Sougata Basu

Total potential ESOP wealth in India stands at INR 14.2 lakh crore! That’s 22% of India’s mutual fund industry AUM — and more than twice the PMS industry’s AUM. Let that sink in. But the biggest ESOP wealth creators are not who we usually think. Nifty 100 companies generate more ESOP wealth than the entire startup ecosystem. HDFC Bank alone created INR 5,282 crore of ESOP liquidity in 2024 — twice as much as India’s entire startup ecosystem did that year. It’s clear that ESOPs are massive wealth-creation engines hiding in plain sight. Yet our quiz last week revealed some surprising facts: Over 65% of ESOP holders with more than ₹1 crore in ESOPs are unaware of vesting calculations, the impact of dilution, or whether their employer’s ESOP policy is favourable. When Revant, Shantanu, and Chirag invited me on the Asymmetric Podcast, I stumbled upon research that made me question many of my own beliefs about this underrated wealth-creation tool. We break down India’s ESOP story in under 75 minutes, covering: - Salary vs Salary + ESOP - Ranking different ESOP policies - Cases where ESOP wealth was lost - The Flipkart Mafia - Life-changing ESOP stories of non-founders - How founders should allocate ESOPs - And a big surprise at the end I promise this will be worth your time — even if you have just 1 unit of equity in your company. Link to the full episode in comments! #ESOPs #WealthManagement #Dezerv #AsymmetricPodcast

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Which ratios to look at while picking a mutual fund? 1) Sharp/Sortino/Treynor for risk adjusted return 2) Alpha/Information Ratio for fund manager skill 3) Expense Ratio/Turnover for portfolio efficiency Story by Dnyanesh Mugurdekar https://lnkd.in/gnGzFhiD

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Healthcare in India has quietly shifted. What was once a mission-led sector is now a PE-owned asset class. Most of the country’s leading hospitals are no longer promoter-led. They are backed by Private Equity funds chasing scale and returns. Temasek → Manipal Hospitals (MHEPL) Blackstone → CARE Hospitals, Quality CARE India Limited CVC / KKR → HealthCare Global General Atlantic → Ujala Cygnus Hospital KKR → Baby Memorial Hospitals This shift has undeniable positives: capital inflows, modern infrastructure, global best practices. But it also hardwires ROI targets into an industry built on empathy. And the trade-offs are visible: - Profitable procedures prioritized over basic care - Luxury patient experiences over affordability - Operational efficiency over emotional connect The sector needs growth capital - no doubt. But when healthcare becomes just another asset class, we risk eroding its very core: quality and accessibility for all. The question: Can we let healthcare become just another profit-driven asset class… without eroding its core - quality and accessibility for all? #india #healthcare #privateequity #growth #funding #asset

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Thrilled to announce the launch of Ironclad Ventures Fund, our second investment product under Ironclad Asset Management — a ₹200 Cr SEBI-approved fund dedicated to Employee Secondaries. Why does this matter? In India, most venture-backed startups allocate 5–15% of their cap tables to ESOPs, yet liquidity for employees is rare and ad-hoc. For too long, ESOPs have been treated as “paper money,” leading to weaker belief in equity ownership and misaligned incentives. Ironclad Ventures is built to change that. We partner with leading VC-backed startups to offer structured, repeatable liquidity programs, so employees can partially monetize their equity while continuing to hold long-term upside. This liquidity massively increases employees' belief in ESOPs. For companies, this reduces the pressure to constantly increase cash salaries, strengthens retention, and sends a credible signal of wealth creation via ESOPs to future hires. We will take a diversified approach — backing 30–40 high-quality startups across fintech, consumer, SaaS, AI, and digital infrastructure with small ESOP secondary cheques of ₹1–4 Cr for Seed to Series B startups. Our aim is simple: 1. Improve the belief that employees have in ESOPs and unlock some wealth for the people building India’s breakout companies 2. Preserve founder alignment and cap-table integrity 3. Enable Indian HNIs & family offices to access the innovation economy This launch follows the success of our first product, the Ironclad Flexicap PMS, which has grown capital at ~20% since inception in Jan 2025, in a difficult year for capital markets. With Ironclad Ventures, we extend our disciplined investment philosophy into private markets. #Ironclad AMC #VentureCapital #ESOPs #Secondaries #WealthCreation #InnovationEconomy https://lnkd.in/gqWkh_-m

