Applabs Technologies provides computer software testing services. The Company offers software quality assurance, third-party validation, consulting, outsourcing, and mobile application testing services. Applabs serves the health care, manufacturing, chemical, energy, and travel industries worldwide. Based in Philadelphia, the company’s presence spanned the US, UK, and India. Applabs was one of the first successful outsourcing plays, leveraging India’s cost advantage and vast pool of technical talent. It was acquired by Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE: CSC) in 2011 and today is the world’s largest software testing and quality management company.

Assurekit is building a unified insurance infrastructure gateway that seeks to simplify insurance distribution in India by building a network that enables businesses across the ecosystem to create, sell, and manage insurance in a plug-and-play fashion.

Assurekit’s first offering – AssureDash – is a full-stack technology solution that aims to digitize the long tail of agent-assisted legacy (offline) insurance distributors that account for the lion’s share of insurance products sold in India. The platform provides an integrated interface that facilitates these brokerages to manage their nexus of insurance providers and products. It ultimately empowers their agents to offer an online-first customer experience.

Assurekit’s second product – AssureGate – leverages the embedded insurance model to offer businesses a check-out stack that allows them to start selling insurance as a value-added offering directly to their customers. Powered by ready-made integrations with insurance providers, Assurekit’s platform enables businesses to sell insurance without the hassle of investing in and developing their own insurance infrastructure.

Our conviction in the Company primarily rests in the massive growth potential of the relatively underpenetrated insurance sector in India and the founder’s intimate knowledge of insurance that puts him in good stead to realize the company’s lofty ambition of modernizing distribution channels so that insurance may become the go-to risk protection tool for every individual.

AutoNxt is a Mumbai-based deep-tech startup building India’s first electric tractor with off-road autonomous driving capabilities. Its high torque-capable EV tractors deliver the same degree of operational performance for heavy-duty applications as conventional ICE-based (diesel) tractors.

While India has taken several steps to reduce (on-road) transport emissions – with the transition to BS VI emission & fuels standards and the push for EVs – the off-road transport sector, which primarily comprises tractors (in agri and industrial use cases), has lagged.

The outdated emission control technology for India’s tractors, coupled with the expected rise in the stock of tractors in use as agri mechanization continues apace, makes the segment ripe for electrification. As the only Indian company with electric tractors ready for commercial deployment towards large-scale B2B industrial use cases (e.g., solar panel cleaning and hauling biomass fuel for energy generation), AutoNxt is perfectly positioned to be the category leader in this space.

Beans.ai is a California-based early-stage company building a complete last-mile logistics platform offering hyper-accurate mapping and location data, route planning and optimization, and fleet management services. Its AI-powered platform provides unmatched visibility at every step of the package delivery journey – from address verification and geocoding to route creation, sorting, scanning, and sequencing to dispatch, delivery, and reconciliation.

The platform collects and processes data from multiple sources and provides delivery partners with proprietary geocodes to simplify parking, access, and delivery. Beans.ai seeks to resolve issues in the last-mile delivery market, such as undelivered packages and re-delivery attempts which exacerbate the operational and cash burden logistics players face.

Saama invested in the Company at a pre-product, pre-revenue stage based on our conviction in the founding team, which had deep technical expertise in on-demand delivery logistics. The CEO had previously led the on-demand delivery and 3rd party integrations group at Google and had an exceptional understanding of the problem faced by enterprises and delivery companies.

Bluestone is India’s leading brand of high-quality, design-driven, fine jewelry and accessories with strikingly exquisite designs. In an industry-first move, the Company was the first to leverage an omnichannel strategy for selling jewelry by marrying the convenience of shopping online with the visceral trust of an in-store shopping experience.

At the time of our investment, while the fine jewelry industry in India was booming, it suffered from a distinct lack of a superior customer service experience. Cognizant of this gap in the market, Saama invested in BlueStone’s vision of disrupting the jewelry buying experience through a tech-enabled business model. As a maverick of the D2C approach, the Company started as an internet-first brand and later reimagined the traditional jewelry store to offer an immersive and contemporary offline buying experience.

Saama’s early conviction in Bluestone was rooted in the solid entrepreneurial mix of the founding team – with one of the co-founders being a successful serial technology entrepreneur and the other being a 5th-generation jeweler from the CKC Jewellers group (a 150+-year-old leading jewelry brand in South India). We have realized a partial exit, and the company plans an IPO over the next 12-18 months.

