After 200 cheques, an Indian pre-seed VC moves a notch up, into deep tech.

Between 2014 and 2021, Shashank argues, India built something it had never had: a passable bottom of the pyramid for early-stage capital. Flipkart's Bansals reached escape velocity. Private-equity managers spun out smaller funds. Startup India launched in 2016. The fund-of-fund schemes seeded a generation of GPs. Atal Innovation Mission and the Department of Science & Technology poured grants into incubation centres beyond the IITs. Returning Valley operators brought process discipline. Second-time founders showed up with scar tissue.

By 2021, with COVID as the accelerant, the floor was set. Not the ceiling, not the middle. The floor. Shashank's whole 2025 pitch sits on this premise, because if the floor exists then 247VC's fund-two move "a notch up" is a market response, not an ego move.

The 100X.VC numbers Shashank quotes are the spine of the case for India's pre-seed cycle being real. A 145-crore fund. iSAFE notes drawing on a 2018 SEBI scheme that let a fund instrument carry the 5-crore minimum. 5% of the portfolio has gone to Series B, another 20% to Series A. The shape is power-law, with names (Up Coffee, Kerala Banana Chips on consumer, Emo Energy on battery cooling, Data Sutram in enterprise) that didn't exist as legible categories when the cheques went out.

The 15,000-decks figure matters more than the 180. Pre-seed at scale is a filtering business. The interesting question is not which 180 he picked but what process let him say no to 14,820 with enough confidence to keep saying yes at velocity.

The most under-reported partnership in the Indian startup decade. When AIM and the Department of Science & Technology started grant-funding incubation centres in 2016, from VIT to regional engineering colleges and eventually 350 plus, the volume of seeded companies exploded. Then nothing. In 2019–21, less than one per cent of incubation-centre companies were receiving VC follow-on. The conversion engine didn't exist.

Shashank's framing is that 100X.VC's actual product wasn't the cheque. It was the training programme for CEOs of incubation centres: what to back, what TAM to interrogate, how to staircase a company toward a Series A. The cheque came after the conversion infrastructure was built. Without the infrastructure, the cheque was a coin toss.

The numbers Shashank states for the new fund are the most concrete operational claim in the conversation. Thirty investments over three years. Two-to-five-crore initial cheques. Forty per cent of fund capital reserved for follow-ons. Pre-seed to seed stage, with the explicit confidence that he is willing to enter deep tech earlier than most peers because he has done it before: companies he wrote 25-lakh cheques to in 2019 are now doing four to five crores of revenue a month.

The follow-on reservation is the structural change from 100X.VC. The earlier fund was a high-velocity, fixed-ticket vehicle; the new one is built for ownership maintenance through the Series A bridge. The arithmetic of returns is different. So is the operator experience required from the GP.

Shashank lists Industry 5.0 / advanced manufacturing, deep tech (space, foundational AI, quantum), enterprise tech (middleware, cybersecurity, devops), and consumer tech. Then he says, twice, that they are cross-pollinating for the first time in fifteen years. A logistics company can be built on a manufacturing use case running on an enterprise foundation model. The four buckets are a taxonomy, not four funds.

This is the difference between a thematic fund and a sector fund. A sector fund picks the bucket and lives or dies on it. A thematic fund picks the connective tissue. Shashank's whole framing, "cross-pollinating," "operator experience between me and my founder", argues that the value he adds is at the seams between buckets, not inside any one.

The narrative people remember about Indian COVID is UPI adoption. Shashank's contrarian framing is that the more durable inflection was inside MSMEs: the third-generation owner of a Tirupur cluster whose father bought 50-year-old machinery, then 10-year-old machinery, suddenly forced to digitise because two of ten workers showed up to the floor in 2020. Predictive-maintenance sensors that latched onto fifty-year-old machines became sellable to a buyer who had never bought new-age tech in his life.

One 247VC-backed company Shashank describes didn't ultimately work. But the buying behaviour it surfaced did. The MSME owner now buys, and the path to that buyer runs through a use case where the alternative is a shut factory. STPI's facility-and-grant model and Department of Science & Technology programmes have since stitched MSMEs into the startup distribution map.