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Tier 2 & 3 Cities: India’s New Investment Hubs A quiet revolution is underway in India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Post-demonetization, promoters and families in places like Kanpur, Lucknow, Guwahati, Ranchi, Indore, Nagpur , Kochi, Coimbatore, and Bhopal are moving away from traditional assets like gold and real estate towards liquid financial portfolios. What’s driving this shift? 1. A next-gen, globally educated, financially aware 2. Improved local business sentiment under supportive government policies (RERA, PLI) 3. India’s emergence as a manufacturing alternative post-COVID 4. Monetisation of businesses and real estate with stake sale, etc Where earlier wealth would flow out to metros, today these cities are becoming investment centres themselves, creating exciting opportunities for wealth firms expanding their reach.

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Sizes that outsize! It is not uncommon to find concerns around fund sizes and hence their commensurate performance. This ostensible concern makes us look for sleeker options backed by relatively recent performances (due to their low ageing) and with the rationale that these have a long runway to cover before their chopper like structure turns into a Boeing! So till then, it's all good Going! Though what gets conveniently ignored is the velocity of market expansion that vindicates outsized funds. However, the overarching statistic that reflects the fund's ability to stomach market oscillations over decades and yet deliver outsized returns gets masked by fancier and newer names. Lest I forget the commercials. Many a times what is clinical in theory doesn't work in entirety, when it comes to hitting the ground hard and running. This is not to say that smaller sized funds haven't delivered or do not old the promise to swell into Boeings tomorrow. Hence it is prudent to have a mix of schemes based on sustainable performances. 'What has worked thus far will continue to work far!' And if it doesn't as an exception, there is always a recourse available in the form of reviews. Therefore, the challenge is in staying away from half found truths that translate into biases. A cursory glance at the table below by Value Research shows the kind of exceptional performance rendered by select schemes over time periods. Of course this is just the gist. The actual list of relatively larger schemes that boast of outsized returns runs much longer.

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Accredited investors (AIs) is the way to go for HNIs. - AIs only AIF - Co-Investments simplified for AIs - More flexibility to invest smaller amounts in AIF, PMS and soon to be launched SIFs - Better advisory solutions for AIs SEBI comes out with fresh set of notifications to make Accredited Investors stand above other investors. Sanket Dhanorkar

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We’re excited to share our blog on Premji Invest’s recent investment in Baseten. In it, Vedant Agrawal breaks down the key questions we had to answer—why now and why Baseten—and offers insights into how we track markets, build conviction, and decide when it’s the right time to lean in. High-level takeaways: 👉 Inference optimization as a point solution quickly becomes a race to the bottom. Baseten is different: it delivers a reliable, developer-centered inference system with strong stickiness and pricing power. 1⃣ We waited for the right moment In early 2024, inference infrastructure was crowded and chaotic with dozens of startups chasing narrow optimizations. We held back until lasting market traction emerged. 2⃣ The market matured, and Baseten stood out As the field narrowed, Baseten differentiated itself with enterprise-grade, model-agnostic, cloud-agnostic reliability and deep customer integration. 3⃣ Reliability, workflow, and sticky enterprise traction With 99.99–99.999% uptime across regions, Baseten is built on trust, not just speed. Its developer-first tools embed directly into engineering workflows, creating durable attachment. 4⃣ A level beyond what hyperscalers can offer Beyond compute and storage, Baseten provides redundancy, versioning, autoscaling, and rollback features that matter even more in the wake of recent cloud outages. 5⃣ A strong team and thoughtful business model Founders Tuhin Srivastava, Amir Haghighat, and Philip Howes embody enterprise discipline and product depth. The model scales without owning hardware, and with leaders like Dannie Herzberg driving go-to-market, enterprise adoption looks compelling. Read the full post here: https://lnkd.in/gS92F_BW Premji Invest - US Premji Invest

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