Astha Gupta

Super stoked to announce the close of our third fund! Grateful to have been a part of the journey thus far. 🚀 🚀 If you are building in the consumer brand space, please reach out to us- we would love to have a chat. We invest in businesses at a pre-seed, pre-revenue stage with the ability to support our portfolio companies until growth/ late stages. #Fund3 #ConsumerBrands #EarlyStageInvesting #SauceVC #Startups  #Entrepreneurship #IndiaGrowthStory #PreseedInvestment #VentureCapital #Consumer

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V3 Ventures Deal Announcement: Creme Castle - A tech first driven assembly line bakery for Bharat! 🔥 While I was evaluating this file, a lot of people said - bakery? There are 100s of home bakers. How is this scalable? I would have agreed, until I met Pranjay Mittal, who brought innovation from IIT-D, FMS and CarDekho Group to his mom’s humble bakery in Noida. You might remember their Shark Tank episode where his mom famously said, “Main neend mein baking kar sakti hu” 😊 That passion is exactly what we want in founders! From a small bakery in Noida to now clocking monthly sales of over 1 Cr, Creme Castle is disrupting the $12.6 billion Indian bakery industry. 🎂 Here is why we invested… ✅Changing consumer behavior from mithai → cakes & desserts India is a land of festivals and no festival is complete without mithai. However, cakes & desserts are now taking center stage in these celebrations. as the Gen Z takes over. We all know India is trading up. So, there's a growing demand for Tiramisu in Tier 2 and 3. But, we’re lacking a player. ✅The Assembly Line Model: And, we need a player that’s standardized. The biggest problem with F&B is that when you order from the 2nd and 3rd outlet - the product isn’t as good. This is the most unique part of Creme Castle. Cakes are made in 3 components in a central kitchen - base (sponge), icing and customization. At spoke kitchen it’s only about putting these parts together - thus ensuring quality! ✅This industry is regionalized and heavily fragmented: Think about it, growing up, we all had cakes from our favorite local bakery. Every city has one, but when we moved for college or work - it wasn’t there. Cakes have a nostalgia factor associated with it and so making this change is hard. With all of this Creme Castle is can offer something India hasn’t seen before: - 100% customized cakes in just 2 hours - World's highest # of flavor profiles to choose from They have >10 Lakh loyal customers with a 60% repeat rate and we’re all geared up to expand from NCR to Jaipur and Chandigarh! We’re excited to back the mother-son duo of Veena and Pranjay to disrupt India’s cake market 🎂 What’s do you order cake? PS: Delhi-NCR folks, give us a try. Even available on Blinkit! #india #investment #startup #investor #entrepreneur

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Friends I would highly recommend this course to anyone who is interested in: 1. Understanding if Product Management is what you will enjoy. 2. Learning to be a 1% operator in any role you choose to do 3. Benefiting from the diversity of the people in the cohort (age, education, occupation, geography) 4. Having a hands-on experience working on case studies. 5. Interacting with some of the coolest founders and Product management voices Cherry on top: Get amazed by the diversity of topics that Shravan Tickoo can go in depth outside of core Product management. Don't join: 1. If your goal is just to learn a bunch frameworks 2. You can't dedicate an additional 20 hours a week

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Shashank Bijapur co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, our portfolio company, ran a terrific panel at the Arkam Innovation Summit. He covered a lot of ground with Manish Jethani Co-founder and CEO of Hevo Data Data, and Gaurav Sharma Founder, and CEO of SaaSLabs .    Here are some key takeaways that stayed with me: Initial journey of identifying the problem statement and figuring out the solution during the early days at SaaS Labs and Hevo Data After selling his first company in the US, Gaurav returned to India. All he wanted to do was make $4-5 K living in India, so he started out by building tools for Shopify users. But when those tools rapidly grew to half a million in recurring revenue, Gaurav realized that he could build anything, be anywhere in the world, and sell it worldwide. Manish believes that your product has to solve a personal problem in addition to an industrial one. Once you start the journey as an entrepreneur, financial success will not satisfy you. “What one problem can you solve even if the financial outcome is not that great?” Deciding whether to validate the product in India and move to the US versus taking a US market-first approach Selling in India is hard, especially in the early days. As Gaurav said, "if you sell a $10 product, you must create an invoice, and then they’ll make the payment in 60 days. So, it became very hard to make a profit. From this, I realized that India is not ready to buy software yet, so the best model would be to build it in India and sell it across the world" Manish believes customer needs and expectations are completely different across India and the US. It's quite challenging to build a product for India and expect it to succeed in the US. So, from day one, he focused on the US market-first approach. Establishing product differentiation during the early days of growing in the US market? Initially, the number one challenge for Manish was to sell a product that their target audience could build themselves. Hevo Data needed needed financial and operational data from companies, which nobody shares easily. Most companies prefer to build a product in-house and work with that tool. So, Manish decided to find initial customers who meet three criteria: they should not want to build a product in-house, they should be fine with sharing the data, and they should be from the US. Aspects of the business that changed from 0-1 to 1-10 journey and beyond To get initial customers, Gaurav decided to integrate his product into larger companies to get more eyes on it. To sustain this growth, Gaurav bet on excellent customer service, which is “an unfair advantage for Indian SaaS,” as he says. His customer service and fast responses became the talk of the town amongst his customers. Here’s the full video video. Well worth your time to listen to three $10M+ ARR SaaS founders at the top of their game.   Arkam Ventures https://lnkd.in/gP_YT-gV

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We have 20 spots open for our upcoming member-led knowledge session on 'How to get your first 10 customers' with Ravi Kaushik Rajagopal (Former Head of India Sales, Stripe). We'll dive deeper into writing your first sales pitch, defining your persona, TAM calculation, building an outbound engine, and more. This is a must-attend session if you're exploring or are early into building in the B2B space. RSVP via the link in the comments!

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ElasticRun's business model succinctly explained in this short video --> The rural market distribution/penetration problem for FMCG companies and a potentially viable solution for both the rural Kirana store owners and the FMCG brands. https://lnkd.in/gjd2bK3i #FMCG #Distribution #Kirana #Retail #Rural #ElasticRun #Brands #Access #Transformation #Logistics #Transport #SupplyChain #Ecommerce

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I had the pleasure of meeting Anubhav Dubey, the Co-Founder and CEO of Chai Sutta Bar, Maatea, and Kaffee-La'. It was an incredibly insightful conversation as we discussed growth strategies and startup dynamics. We talked about iSoul and its inception by Shwetanshu and me. Anubhav provided invaluable advice on scaling and common pitfalls that startups often encounter. He also emphasized the importance of maintaining a growth mindset. I am grateful for his wisdom and eagerly looking forward to implementing these valuable insights. 🚀🚀 Already counting down to our next Chai Chat. ☕️☕️ #isoul #startup #entrepreneurship #chaisuttabarindia #maatea #kaffeela

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