. So the stack is not there yet, at least the underlying stack. So ultimately, I think AI will get there. But that's just a snapshot of time. And remember, open banking hasn't worked anywhere else in the world, at least with UPI, obviously, the government really got involved. In Europe, it kind of fizzled out because people resisted. Banks are basically saying, this is a parasitic framework for me. I'm losing data, I'm losing money, I'm losing customers. Even J.B. Morgan has now put a massive toll on Platt, right? That's why when we go to the banks, we sell them business. They don't look at us as a parasitic partner. They look at us as somebody who's driving revenue and costs them. So it's really the mindset. I think it's a GDM strategy that has the secret sauce here. And now that we are integrated across, I think it's very hard to replicate that. Did I know this was going to happen on Whatsapp? Absolutely not, right? Did I believe this is an incredible founder? Absolutely. So you want to get behind the right people solving the right problem and then let them run with it.

Utsav Somani: Right. So I think, I mean, I have one question which is on every founder's mind. Like I think the 2026 capital stack has evolved. Like, I mean, now finally the late stage market is open and bright for at least the public markets for all startups. They're all paying huge taxes, flipping back to India, Zepto, Flipkart's done, Grow already went public as well. So where do you see that this cycle leads? Like, do you think the public markets will hold up and become a viable option? Or this was just cyclical where the two-year window is now going to sort of not open again for a while?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: I think, you know, the current geopolitics notwithstanding, this is a secular trend. We have, what about a 5 trillion market cap for the country? Barely two, two and a half percent of that is the digital sort of internet market cap, right? So you look at US, it's about 40%. China is 20. UK, Germany, these are all the high teams. My bet is we're going to be at 10 to 15% in 10 years. So they've got easily, and I'm not talking about the geo in the world, I'm talking about, you know, maybe the phone pays and the internals and all of those and new ones coming. We're looking at another 1.5 trillion market cap coming online in the next decade. So this is not going to stop because there is demand for internet people. That is the reality.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, and the multiples that we're getting in India, it's just pretty sweet also, right? For the founders, it makes liquidity pretty exciting to capture.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: So we don't have a NASDAQ. We don't even have ARK fund, right? Where is your internet only mutual fund? It doesn't exist. And look at your life, look at our lives. We're living, you know, we're living largely digital lives in many ways. There's no way I can invest in that life, right? That's the crazy part. I can invest in the Mac Nifty. I can invest in an FMCG thing. I consume, you know, Unilever products and this and that. I can buy into that. There is no way for me to manifest my life in my portfolio today, my digital life. It will happen. So the demand is going to be there for sure.

Utsav Somani: All right. I think we're almost at the end of time. So I think there's one question that I want to ask you. You mentioned all the companies and journeys that you've been on with these awesome companies and FinTech and consumer players, but what are two, three misses that you still think about? Anti-portfolio.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: You know, my biggest anti-portfolio is Zomato. Oh, wow. I discovered 4D Bay randomly browsing the internet and I was in New York. I was visiting that time. I wrote an email to the founder, Deependra and he actually responded pretty quickly. We had a call. He said, I've just signed a term sheet with 4H.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: I tried to dissuade him, but of course he's a good, he's a good founder, he's an honorable person. So I met him later on about a month or so later in Gurgaon and I was very impressed. I got a real sense that this is something you could be building. In high time, maybe I should have just not given up. You know, the valuation back then, I still remember is eight crores free money, three and a half crores. So 11 and a half crores raise. You can do the math. I wanted to invest 100,000 that time. So that's obviously a big, big miss. And anytime I get my spidey senses tingling now, I don't wait. Right. So I moved very, very quickly. Other than that.

Utsav Somani: Any recent ones? Eternal's been a while.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: Nothing recent that I regret, to be honest. Okay. I'll tell you how I look at it. Like my anti-portfolio obviously does exist. I want to back enduring companies, right? I don't want to back something which comes up, goes to the roof and blows up. So there have been a few that I looked at at seed. I passed for my own reasons. They went through the roof and they blowed it. I obviously don't have any regrets there. But something that I really, really wanted to invest in and more recently, at least in FinTech, we have not missed anything so far. Kind of lucky. There's also been obviously a lot of turmoil with the RBI intervening in so many ways. It's been hard to invest. But I would say, look, so far Lady Luck has been kind to us. I'm sure we'll miss a few. We're trying our best. So we are open. You know, please write to us, write to me directly on LinkedIn. I'm Vikram, edit IGC. Read to us the hello edit IGC. We respond very quickly. We have an origami program, pre-seed program. We open it twice a year. You don't need to send a deck, just answer the questions we have. And we will respond to you within the week and find you within a month. So that's a program which has been enormously successful for us. So yeah, that's what we're trying to do to avoid difficult answers to your question.

Utsav Somani: Vikram, I wish this could go on for longer. But thank you so much for coming on the show. Of course. Sahil, you were asking something?

Sahil Talwar: No, I'm saying a nice quick pitch towards the end to ensure you don't miss out on us.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, that's a solid plug. We'll include it in the show notes as well and our community as well. Thanks, Vikram.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you, Sahil.

Utsav Somani: No, no. Are you coming to Delhi anytime soon? On Monday, FinTech, you're close to RBI.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: No, no, I will come. And you're in Gurgaon, right?

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: I will look you up for sure. We'll catch up.

Vikram Chachra - Founding Partner, 8i Ventures: Thanks, guys.

Utsav Somani: Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. All right, listeners, that's it. Final show of this financial year. We'll see you on Wednesday at four o'clock. Bye-bye.