Vijay Ratnam

A founder who has spent 32 Years building IP-Owned Tech in India's Defense Sector. Ashok Atluri, Founder of Zen Technologies Limited shares a growth story bootstrapped from Hyderabad: -Revenue: ₹60 Cr (FY21) → ₹930 Cr(FY24) -Market cap: 40 Cr (2012-13) → 13000 Cr today -Growth: 400X in 12 years Takeaways from our conversation: 1. India historically imported 65–70% of its defense equipment. Today, defense exports have grown more than 30× over the past decade, with the private sector contributing around 60% of exports. Domestic defense production has increased to ₹1.27 lakh crore, a 174% rise since FY 2014–15. 2. For over two decades, Zen built advanced simulators but struggled to sell them in India because single-vendor bids weren’t accepted. The IDDM policy in 2015 gave preference to IP-owning Indian companies and allocated 75% of the capital acquisition budget to local sourcing. And decades of R&D became a real market worth ₹200 billion. 3. Defense tech startups in India have raised $184 million in VC funding since 2020. Zen’s journey shows that IP-owned Tech built with self-funded R&D can build the most defensible advantage, similar to how Apple captures value through IP rather than manufacturing. 4. Zen’s anti-drone systems were proven in field operations, leading to export inquiries from over 20 countries. This mirrors the broader trend of India’s defense exports growing from ₹1,940 crore (FY14) to ₹21,083 crore (FY24). Field-tested solutions build trust far faster than lab demos or pilot projects. 5. Government fundings are rewarding innovation over manufacturing. Programs like iDEX provide up to ₹10 crore for proven concepts, while DRDO offers ₹50 crore per system under the Technology Development Fund. This shift allows companies to reinvest profits into next-generation R&D. 6. Ashok believes that not all technologies should be patented. Highly secretive or complex innovations can be reverse-engineered if patented. Instead, patent what is obvious to outsiders to protect your competitive edge. 7. Build with a focused approach on Pareto technologies with maximum impact. Instead of chasing every opportunity, Zen concentrated on the 20% of technologies delivering 80% of results, anti-drone systems and simulators. Prioritizing high-leverage areas compounds impact effectively. 8. Time market entry around overlooked gaps: In 2018, drones were a hot topic, but there was little attention on anti-drone systems. Zen entered this gap and was ready when the need became urgent, from regional conflicts to domestic security. Opportunities often lie where others are silent. 9. Create policies around your innovation: Self-funded R&D firms face unique risks that conventional procurement rules often overlook. Zen advocated for new categories rather than adapting breakthrough technologies to unsuitable frameworks, ensuring their innovations could be evaluated on merit. Full Episode https://lnkd.in/gnAFEj3f

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After a fabulous two years at Kae Capital, I knew it was time to build the fund I wished had existed when I was a founder. Today, I’m launching Boundless Ventures, an early-stage, AI-native venture firm backing India-rooted founders who are building globally defensible companies at the intersection of science, systems, and culture. Boundless starts with a simple belief: the next decade’s breakout companies won’t “add AI” as a feature. They’ll be AI-native from day one, rethinking consumer products, enterprise workflows, and infrastructure with new primitives. We’ll write the first cheque, and then double down. We’ve proud to have already partnered with six category-shaping founding teams: • Superhealth: rethinking healthcare from the ground up • Armatrix: autonomous snake-arm robots for engine inspection • PierSight: real-time ocean intelligence • KNOT: AI-native fashion discovery and logistics • Two stealth companies in infra and consumer AI Our thesis spans four arenas: • The AI-native stack: infra, agents, and memory protocols • Make-in-India hardware: autonomous systems, design-led manufacturing • New-India consumer: culture × code • Science × story: where deep tech meets narrative leverage India is not catching up. It’s compounding. Boundless exists to back originals, with speed, belief and storytelling firepower. Link to our website & thesis below.

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How does he sell products on Amazon every THREE seconds? The answer lies not just in the product, but in the PRICE. 💰 ➡️In the chapter “PRICING: THE HOLY GRAIL OF BUSINESS” from my book Startups of Bharat, we unpack the story of Varun and Tarun from Boult, one of India’s top three audio and wearable brands that has bootstrapped its way to 750 CR in revenue. 😳 At a time when international heavyweights like Bose, Sennheiser, and Marshall already dominated the premium segment, and local brands were competing on price, Boult charted its course. 👇🏻 Varun and Tarun discovered a clear gap ⏩Customers wanted premium design and sound quality — without the premium price tag. However, identifying a gap and monetising it are two distinct things. The real game-changer? Boult’s adoption of the target costing model—a method where you first decide the price customers are willing to pay and then engineer your product to fit the cost constraints. For example, if the COGS is capped at 60% and comes to 2200, with a remaining 40% margin, your price would be Rs 3080. This meant tight control over production costs, design-led differentiation, and a refusal to fall into the trap of over-innovation. Profitability wasn’t a distant milestone—it was baked into the business model from day one and reinvested to grow the business to 750 CR and take the No. 3 spot in the ever-competitive audio category. 💪 Ask yourself ⬇️ I) Would your customers still trust your product if it cost 20% more—or 20% less? II) Are you pricing based on cost or value perception? III) Is your pricing strategy helping you build a brand, or just moving inventory? IV) What does your price say about you, even before your product does? Find the answers in “PRICING: THE HOLY GRAIL OF BUSINESS” — only in Startups of Bharat on Amazon. Link in comments! Varun Gupta Surya Pasricha 🌞 BOULT #startupsofbharat #startups #india

