Bibin Shivas

An area that Anjali Nair and I have been spending some time on lately, is vertical micro-drama apps globally and in India. Some key features of these apps: 📱 Vertical format designed specifically for smartphones ⏱️ Episodes run just 1-3 minutes each 📺 Full series contain 70-150 episodes (equivalent to a feature film when binged) 🎭 Scripted, melodramatic content with fast-paced plots 🔄 Cliffhangers and over-the-top storylines designed to hook viewers instantly This format originated in China and has since boomed globally: - Kuaishou hosts 100,000+ micro-drama channels with 270M daily viewers (70% of DAU) - ReelShort, DramaBox, ShortTV lead the US market - Many platforms were created by teams with mobile gaming backgrounds - Top apps saw 34M monthly downloads and $78M revenue in early 2025! It's clear to me that India is going to see a huge wave of vertical video, episodic micro-drama startups launching in the coming months. For founders building in this space, consider: 🎯 Content Strategy: Focus on culturally resonant genres - not just romance, but family dramas, mythology and comedy that speak to Indian audiences 🗣️ Language Approach: Launch with multiple regional languages from day one - Hindi alone won't capture the full market potential 💰 Monetization Mix: Design a smart freemium model with brand integrations that accounts for India's price sensitivity while maximizing revenue 🚀 Capital Efficiency: Balance content production costs with marketing spend to achieve scale before competitors 📊 Measurement: Build analytics that track not just views but completion rates and emotional engagement to prove value to advertisers We're actively seeking visionary founders ready to capture this emerging opportunity. The perfect storm of India's mobile-first population, our love for dramatic storytelling, and evolving consumption patterns makes this the ideal time to build in this space.

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Recko | A Stripe company's $150M acquisition proved that India Talent can build world class software. Here are the top learnings from my podcast with Saurya, Co-founder, Recko: 1. Recko was founded in 2017 by Saurya and Prashant to fix the complex and broken process of financial reconciliation in fast-growing B2C companies like Flipkart and Blinkit. 2. Getting the product off the ground was really tough. Early customers openly said they didn’t need it, and investors thought the idea was pointless. Recko was trying to build in a new category where there were no benchmarks or clear paths to follow. 3. Their first big break came from Myntra, who reached out just when Recko was down to their last $500. Over the next 3 to 4 months, they worked closely with Myntra’s finance team to solve huge reconciliation problems involving millions of data rows. That work earned them the credibility to build the product. 4. Indian VCs passed on Recko for several reasons: Lack of investor-focus on B2B during 2017-18 , the perception that back-office products were unsexy and the pressure for fast hockey stick growth. In some cases, even customers denied they had the problem Recko was solving, which confused potential investors further. 5. Saurya shares that India’s B2B ecosystem has “over-indexed” on cost advantages and marketing-heavy models. But to truly compete globally and reach higher valuations, companies should start with a solid product that offers real value through Tech and product superiority, not just by being cheaper. 6. For early-stage B2B startups, the most important metrics is not ARR, but product shape & product usage- how often the product is used and how critical it is to the workflow of the business. If your product becomes part of a company’s core workflow, it’s much harder for them to stop using it- even if it’s tough to sell at first. 7. Stripe's acquisition of Recko was primarily a product acceleration and product suite completion strategy. With financial operations closely tied to payments, Recko brought deep expertise in that space- something Stripe's customers were already asking for. 8. Recko was acquired at a 75X revenue multiple of $2 million ARR - A result of the product's unique strength, very specific domain knowledge, and "thickness" in its product layer. This contrasts with companies offering easily replicable solutions or operating in crowded, benchmarked categories, which give them lesser leverage in acquisitions. 9. The acquisition process took about six months, with four of those months spent on intense due diligence. Founders must manage conflicting expectations from investors and employees while maintaining highly confidential communication throughout. 10. Saurya advises founders to prioritize long-term relationships over attempting to "squeeze the last drop" of money during an acquisition, as future collaborations are likely. 

