Early-stage investing in India Talk to us - https://xitter.cf/t.co/bLxCUmsHpG
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Joined October 2016
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We’re pleased to partner with EcoTech, the Economics Society of USME, Delhi Technological University (DTU), as a Knowledge Partner for Arthik Khayal 2026.
The competition brings students together to tackle a real-world economics and business case, challenge their thinking, and defend their recommendations before an industry panel.
We look forward to seeing the ideas, perspectives and solutions they bring to the table.
Grand Finale: 29 October 2026
📍USME, DTU
Register here - unstop.com/o/Zwi5xWC?lb=Ochw…
One interesting thing COVID changed: companies started thinking a lot harder about where their supply actually comes from.
India benefited from that shift, but there’s another piece to the story: a big enough domestic market to build real scale before going global.
Abhishek on why that combination is creating a very different opportunity for Indian manufacturing startups.
more on @livemint - livemint.com/companies/suppl…
Is it wrong to build a company just to make money?
It’s a question founders don’t always say out loud, but it’s worth asking. Not every company needs to change the world. Sometimes, building a great business, creating value and making money is a perfectly good ambition.
So where do you draw the line? @SashaMirchi explores that tension.
Chinese toy imports into India collapsed 83% between FY20 and FY25. Import duty went from 20% to 70%. BIS certification requirements closed another gap.
This is not primarily a protectionism story.
₹33 billion addressable market. Baby care alone growing at 15% annually, tracking toward ₹35 billion by 2035. And the category leadership question is genuinely open in a way it wasn’t three years ago.
The specific whitespace: the ₹500-1,500 kidswear band, India-built STEM toys that combine education with cultural content, functional school bags (no strong Indian brand exists), and organic baby care (completely fragmented).
Below roughly ₹1,500, design is the primary purchase driver. Brand values start to matter above that. That’s where a challenger brand should enter, owning design before building brand.
Why we think now is the right time to build a kids brand in India: kae-capital.com/blog/the-cas…
64% of seed deals in India between Q3 2023 and Q3 2024 were SAFEs.
Most first-time founders signing SAFEs don't fully understand what they're signing. A SAFE isn't equity. It's a promise of equity at a future conversion event, with terms - discount rates, valuation caps, MFN clauses - that determine what that equity actually looks like when it materializes.
The cap matters more than the headline number. A ₹2 crore check on a SAFE with a $3M cap converts very differently than the same check on a $6M cap at a $8M post-money Series A.
A founder who raises a seed round on terms they don't understand is building toward a Series A where the cap table tells a complicated story.
Everything we know about raising a seed round in India: kae-capital.com/blog/how-to-…
You can build a great product. But a business needs more than a great product.
It needs someone who can build, someone who can sell, someone who can raise capital and, as the company grows, people who can take each of those functions to the next level.
@SashaMirchi breaks down what a strong founding team really needs.
One insight from our research on AI and consumer brands that doesn't get enough attention: Instagram is effectively invisible to AI.
LLMs can't read content behind walled gardens. Your Instagram grid, your reels, your story highlights - none of it is indexable by the AI systems that are increasingly shaping what consumers discover. YouTube is openly accessible. Blogs and articles are accessible. Instagram is not.
For brands that have built their content strategy entirely on Instagram, this is a structural problem that most haven't priced in yet. The content exists. The AI can't find it.
The brands reconfiguring toward indexable content - YouTube, long-form articles, structured web pages - are building discoverability that compounds. The ones staying Instagram-only are building an audience the algorithm can see and a brand the AI cannot.
Our take on the modern AI P&L playbook for consumer brands: kae-capital.com/blog/the-ai-…
Ideas are everywhere. The harder question is: who is the right person to build it?
For @SashaMirchi, it starts with the reason they’re building in the first place. The strongest founders aren’t chasing the startup label. They’re solving a problem they’ve experienced, understood deeply, and can’t ignore.
The ability to keep building when the market turns, things break, and the original plan stops working. Sasha shares why resilience in the face of adversity is one of the qualities Kae looks for most closely in founders.
🤖 Made with AI
Kae backed @nuawoman in 2018. This month they closed a ₹50M Series C at 3 million monthly users and ₹500 crore in annualized revenue. Profitable.
That's 8 years and an 18x MOIC.
The femcare category had seen almost no innovation for decades when Ravi and team started. Incumbents owned distribution. The insight was simple: Indian consumers were going online, and the products they actually wanted weren't available in physical retail at all.
₹500 crore ARR while profitable in Indian D2C is genuinely rare - most D2C companies at that scale are still having to buy growth.
What convinced us to write the first check wasn't a model. It was a founder with a consumer-first mindset and an empathetic understanding of a problem that most people had never thought carefully about. That combination is still what convinces us to write early checks.
A look back at eight years of backing Nua from day one: kae-capital.com/blog/backing…
AI makes it easier to build. It doesn’t make it easier to build a business.
The interesting work starts with figuring out what deserves to be built, who will pay for it, where the real wedge lies, and what makes the business durable.
That’s what we want to talk about at Kae Office Hours #04.
We’re hosting AI founders in Bangalore for candid conversations with the Kae team on the ideas, products and companies they’re building.
Apply - forms.gle/ddTpn9ECvkizMYAJ7
What makes a great founder?
For @SashaMirchi, it starts with one trait: conscientiousness.
After thousands of pitches, Sasha says the real signal isn’t what a founder promises in the room. It’s whether they follow through after the meeting, without being chased.
Sasha joined @rajshamani for a wide-ranging conversation on founder resilience, failure, pitch decks, VC math and what he looks for before writing a cheque.
Watch the full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=0XStJayU…
Kids’ nutrition is a two-customer business: the child wants taste, while the parent wants nutrition and trust.
As the category gets crowded, the bigger challenge is building a product that works beyond D2C and quick commerce. @sun1tha_v points to a key consideration: pack sizes, price points and margins that work online don’t automatically translate to kiranas and supermarkets.
The next phase of the category will be about turning a strong health proposition into an everyday household habit, across channels.
For anyone building in AI: we'd love to meet you.
This is the first generation of AI-native Indian founders.
That means, from an Indian context, every early decision you're making, ICP, pricing, sales motion, architecture, is being figured out from scratch. Some of it will look obvious in three years. Right now it doesn't.
The next Kae Office Hours is a room to think out loud about those decisions.
apply here - forms.gle/Wy9RUtFbBc5KGZTP6