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The Great GCC Paradox: We’re Hiring, but Losing India’s GCCs are expected to cross $100B by 2030. But here’s what no one’s openly talking about: We’re leaking talent at the top, and hiring at the bottom. 1. A new study by Mercer shows mid-career attrition in tech has doubled since 2022. 2. CXO-level hiring cycles in GCCs have stretched beyond 6 months (Zinnov, 2024). 3. Returnee talent with global exposure is still asked: Q) “Why do you want to come back?” Q) “Are you too senior for this role?” We’ve mastered delivery. But we’re stuck in a talent loop: - Entry-level upskilling is celebrated - Strategic leadership hiring is feared - Internal mobility is sluggish - Culture fit outweighs culture transformation The result? India’s most capable talent is being interviewed by Singapore, Berlin, and Dubai, while local GCCs are still refining JD drafts. What if the real growth limiter isn’t infrastructure or policy… …but our inability to bet on catalytic leadership? You can’t build a $100B ecosystem with a $1M mindset. Let’s talk: What one mindset shift would unlock India’s next-gen GCC play? #GCC #LeadershipHiring #IndiaTalentCrisis #DigitalTransformation #ReturneeTalent #LeadershipGap #CXOHiring #Mercer #Zinnov #StrategicIndia #FutureOfWork #TalentFlight #HyderabadTech #GCCReset Zinnov Achyut Menon "AK" LinkedIn News India Reshab Shaw Vishwanadh Raju Viswanathan K S GCC Pulse™ Korn Ferry KPMG India

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Health AI for India isn't just about diversity or cultural adaptation—it's about solving real problems with deep indian clinical nuances to deliver better health outcomes. Our journey building healthcare AI for India taught us that deep innovation requires thinking from the ground up and not just building on top of SOTA models. Our approach involved: 🔹Evaluating the right models for Indian healthcare contexts 🔹Fine-tuning with carefully curated, relevant data ( think of how we describe our symptoms in our local languages 😀 ) 🔹Building comprehensive medical knowledge bases ( be it Indian Journals & datasets or published protocols by RSSDI - Research Society for the Study of Diabetes in India , ICMR - National Institute of Epidemiology (ICMR NIE) and many others. 🔹Training specialised embedding models. 🔹Building collaborative agentic workflows And most importantly, 🔹Collaborating closely with doctors and medical institutions 🔹And Listening to our partners, customers, and patients Today, I'm excited to share some of these learnings through the stable of Sankalp Gulati with the broader community. Also, proud to host it on AiKosha, the amazing platform built by the IndiaAI team. 🔹 Karma ( https://karma.eka.care/ ) - A comprehensive framework for evaluating and benchmarking healthcare models specifically for India, detailed blog here.  🔹 Transparent, India-centric evaluation datasets across multiple modalities 🔹 Smaller versions of our Audio and Vision models - demonstrating the power of building for India-specific use cases Do read out the details here: https://lnkd.in/gTqhxenp The future of healthcare AI in India is being built today—let's build it together. Try our APIs at https://developer.eka.care and join our Discord community https://lnkd.in/gZAb-S6d for feedback and collaboration. Congratulations to Rushabh Vasani Nikhil Kasukurthi Vasanth Murukuri Dr.Sanjana Sn Deepak Tuli Amit Bharti Bhaskar Chaudhary Neha Jagadeesh Vishal Kumar Tuniki Ajitesh Kaicker Raghunandan gupta Pranjal Pandit Mohit Rajpal Sumit Kumar Kunal Katre Nilaksh Kushwah Dr. Neelesh Kapoor Niharika Chaturvedi Karthick P Nura Almas Lourdes Dinesh Vishwesh Jainkuniya Trilok Yadav Saroj Kumar Sahu Arya Vashisht Shyamjith Palakkandy Niharika Chaturvedi Karthick P Nadeemahmed Totad Divyesh Jivani Sam Dennis and the whole eka.care team. #HealthcareAI #IndiaFirst #MedicalTechnology #HealthTech

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In venture capital, ultimately “only a handful of companies per year actually matter”. Just 7 firms led the Series A of ~60% of startups in India that are worth $1B+ today. The list of firms leading investments in these cos is fairly predictable - PANZEL + Tiger Global. Full post on India's unicorn hunters in the comments