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Indian startups are ditching Silicon Valley for home! The great Indian startup ghar vaapasi is in full swing. Let that sink in. Razorpay. Zepto. Groww. udaan.com. Pine Labs. Meesho. What we are witnessing is not a series of one-off moves, but a broader return from Delaware to India. For over a decade, the playbook was crystal clear: Build in India, incorporate in Delaware, raise from Sand Hill Road, list on Nasdaq. That playbook is dead. Here's what changed: A startup that would have raised capital in Silicon Valley can now raise more capital in India. Same company. Better terms. Home ground advantage. The IPO math is even more brutal for those who stayed offshore. Indian companies listing domestically are fetching better valuations compared to their US-listed peers. Meanwhile, compliance costs for offshore structures have tripled, and regulatory scrutiny has intensified. This isn't just about money, though the money is compelling. This is about where value gets created in the next decade. Boardroom conversations now have the question: "Should we come back?" And increasingly, the answer is becoming obvious. But here's the catch: The decision to flip goes beyond geography. It is a rethink of how startups build, scale, and create wealth in India. A SaaS company optimised for Silicon Valley metrics operates very differently from one built for Indian public markets. The investor base is different. The growth expectations are different. The exit strategies are fundamentally different. That's why this homecoming wave is a complete recalibration of how Indian startups think about wealth creation. In my latest Create Wealth newsletter, I break down: - Why startups went offshore - The roll call: startups making the move - The big flip: Why India looks better today - The IPO math- Why India now offers better outcomes - The challenges of homecoming Read the full analysis here: https://lnkd.in/dhr9kBiQ #CreateWealth #Dezerv #Startups #IPO #VentureCapital #StartupIndia #Founders

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With the advent of GenAI, I strongly feel sales Careers will make a return to reinforce the human advantage. There are two key challenges that we face here, esp in the context of India: 1. There aren't enough structured training programmes for Sales at a college level. An HBR study found that since sales was historically considered a vocation, even the level of academic literature is limited. Sales people are created, largely due to meaningful learning experiences early in their career led by the right leaders within the right companies. This unfortunately, is a hit or a miss. 2. Overall, and I say this with no offence to anyone, the quality of sales talent in India is quite subpar. One of my resolutions for this year was to find ways to give back to the Sales Community. Last week, I had the privilege of taking a B2B sales class at Mesa School of Business, and I was thrilled at the response I got. While this was specifically tailored for B2B founder led Sales, some of these learnings apply to pretty much any early stage seller. As a sales nerd, I'm super excited about where this exploration takes me. Big thank you to Yashaswika Gaur and Prashika Dua for helping set this up and the super passionate entrepreneurial cohort at Mesa! PS: The video is a simple energizer before one starts a sleepy post lunch session 😅

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🇺🇸 Bay Area vs 🇮🇳 Indian Investors, A Founder’s Perspective After spending good time in the Bay Area over last few years, one thing hit me hard the mindset gap between investors there and most Indian investors. In the Bay, investors bet on the future. They understand that true innovation often starts at 20% clarity and gets built through conviction, not spreadsheets. They think in decades, not quarters. They ask: 👉 “What if this works?” In India, too many investors are still stuck asking: ❌ “Has it already worked somewhere else?” We’ve somehow built a system where: • Risk appetite is near zero. • Ego often outweighs empathy. • Everyone wants traction before vision. • And discussions get lost in TAM, SAM, SOM slides instead of customer obsession and speed of learning. And lately… spend more time building personal brands than backing brave ideas What’s worse many forget they’re managing someone else’s money, and the job is not to look smart in IC meetings, but to identify founders who see what others can’t. The US system isn’t perfect, but it rewards conviction and courage. India still over-indexes on control and caution. If India wants to build truly global products, our investing mindset needs to evolve from valuation spreadsheets to visionary bets. #startups #venturecapital #investmemt #funding #BayArea #VCIndia #Entrepreneurship

