Nishkam Prabodh

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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I am always amazed when someone discovers whitespace in B2B SaaS that is eligible for pre-seed funding. It's interesting to see that Chiratae Ventures led Pre-Seed round for Pepsales. Pepsales is trying to help B2B SaaS companies improve their sales by creating personalized product demos using AI and ML. The pain point they are trying to address is that most demos don't impress buyers because they tend to be generic and one-size-fits-all. Congrats Ajay Singh and Abhinandan Sahgal! Source: INC42, Entrackr, VCCircle #VentureCapital #B2BSaas

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SaaS is a hotbed of opportunities for founders and investors to create disproportionate returns on capital. Amidst this growing landscape of Indian SaaS startups, a critical component often gets shadowed by the immediate goals of growth and market capture — the exit strategy. Accounting for exit outcomes over the longer term should start early so founders can optimize for the success of themselves, their employees and their investors. We at Matrix Partners India spent some time speaking with founders, corp dev professionals, investment bankers and other leaders in the space to understand the exit scenarios including M&As, PE acquisitions and IPOs (India and US) and have compiled our learnings. Link to the article in comments. Would love to hear from you if you have insights on the topic / further questions :) Avnish | Ashwin | Pranay | Vikram #SaaS #IPO #ExitStrategy

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At BizPodRoohi we are building - Quality and valuable podcast content focused on the Indian and US startups and VC ecosystem Focusing on Indian and US as that's where the majority of the listeners are from - Piloting various content experiments like: 1. In person podcasts - In September will reach out and start planning with Sahil Lavingia for a live in person podcast + mixer Dependant on whether he comes to Singapore or not- in November 2. Build in Public monthly content 3. Deep Dive episodes on companies 4. Roundtable podcasts 5. This Month in VC 6. Early Employees Segment 7. Newsletter 8. Email Updates 1) One thing I have realized is trying to build a weekly business podcast for BuildSpace is that it is hard - Guests are getting inundated with requests You have to try a combination of ways to get a guest to agree to come on 2) Another thing I have learned from hosting an event for my podcast and in person podcasts - Nothing can beat the energy of in person podcast episodes 3) Final one podcasting helps you improve your luck surface area - you get to know more people in the ecosystem as a byproduct of sharing conversations with them

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{New pod 🎤} "𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗣𝗠 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗜𝗜 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗦𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗲𝗿𝗰𝘂𝗿𝘆" Was super-fun to record this with Rohini Pandhi - Product Lead at Mercury and ex-Product Lead at Square/ Block. The first half of this episode covers best practices and frameworks used by best-in-class fintech companies like Square and Mercury to build products and drive go-to-market.  In the second half, we discuss insights and learnings for PM career planning in fintech, including ways to prepare for the potential impact of AI on product jobs. Some great learnings here for fintech product leaders, young PMs, and founders. Let me know what you think! Spotify - https://lnkd.in/dJQMM9sB Apple Podcasts - https://lnkd.in/dyDaCDk7 An Operator's Blog - https://lnkd.in/dREtbx9n

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Another special go-live for us. When you start your startup journey, the first big step is to validate your idea. Bipin Shah from Titan Capital connected us with two brands to discuss the original idea. One of them was SuperBottoms. Pallavi (founder of SuperBottoms) was eager to share her ideas and feedback around what makes a great customer experience for her customers. Little did she know that her pain points would serve as the cornerstone of our company and the LimeChat product. They were adamant about trying out the market before working with us because they saw us before we were a company. Well, things have come full circle, and we couldn't be happier to have them on board. Our solution was always built with SuperBottoms' use cases in mind. Four years ago, Aniket and I spending hours manually adding data and FAQs about baby diapers to show the SuperBottoms team. We have come a long way since then. Pallavi, thank you for your trust and support. We will ensure that we enhance your customer experience, bringing smiles to all moms and treating them as gently as your products treat their kids. #babiesrock #startupjourney #Earlyadopters #innovation #customerexperience

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Can technical founders become effective CEOs? Srinath Sridhar knew he needed to step out of his comfort zone when he founded Regie.ai four years ago. Now he and cofounder Matt Millen have raised more than $20 million and landed on G2’s list of fastest-growing software products of 2024. My full conversation with Sri is in the comments.

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