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A lot of folks that we have spoken to have always yearned for a big screen home projector experience but never got around to doing it. This review (1/n) by Manas Tiwari articulates the common concerns and how the Lumio Arc 7 (https://amzn.in/d/g1kPMwW) addresses them all True plug-and-play simplicity -> setting it up is almost laughably easy.Everything you need is built-in as well: certified Netflix, native Google TV, Google Assistant, Chromecast, and even YouTube Music integration via TLDR Immersive Display -> It was evident that Lumio Arc 7 is clearly tuned for low-light environments and when used in a dark room, it delivers a genuinely immersive experience that feels well worth the asking price. Solid Audio - > The projector has built-in speakers, backed by Dolby Audio processing and they are surprisingly capable. Dialogues were clear, background music has presence, and casual viewers won’t feel the immediate need to plug in an external soundbar. Lumio Arc 7 delivers more than just a decent home entertainment upgrade: it delivers peace of mind. It ticks off all the boxes that typically trip up mid-range projectors: setup is refreshingly simple, the software experience is smooth and certified and the picture quality holds up surprisingly well whether you're bingeing shows or watching a live match. https://lnkd.in/e54jy2U2

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The August Edition of AIM Print is Out! From India’s AI agent gamble to a 91-year-old vibe coder, this issue is packed with stories that redefine how we think about technology, talent, and transformation. 👉 India’s AI Agent Gamble Startups like RevRag.AI (Ashutosh Singh), Gupshup (Beerud Sheth), gnani.ai (Ganesh Gopalan, Ananth Nagaraj), Floworks (Sudipta Biswas), Sarvam, Zoho (Ramprakash Ramamoorthy), AIonOS (CP Gurnani, Arjun Nagulapally), RagaAI Inc (Gaurav Agarwal), and Krutrim (Bhavish Aggarwal, Chandra Khatri, Navendu A, Sunit S.) are betting big on agentic AI—shaping everything from banking apps to conversational platforms. 👉 Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur: India’s Next Unicorn Hub With SIIC and FIRST, IIT-K is incubating product-led deep tech startups across AI, defence, and healthcare, powering India’s next wave of unicorns. 👉 Madhya Pradesh’s GCC Playbook Unlike Bengaluru or Hyderabad, MP is taking a unique approach to building GCCs—backed by a bold state policy. 👉 Game On, AI Style From Khelo India spotting young athletes to startups building video tracking and scouting tools, AI is revolutionising Indian sports. 👉 Locked Up, Logged In Meet Preston Thorpe, a software engineer at Turso, who codes in Rust and Python—contributing to databases and open-source projects from prison. 👉 MongoDB vs Databricks vs Snowflake As the battle moves into PostgreSQL, the rivalry intensifies—reshaping enterprise data strategies. 👉 Red Hat’s AI Feathers With open-source at its core, Red Hat is showing how global collaboration drives AI innovation. 👉 smallest.ai’s Global Play Sudarshan Kamath is building for the world first—before channeling gains back into India. 👉 91-Year-Old Vibe Coder John Blackman challenges age stereotypes by using Claude and Replit to build tools for his community. 👉 Indian IT’s New Reality From TCS’s bench policy change to soaring CEO salaries at HCLTech and mid-tier firms, the gap between boardroom and cubicle is widening. 👉 EkStep Foundation & BHASHINI - (Digital India BHASHINI Division) Shankar Maruwada shares why tech must serve those who need it most, while Bhashini builds a digital language backbone for India. This edition is a reminder: AI is not just about models—it’s about ambition, culture, resilience, and the people who push limits. Grab your copy of AIM Print August 2025 and see why this is our most talked-about edition yet: https://lnkd.in/gWrRb364

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SUPER EXCITED for this one: Kalyanaraman Parthasarathi spent 10 years shaping Freshworks’ product and was part of its historic NASDAQ listing as India’s first SaaS IPO. Then he left and started BaseDynamics to write his own playbook. And last week, he joined me on my podcast. While the goal was to talk about his bread and butter, the conversation turned out to be more interesting. Touching upon areas that would help anyone beyond SaaS understand building from ground up. What we cover in the episode: - Four signals that prove PMF is real (and what’s a false positive) - Two discovery questions that cut through noise - How to turn a 1-hour support ticket into an expansion revenue opportunity - Why frequency of pain matters more than passion in discovery - Why plurality in GTM beats the “one silver bullet” myth - How to spot friction in the first 30 days of usage - How direct founder feedback avoids “translation loss” - The never-before-shared story of how Girish Mathrubootham built a culture of liberty and debate at Freshworks. - Much more My personal favourites were understanding the fine line between over-communicating vs. over-committing that every startup must learn, and the ‘taste’ advantage that explains why not everyone can build scalable products. The full podcast goes live tomorrow. Thank you.

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