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We’ve raised ₹48 crore in our Series A. But before the number, let me start with something I was told early on: “Startup finance is different” I’ve heard this often. That finance in startups is more flexible, more forgiving, sometimes optional. That burn is normal. That growth justifies everything. But I’ve never really agreed. To me, there’s only one kind of finance that matters, the kind that tells you whether your business works, without needing an excuse around it. When Kuldeep Parewa, Aayushi Khandelwal and I started Anveshan, we weren't just thinking about scale or fundraising rounds. We were thinking about how we could build a brand that understood its own economics from day one. That meant: - Knowing what we earned from every unit sold - Building a P&L that didn’t wait for maturity to make sense - Making every rupee work as if it were our own This round — led by Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting and supported again by DSG Consumer Partners, Titan Capital (Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal), Force Ventures LLP, Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta — validates what we’ve quietly built over the last 4 years. Yes, it gives us capital to grow. But more importantly, it gives us room to keep doing things the way we believe in: - Focus on gross margins over vanity metrics - Stay tight on burn while expanding - Build internal visibility across every cost head - And treat people not just as team members, but equity partners This raise also gave us the chance to offer secondary exits to some of our earliest believers, angel investors and ESOPs buybacks for a few of our team members. These are the parts I’m personally most proud of. Because good finance is not about control. It is about trust. And that trust shows up when people are rewarded not just for output, but for belief. In moments like this, I often think of the people who saw the potential when we were just getting started. People like Bipin Shah and Sumit Jain, who understood what we were building even before it was obvious to most. As we move into this next chapter, my goal is the same as it was when we were bootstrapped: To build a business that doesn’t need to be explained. One where the systems hold, the numbers make sense, and the culture doesn’t need repair at scale. I’m thankful to our investors who supported this way of building. And to the team that works behind the scenes where most of the real work happens. - We didn’t raise ₹48 crore to grow recklessly. - We raised it to grow responsibly. - And that is the only kind of growth I’ve ever known. Sumit Keshan Hariharan Premkumar Pooja Shirali Karthik Bhat Neeraj Tyagi Anjali Bansal Ashutosh Valani Priyank Shah Arjun Vaidya Shantanu Deshpande #Anveshan #SeriesA #FinanceWithDiscipline #UnitEconomics #ESOPBuyback #MakeInIndia #CapitalEfficiency #BuiltToLast #CleanFoodIndia #StartupFinance #RealMargins #FounderNote #SustainableGrowth #EarlyBelievers

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Davos has been amazing for Maharashtra! With $5 billion of Blackstone’s investment being directed to Mumbai 3.0 (Karnala-Sai-Chirner New Town), we can expect some fantastic leaps in urban development: like providing relief to the city’s space constraints and bringing down real estate prices. It will also create thousands of job opportunities which would be a huge boost to the economy. But what I am most excited about is how this investment will boost the AI wave in India. 💡 AI infrastructure is going to shape – and even transform – many of India’s industries. Our economic supremacy at a global stage hinges on AI infrastructure as a whole. 💡Industries like data centres and cloud infrastructure are THE industries to analyze, work in and potentially build something new.  💡Mumbai has 24% of India’s data centres but a whopping 45% of the country’s data centre capacity. This shows tremendous potential. Any investment in Mumbai is an investment into India’s AI infrastructure and digital transformation. I will definitely be watching these industries closely for potential ventures and partnerships. Mumbai is Mumb.AI after all! I would love to know your thoughts on this. Do you agree? Government of Maharashtra (GoM) MeitY Startup Hub Ashwini Vaishnaw Kaustubh Dhavse IndiaAI Aakrit Vaish https://lnkd.in/dn-nvHm5 #Davos2025 #Mumbai #AIInfrastructure #DigitalTransformation #AIForIndia #StartupIndia #Mumbai3.0

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🚀 Building a startup is more than just raising capital—it’s about grit, adaptability, and relentless execution. In my latest session with the GSF SuperAngels Academy , I spoke with Abhay Singh (Eeki), Anshul Gupta (Kirana Club), and Snehal Nimje (MeetRecord) about their founder journeys—from securing the first cheque to scaling their businesses, surviving near-death moments, and mastering fundraising. Their experiences offer invaluable lessons for aspiring founders and angel investors alike. 💡 𝟱 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀: 1️⃣ Fundraising is about the right investor, not just any investor: • As a founder, it is crucial it is to align with investors who understand your market and vision. Don’t waste time convincing the wrong people—𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹. 2️⃣ Adaptability beats rigid planning. • Kirana Club pivoted from SaaS to a retailer community, MeetRecord moved upmarket from SMBs to mid-market, and Eeki evolved its model to attract investors who understood long-gestation businesses. • 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻? 𝗕𝗲 𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲: let customer demand shape your direction. 3️⃣ Your valuation is a function of your story + execution. • Investors track founders over time. Early pitches are about vision, later rounds are about proving execution. • “In our seed round, we pitched an idea. By our third round, investors measured us on cost efficiency, scalability, and consistent delivery.” – Abhay Singh 4️⃣ Survive first, scale later. • Every founder faced near-death moments—1-2 months of runway, tough cost cuts, even skipping personal salaries. The key? 𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀, a sharp focus on cash flow, and ruthless prioritization. 5️⃣ Long-term vision attracts the right talent and capital. • Founders who communicate a clear, compelling vision not just to investors but to their teams, customers, and partners create a magnet for capital and talent. 💰 𝟮 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗹 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀: ✅ Look at customer love, not just numbers. • Investors often over-index on financials and projections, but the real story is in how deeply customers love the product. A strong retention rate and organic referrals often signal a winning startup. ✅ Saying 'no' the right way matters. • Founders appreciate direct, transparent rejections over vague deferrals. “The best investors who said no still introduced us to other VCs or potential customers—that’s how you stay in the game.” 🔑 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆: Building a startup isn’t about avoiding failures—it’s about navigating them with clarity and conviction. The best founders adapt, execute relentlessly, and build investor trust over time. And for investors? Backing founders with resilience and a long-term vision often pays off in ways no financial model can predict. #Startups #AngelInvesting #Fundraising #Entrepreneurship #VCInsights

