Why would two veterans - each with over three decades of experience and leadership roles in global MNCs like Microsoft, Xerox, Accenture, GE Capital - tie their careers and fortunes with new age tech startups out of India?
A. It’s the cool thing to do at this point?
B. it’s a lot more fun to work with disruptive innovators, rather than traditional business models?
C. The promise that these will be the icons of tomorrow in their chosen domains?
D. Their hard-nosed analysis and judgment tells them that these are going to become money machines in the near-future?
I’m sure Rishi Srivastava, as Co-founder of Offgrid Energy Labs and Mathew George, as the CFO who came on board Captain Fresh last year, would say ‘YES’ to A, B and C. But it was D, that I wanted to talk to them about. And what a great conversation we had on the session “From Matter to Money – driving returns from Deep Tech” at our Ankur Capital CONNEXT25 event, where we unpacked various dimensions of the value creation potential at these two companies.
As Captain Fresh has scaled into a leading global packaged seafood company with revenue >USD0.5bn, not only have they turned profitable, but also built a foundation for sustained growth, rapidly rising profits and a path to global leadership. In a USD500Bn+ industry, their tech-enabled, asset-light, multi-specie, multi-geography model stands out – especially in the emerging scenario of protectionism and disruptive tariff changes. Mathew shared many insights on the journey, including the revelation that the company had been able to get to the IPO filing milestone a couple of years ahead of their original target.
Rishi was very clear that he saw Offgrid having a good chance of being the ‘David’ in a space that was dominated by ‘Goliaths’ - pointing to that fact that the new energy technologies industry was one defined by global standards and if Offgrid’s product, based on their proprietary ZincGel technology, could meet (or better) the standard defined for their applications, they could find best-in-class partners anywhere in the world and take a big bite of a large global opportunity - supported by an fast improving ecosystem in India as well.
As an early-stage fund, we’re thrilled by the prospect of delivering a big outcome to our LPs via a Captain Fresh listing. Offgrid is at an earlier stage, but with their strong IP and focus on building for the highest standards, we have high expectations here (think USD200bn market cap of the global leader in lithium batteries?)
As we invest out of Fund III, Ankur Capital welcomes ideas from founders building for the large opportunities around digital and deep science technologies. And I look forward to many more such discussions on “From Matter to Money…”
Ritu Verma Rema Subramanian Shiva Shanker Burzin Dubash Vishal Aman Naveli Jain Vishal Katariya Suraj Nair Debansh Sahoo Yagna Sreeramaneni Kamakshi Rao
#CONNEXT25 #Ankur Capital #Entrepreneurship #Startups #Innovation
