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Lesson from my journey
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Sana Gupta
India is not just a large market. It is a reset. The last decade was spent making unstructured data legible. Most apps we know were built on that which is they took an existing brokerage system, made it more efficient, and extracted value out of it. A guest speaker at Kalaari put it well: that fundamental system is now up for a rethink. The real white space is in what you can build when AI can patternize data that was previously too messy, too human to touch, and derive genuine value out of it.
That is what excites me about consumer in India. We have 800 million internet users, a generation spending in ways their parents never did, and behavioral patterns that have barely been unlocked. AI is finally making it possible to build products that feel personal at scale. The founders I am most excited about are the ones who understand their user almost anthropologically,who have gone so deep on a problem that they see things the market simply hasn't caught up to yet.
When I look at any company, I ask three things: is it scalable and sustainable? Will it meaningfully impact a few million people? And is it solving an intergenerational problem, something so entrenched that fixing it creates real lasting value? A good to have would be if it can also transcend geographies because the problem is universal, even better.
I grew up in Kochi and spent every year of my schooling there. Moved to UCLA for university and in my first summer tried building a small dropshipping business selling Indian ethnic wear. I wanted to understand what founding something actually felt like, even in a small way. It taught me a lot.
I interned at Artha Venture Fund while still in college and that sealed it for me. After graduating I joined Deloitte in Los Angeles but always knew I wanted to come back. I focus on consumer tech and commerce and spend most of my time with early stage founders in these spaces.
Every place I interviewed asked me why I wanted to move back. Kalaari never once did.
When I am not working I am happiest with a snorkel mask on or strapped to a zipline somewhere. I have a small family of four and we try to travel somewhere new together every year. Ask me about puttu and kadla and I will talk your ear off.
The most consistent gap I see in Indian venture is not in the quality of founders or the ambition of ideas. It is in who gets access to capital in the first place. Women founders receive just ₹4 out of every ₹100 invested. That is a market inefficiency, and like most market inefficiencies, it exists because not enough people are paying attention to it.
₹4 out of every ₹100 invested in India goes to women founders. That number has to change.
Through CXXO, Kalaari's dedicated women-founder-CEO initiative, I get to do something about it. It is a deep privilege to be in a seat where I can actively scout for and back women building serious, category-defining companies in India. There is no shortage of girlbosses out there. They just need someone looking.
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