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VC Diaries - 17 : Thanks to our Govt and Jio, we have built the world's best digital highways - the next unicorns will be the companies that teach India how to drive on them. For the last decade, we were rightly obsessed with building the India Stack and scaling it. We created the digital rails for identity, payments, and data. But we are now realising that building the infra was only half the job. The assumption that access automatically leads to confident adoption was flawed. The next frontier is not technological, but behavioural. We need to build a 'behavioural infra stack' on top of the digital one. Think about UPI. It's a technical masterpiece. Yet, millions of small merchants still ask customers to show the 'payment successful' screen. This isn't a sign of failure. It's a new, user-generated ritual created to replace the old sensory confirmation of receiving a physical note. It's a fallback norm that bridges the gap between the coldness of tech and the human need for trust. The startups that win from here will be masters of this behavioural layer. They will understand that their job is not just to provide a service, but to shape habits. This means using intelligent nudges to guide users towards better financial health. It means using vernacular explainers that use local metaphors to demystify complex products like insurance. It means designing new rituals that make digital interactions feel as safe and familiar as offline ones. Stop thinking only about your tech stack. Start thinking about your behavioural stack. Your biggest product challenge is no longer about APIs and uptime. It's about understanding the anxieties, aspirations, and deep-seated cultural norms of your user. The first wave of Digital India was an engineering problem. This next, more valuable wave is a human one. The real whitespace is in building the tools that give hundreds of millions of Indians the confidence to navigate this new digital world. What do you think? Do share below in the comments. I have started to share my learnings as a VC more proactively here, with a note coming out every morning 8.30am. And I would love to get inputs. Thanks, Anuradha | Dexter Ventures

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Worry Is the Signal, Work the Response (Originally published for Slice of Startup Life on eChai Ventures) Founders worry. All the time. Payroll is due but a client’s payment hasn’t come in. A key customer leaves without warning. A teammate hints at moving on. An investor who seemed excited goes quiet. Sometimes it’s a shipment stuck in transit. Sometimes it’s a competitor launching the same feature you’ve been building for months. Sometimes it’s simpler, you plan a brand event, but registrations are far lower than you expected. Worry sneaks in, and once it does, it loops in your head. Telling yourself to stay calm rarely works. Worry doesn’t leave just because you want it to. That’s because worry is not useless. It is a signal. It points to the money, the product, the people, or the growth areas that need your attention. And once you see the signal, you need a response. The best response is action. If you’re worried about payroll, chase down the late payment. If you’re worried about churn, call the customers who left. If you’re worried about the event, reach out and invite more people. If you’re worried about competition, make your product better. The worry won’t vanish overnight, but the act of doing makes it lighter. Work steadies the loop. Sometimes that action starts with a pause. An evening with friends, a walk, or a meal without your laptop won’t fix the problem, but it clears the head. And often, that space is what lets you return to the work with more energy and focus. So worry is the signal. Work is the response. One shows you where to look, the other helps you move forward. The question is never whether worry will show up. The question is how you’ll respond when it does.