An anonymous panelist's insight, but Shashank lifts it for a reason. US enterprises evaluate software on efficiency: how much labour does this eliminate, how many hours saved per quarter. Indian enterprises evaluate the same software on topline: how much revenue does this add, what is the visible output the CEO can point to in a board pack. Same product, different question, different sale.

The implication for founders is severe. A pitch that hits in San Francisco lands flat in Gurgaon, not because Indian buyers are slower but because the question they are asking is different. The right Indian B2B pitch leads with a number that goes up. The right US B2B pitch leads with a number that goes down.

Forty years in Kanpur, 4,000-5,000 crores of revenue, distribution from Uttar Pradesh through Jharkhand, Bihar and Kolkata that Hindustan Unilever and Procter & Gamble cannot crack. Ghari Detergent is the case study Shashank uses to argue that the larger FMCG playbooks have failed in the geography that now consumes the most. ITC e-Choupal got partway. Hindustan Unilever's sachets got partway. Neither got the whole way.

The pitch he is making to consumer-tech founders is that the new-age brand has something Ghari didn't: per-customer digital purchase data from Flipkart, Instagram, and the quick-commerce platforms. With the 1.8-billion population mark crossed and tier-three persona-tracking now feasible, the brand that can model the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old in a tier-three town can, for the first time, compete with a forty-year-old distribution moat. Aspiration is the lever; loyalty is the gate.

The single sharpest deep-tech anecdote in the conversation. Ishitva Robotic Systems segregates nine different types of plastic. In year one of monitoring, the segregation cycle took 30 minutes. By the end of year two, it was 9 seconds. Two hundred-fold improvement, achieved at a deep-tech R&D pace that no consumer-tech investor's clock would tolerate. The buyer turned out not to be a municipal corporation. It was an MSME segregator whose own product line depended on cleaner feedstock.

Shashank's point in raising it isn't the cool factor of the robot. It is what kind of capital tolerates a two-year improvement curve. Pre-seed in India, for the longest time, didn't. Now, with 247VC writing 2-5 crore cheques into post-prototype deep tech, the patience window is wider than it has been. That window is the actual product 247VC sells to founders.

In 2019, Shashank visited a grape farm in Nashik supplying vineyards for wine export. Fyllo had installed moisture sensors there to dial in the precise hydration grapes needed to hit the buyer's quality test. Shashank assumed the farmer wouldn't use the app. He was wrong. The farmer was already using it. The insight he carried away, and now applies across the agritech part of the 247VC thesis, is that farmers will adopt any technology that visibly raises yield, with no extra coaching required.

The wider point is about who actually adopts new technology in India. The popular story is that tier-one urban professionals lead and the rest follow. The Fyllo case argues the opposite. Niche, high-stakes producers (vineyard suppliers, recyclers, third-generation MSME owners) are often the first adopters because the alternative is losing a contract.

247VC has evaluated at least five lithium-ion recycling startups and backed two. The full process, from procuring spent cells through breaking, recycling and refurbishing to either supplying back to EV manufacturers or repackaging into farm-grade batteries, is now a coherent circular-economy stack with Indian deep-tech labour built into every step. Shashank explicitly clubs it under the Industry 5.0 / sustainability thesis rather than EV.

The interesting structural detail is the bifurcation between "new format" (cells refurbished for automotive reuse) and "farmer category" (cells dropped into ruggedised packs for agricultural use). The same input, a spent automotive cell, supports two distinct margin profiles, two distinct sales motions, and two distinct regulatory paths. The startup that captures both can run a more capital-efficient business than either pure recycler or pure refurbisher.

Asked about sustainability, Shashank doesn't dodge: China can wipe out a city to build a manufacturing hub; India cannot. The price India pays for being a democratic nation is policy oscillation: Bombay's plastic-bag bans on and off, NEP rollout still slow against the pace of adoption, the skilling department of one state government still siloed from the curriculum-in-local-language startup in Mangalore. He returns several times to "all stakeholders need to come in."

