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Venture Investing

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Before heading to INSEAD for my MBA, I wanted to experience the other side of the table. I took on a 6-month investment internship, capitalizing on the opportunity to learn directly from some of the best early-stage investors in the Indian ecosystem. I deliberately focused my efforts on the Electric Vehicle (EV) sector. Because it was such a nascent space, there was no structured point of view or established firm thesis yet. This gave me a blank canvas to add immediate value by mapping the market and building out our EV investment perspective entirely from scratch.

My Role

  • Network-Driven Sourcing. Leveraged the deep investor relationships I had built during my corporate development role, actively tapping into pre-seed and angel networks to preempt interesting deals and get in front of founders early.

  • Market Mapping & Thesis Generation. Tracked where capital was flowing both in India and globally, dissecting successful business models to build comprehensive market maps. I used this research to develop my own thesis on which specific sub-segments in India actually warranted a deeper VC dive.

  • Deal Evaluation. Spent significant time on the ground meeting with founders and evaluating different businesses, moving from high-level sector trends to rigorous business evaluation to build genuine conviction on what to back.

Execution

I mapped the Indian EV landscape, where I broke the ecosystem down into specific sub-segments to identify true white space:

  • Evaluating OEMs in a Maturing Market: The EV OEM space was already marked by massive funding, consolidation, and early IPOs. Instead of following the herd, my analytical focus was on rigorously questioning the remaining white space: I evaluated whether a 5th or 6th challenger brand could actually capture sustainable, venture-scale value, or if the initial window was already closing.

  • Deconstructing Swapping & Charging Economics: I evaluated whether global blueprints—like Gogoro's $300M+ highly dense swapping networks in Taipei—were fundamentally viable for the Indian market. I mapped out the structural bottlenecks, specifically identifying how the lack of standardized battery connectors and formats creates a fragmented ecosystem that locks consumers in and destroys the station density required to scale.

  • Anticipating Platform Plays: I tracked early funding flows in the US and Europe to identify the next set of opportunities for India. This led to a targeted sourcing effort for startups building software and data analytics layers for battery health and lifecycle management—high-leverage, scalable platform plays sitting on top of the physical infrastructure.