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The August Edition of AIM Print is Out! From India’s AI agent gamble to a 91-year-old vibe coder, this issue is packed with stories that redefine how we think about technology, talent, and transformation. 👉 India’s AI Agent Gamble Startups like RevRag.AI (Ashutosh Singh), Gupshup (Beerud Sheth), gnani.ai (Ganesh Gopalan, Ananth Nagaraj), Floworks (Sudipta Biswas), Sarvam, Zoho (Ramprakash Ramamoorthy), AIonOS (CP Gurnani, Arjun Nagulapally), RagaAI Inc (Gaurav Agarwal), and Krutrim (Bhavish Aggarwal, Chandra Khatri, Navendu A, Sunit S.) are betting big on agentic AI—shaping everything from banking apps to conversational platforms. 👉 Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur: India’s Next Unicorn Hub With SIIC and FIRST, IIT-K is incubating product-led deep tech startups across AI, defence, and healthcare, powering India’s next wave of unicorns. 👉 Madhya Pradesh’s GCC Playbook Unlike Bengaluru or Hyderabad, MP is taking a unique approach to building GCCs—backed by a bold state policy. 👉 Game On, AI Style From Khelo India spotting young athletes to startups building video tracking and scouting tools, AI is revolutionising Indian sports. 👉 Locked Up, Logged In Meet Preston Thorpe, a software engineer at Turso, who codes in Rust and Python—contributing to databases and open-source projects from prison. 👉 MongoDB vs Databricks vs Snowflake As the battle moves into PostgreSQL, the rivalry intensifies—reshaping enterprise data strategies. 👉 Red Hat’s AI Feathers With open-source at its core, Red Hat is showing how global collaboration drives AI innovation. 👉 smallest.ai’s Global Play Sudarshan Kamath is building for the world first—before channeling gains back into India. 👉 91-Year-Old Vibe Coder John Blackman challenges age stereotypes by using Claude and Replit to build tools for his community. 👉 Indian IT’s New Reality From TCS’s bench policy change to soaring CEO salaries at HCLTech and mid-tier firms, the gap between boardroom and cubicle is widening. 👉 EkStep Foundation & BHASHINI - (Digital India BHASHINI Division) Shankar Maruwada shares why tech must serve those who need it most, while Bhashini builds a digital language backbone for India. This edition is a reminder: AI is not just about models—it’s about ambition, culture, resilience, and the people who push limits. Grab your copy of AIM Print August 2025 and see why this is our most talked-about edition yet: https://lnkd.in/gWrRb364

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🚀 I had the pleasure of attending a candid, no-fluff VC/Founder session (organized by Foster Ventures, Sorin Investments) recently. I found the fireside chat (between the Priya Ramachandran, Mandar Dandekar and Shyam Rao), extremely valuable. It really resonated with many questions (as well as experiences i have had in the past) Sharing the 8 most practical takeaways founders (from pre-seed to Series B) can use right now. Some of these are valuable for any SaaS tech company. 1. Raise for 24 months – Buy yourself time. Black swans, pivots, or better terms all need cash runway. 2. Be (productively) paranoid – About customers, burn, hires, the market, your own assumptions. It’s your job to stay sharp. 3. Build into the workflow – If your product doesn’t solve a pain in an existing workflow, you’re just a nice-to-have. Easy to ignore. 4. Great CSMs = Retention – Especially in AI SaaS: they must be technically fluent, product-savvy, and adoption-first. 5. Founder-led sales is a must – Outreach works, but only if you drive it. Don’t delegate until you’ve closed paying customers yourself. 6. Don’t hire until you’ve sold – Product-market fit comes before GTM scale. Build, sell, then hire. 7. Team size = function of runway – Grow responsibly. Headcount follows revenue or funding—not the other way around. 8. Let go, fast – Bad fits hurt more in small teams. Don’t wait. It’s not personal; it’s about stage-fit. 💡 Every point hit home. I am curious to hear from other founders: Which of these resonated with your journey? What would you add to this list? #AI #SaaS #Founders #Startups #VentureCapital #ProductMarketFit #FounderLedSales #PristineDataAI

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Surat-based Rocket has raised a $15M seed round led by Salesforce Ventures, Accel, and Together Fund. In just 16 weeks of launch, Rocket has: - Crossed 400,000+ users across 180 countries - Landed 10,000+ paid subscribers - Hit $4.5M ARR, with a goal of $20–25M by the end of 2025 and $60–70M by June 2026 - got users from companies like Meta, PayPal, KPMG, PwC, and PhonePe Rocket isn’t building “toy apps" like I did or most of the vibe coders do. It’s pioneering production-grade vibe-coding while going deeper into scaffolding, modules, and usable UX. Think of it as a “prompt → product” platform. And, when we think of the bigger picture, the low-/no-code market is projected to grow from $26B in 2025 to $65–70B by 2030 For decades, India’s strength has been its developer base. But vibe-coding flips the equation. With Salesforce Ventures' backing, I think there can be some enterprise workflows in scope. Also, I think if prompt → product becomes mainstream, the real moat shifts away from code and infra (where NVIDIA & OpenAI dominate) to distribution, data, and taste. We saw Cluely cracking it well. Email and AI agents as the rails of distribution where a voice/taste layer that ensures outputs feel human, not robotic Rocket is betting big that India can lead this shift. And if they succeed, this could be our Canva/Figma moment, but for building entire apps.

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