Work

ITI Growth is a Mumbai-based SEBI-registered Category I AIF, investing from seed to Series A with a focus on deep-tech, defence-tech, healthcare and climate tech. Cheques typically run ₹6 to 12 crore.

I work end to end across the cycle: sourcing, screening, diligence, financial modelling, legal document review, investment committee documentation, closing support and fund-level modelling. Five transactions have gone through deep diligence since I joined.

Most of it is stress-testing. That means auditing a company's own financial model, modelling the downside, and writing the founder question set that decides whether the story holds. On one multi-centre healthcare services business I worked through 33 months of P&L, payor mix and cohort performance and found that a single centre was producing most of the apparent growth. The fund passed. That is the part I like most: finding the one number that changes the decision.

I also stay with the portfolio after the cheque, including Redwing Labs, Fasal and Coffeee, on capital utilisation, covenants and runway planning, and I evaluated roughly 500 agritech and AI startups for Maharashtra's AIAIC grant programme, building the scoring framework used to shortlist them.

Peak Sustainability Ventures is a climate-tech fund investing at Series A, and this was my first venture role. I joined as a Senior Analyst and was promoted to Associate inside the first year.

I ranked first among my peers on origination, sourcing more than 100 opportunities a year inside a pipeline of over 2,500, and took 35 companies to pre-IC stage. I also built the sector intelligence across logistics, SaaS, heating and cooling, energy efficiency and more than ten other themes that fed the fund's theses.

I led end-to-end diligence, cash-flow modelling and downside analysis on three investments of about $1.3M each, across solar, cooling and biogas. I stayed with the portfolio afterwards. With SustLabs and HT Materials Science that meant sales support and the launch of pilot programmes in India. With Hydrogen Mem-Tech it meant support on the India expansion.

I also ran work outside the deal cycle: firm-wide marketing, strategic partnerships and portfolio incubation. A fund's return gets set after the cheque as much as before it, in the work of getting a first customer to say yes.

I joined as a summer research fellow in Washington DC, working on hydrogen at the energy policy organisation founded and led by a former US Secretary of Energy. The fellowship was extended by five months, which is how the modelling work below got done.

I built a long-term hydrogen demand model covering more than forty countries, using supply and demand data and the plants planned or operating in each, which the Saudi Arabian government used to forecast demand to 2050. I also modelled the levelised cost of hydrogen across six green production pathways and found electrolyser capex to be the highest-leverage variable, worth 12 to 18% of cost per kilogram by 2035.

The other half of the fellowship was emissions accounting. I analysed Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions across hydrogen production and transport for a client in renewables, and the recommendations that came out of it added up to a 34% cut. Most of a hydrogen project's carbon sits in its supply chain. That changes what you build first.

That project is where financing infrastructure stopped being an abstraction for me. The question stopped being whether the technology worked. It became how the project got paid for, which is the question I work on now.

Alongside the master's I ran the numbers for Carnegie Mellon's energy and climate research centre: a $3M portfolio of roughly fifty deep-tech grants.

I also helped lead partnerships for CMU Energy Week, the institute's flagship conference, working across 45 stakeholders from corporate sponsors to the investors and startups in its pitch forum. The March 2023 edition, the first in person since 2019, was built around decarbonising heavy industry and drew more than 500 registered attendees from over 200 organisations.

I built the underwriting framework the institute used to assess them, fifteen or so quantitative metrics covering technical quality, capital absorption and milestone risk, and it informed where the following year's disbursements went. It was the first time I had been on the allocating side of a table rather than the asking side.

A last-mile distribution venture for rural India. We helped small manufacturers of clean products, solar cookstoves, water filters and bio-alternatives among them, reach customers the usual supply chains never got to, and gave those customers access to essentials on credit. The catalogue ran to lifestyle products and education as well.

It started in 2019 with work at MIT D-Lab and Engineering for Change. Interviews with 23 social enterprises showed the biggest threat to their survival was last-mile marketing and distribution. The first concept was SolarCart: a mobile solar-powered kiosk offering drinking water, phone and battery charging and internet access, with a product catalogue attached.

I led partnerships and scaled the team from five to fifteen, built a network of more than twenty-five small business partners, and raised $10K+ in non-dilutive funding through competitive pitches. I also ran a fixed-location retail pilot in a high-footfall area. It came in at the lowest customer acquisition cost we had measured and held customers better than the mobile kiosks we had been running. It reached $18K+ in revenue. The lesson is the bridge to investing: customers would pay for clean products, and what was missing was well-structured capital.

Sattva is an impact and strategy consultancy. I worked in its founder's office, and for most of a year my client was the Bihar health department: I flew in and out of Patna and worked from the state secretariat, on a mandate to raise the quality of care for about 13 crore people, nearly twice the population of France.

The centrepiece was a health monitoring command centre for the Bihar State Health Society. I designed it to pull live data from facilities in every district into one place, so the department could see bed utilisation, when patients are admitted and discharged, when doctors arrive and leave, and where medicines are in the supply chain. It brought seven departments onto one digital system.

The rest of the work was regulatory and governance reform. I developed a five-pillar governance strategy for district and village health centres, which lifted satisfaction among more than 15,000 grassroots health workers by 95%, and ran operational audits that improved case closure by 40%. The programme helped secure buy-in that included roughly $5M in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and support from the Chief Minister's office.