But the framing is unsentimental. The democracy tax shows up in execution speed, not in capacity. The cohesiveness of intent across government, private sector and consumer is, by his measure, real and rising. DigiYatra is the example he keeps coming back to. UPI is the other. The work for the next forty years is connective, not foundational.

247VC backed an assessment-grading startup in the previous fund. It failed miserably, Shashank says, without flinching. The wider edtech category, in his read, has not been delivered to scale because the National Education Policy rollout is not fast enough relative to the adoption curve students and parents could absorb. The Karnataka skilling department warned him people are not being skilled. They called it a ticking time bomb. The bomb hasn't gone off, but it hasn't been defused.

The example he keeps repeating is a Mangalore startup providing curriculum in the local language using AI, for tier-two and tier-three students who will pick up jobs in Mangalore. The company has no Karnataka or Kerala government association. He thinks the skill department should run a startup-engagement programme to find founders like this. They don't. The siloing is the story.

The most quotable theoretical claim of the episode. Shashank started a SaaS company in 2009: input, output, fixed monthly subscription. He would not build that today. The breakage isn't the technology underneath SaaS, which has only got better. It is the pricing model. Subscription assumed every paying user used every output. Agentic workflows reveal that most users use a fraction. The right 2025-equivalent of his 2009 product would meter the unit of consumption (the deep-research query, the bot question past the tenth turn, the dataset called) and price accordingly.

The corollary he names is that founders who refuse to evolve will not survive. Zoho and Freshworks are evolving. Knight Fintech, one of his earliest angel cheques, has moved from cooperative-bank treasury software to private-bank piecemeal implementation funded by Accel because the underlying business model bent. The product persists. The pricing model dies.

Shashank's read of large Indian enterprises: the chief information officer or chief technology officer is willing. The problem is the rest of the machinery. The decision-making process is too long. The SBU head has one use case, the next SBU head has another, there is no consolidated buying signal. Procurement is set up for annual renewals against five-year roadmaps the startup is structurally unable to commit to. The corporate-innovation programme exists, but the litmus test, "can you deliver this over the next five years", is calibrated for incumbents.

His solution is not direct enterprise sale. It is corporate VC funding off the balance sheet, system integrators bridging the gap, and startup-engagement programmes attached to specific use cases. The deal architecture is the product. Founders who insist on the cleanest direct-sale path will, in his view, mostly fail; founders who design for triangulated buying will win.

Shashank corrects Vishal mid-conversation: 100X.VC wasn't an angel platform, even though everyone called it one. It was a fund. The mechanism was a 2018 SEBI scheme that allowed incorporation of a fund with a 5-crore-minimum-ticket-size structure, which platforms otherwise built around angel cap-table aggregation could repurpose as a proper instrument. The fund pulled in LP money, deployed against an iSAFE note (the Indian-law SAFE), and the cap table stayed clean.

The regulatory framing is essential to understanding why Indian pre-seed scaled when it did. Without SEBI's scheme and the iSAFE template, every 25-lakh cheque would have required its own SHA, its own valuation cap negotiation, and its own dilution paperwork. The standardisation is the enabling move. It is also why a fund can credibly say it deployed 180 times in five and a half years.

The quietest section of the episode and worth not skipping. Shashank says he hasn't finished a book in three months. The fundraise and the first wave of 247VC applications have eaten the input time. The exceptions are the books he rereads: a fundamentals-of-financial-modelling textbook by Mr Lamba which he opens because engineers-turned-VCs need to keep returning to balance sheets; The Tao of Physics, for the science-spirituality braid; and Isaac Asimov's Foundation, which he calls one of his all-time favourite series, and which, he notes, Asimov modelled on Roman imperial decline.

The substitute input now is curating Mahabharat (the 1980s version) for his seven-and-a-half-year-old. Twenty-two episodes in. He frames it as inculcating context, castism and the dwapar-to-kalyug transition, into a child whose default media diet is Roblox, Minecraft, Russian YouTube, and his wife's K-pop. The intellectual portfolio rebalances at home when the firm portfolio crowds it out.