Chai Point is India’s largest organized beverage chain, with a vast network of retail outlets and a large installed capacity of brewing systems catering to corporates. The Company seeks to serve India’s large workforce with a delectable selection of beverages and associated food items via a network of consumer-facing outlets, dispensers for corporate enterprises, and on-demand delivery.

The Company has established a robust pan-India footprint with industry-first innovations such as a specially developed use-and-throw heat retaining chai flask and a fully automated chai dispensing machine. In addition, the Company has developed an extensive range of packaged food products that can be served with beverages and are distributed through offline and online channels.

The Saama team had tracked the founder since our first meeting at a food and agriculture investment summit in 2011. The founder’s simple yet powerful realization that “India runs on chai” (now espoused in the Company’s official slogan) and that the market lacks a beverage product delivered consistently with high quality and hygiene resonated well with the Saama team. This, along with a delightful and extensive diligence process of trying several cups of tea at various early Chai Point stores, gave us the confidence to be the first institutional investor in the Company.

DailyNinja offers a platform enabling hyperlocal delivery of high-frequency daily need products (e.g., milk, eggs, bread, yogurt, etc.) through a subscription-based model. The Company was, arguably, one of the first grocery delivery apps that sought to digitize and automate (via subscriptions) the purchase of daily essentials that were generally perishable and needed frequent replenishment. In a bid to consolidate its subscription delivery business, BigBasket acquired DailyNinja in 2020.

DaMensch is an early-stage venture building a premium men’s fashion essentials brand in India. The Company manufactures products ranging from innerwear to casual clothing and activewear, targeted toward urban style-conscious millennials who inhabit a digital-first world, are comfortable making apparel purchases online, and are conscious of the brands they associate with.

With a strong focus on R&D and delivering a fashion quotient that is in tune with evolving youth trends and value that sits at the intersection of ‘premium’ and ‘affordable’, DaMensch offers best-in-class quality and functionality. Lab-tested for color fading and certified as ‘shrinkage-resilient’, DaMensch’s leading collection of briefs and trunks is made of micro-modal fabrics and comes with an industry-first warranty of 500 days!

Saama invested in DaMensch just six months after they started operations due to deep conviction in the innerwear market and its potential depth in the growing digital e-commerce space. With extensive digital product and e-commerce experience at companies like Nykaa and Snapdeal, the founders were the ideal team to build a digital-first brand for millennial India.

Dasera is a California-based company building a SaaS cybersecurity platform to tackle data lifecycle security for cloud data stores. The core idea is to address internal threats presented by employee negligence and malfeasance. The Company aims to build an end-to-end solution for visibility, security, compliance, and privacy.

By analyzing database queries from employees (e.g., engineers and analysts), flagging suspicious queries (for anomalous usage patterns indicating data exfiltration or privacy violations), and rewriting them in real-time, Dasera operationalizes data protection and governance. Their vision is to democratize enterprise data security operations through an automated solution deployed at scale by a single engineer and easily accessible by executive stakeholders, data owners, security operations, and compliance teams.

Digiaccel is an early-stage venture building a digital skills academy and marketplace for white-collar workers and organizations to build employability for non-programming job roles in India through a tech-first skilling engine combined with human coaching.

Through a nearly 14-year stint at HUL, the founder realized that India’s traditional degree/certification-based curriculum did not focus enough on building skills for the workplace. There was an increasingly large gap in the demand for and availability of digital employment – across fields such as data analytics, digital marketing, tech operations, and product management.

As such, organizations end up with a formally educated workforce that lacks skill-based knowledge and industry context. This leads to a longer ramp-up time for new employees, which decreases efficiency.

To preclude this problem, Digiaccel offers 12–20-week focused skilling courses with pre-recorded theory/demonstrations/simulations supplemented by live mentorship. The proprietary skilling engine then provides customized pathways for different candidates with assessments to constantly identify and correct skill gaps. After this, Digiaccel connects skilled personnel with the right digital employers.

As an early and differentiated player in India’s otherwise crowded EdTech space, we believe the Company is well poised to solve a significant problem endemic in the Indian job market.

dRisk is an early-stage venture dedicated to building a ‘risk-free’ investing ecosystem and arming retail investors with the power of hedging by simplifying options to cover their trades.

Over the past two years, there has been an unprecedented influx of retail investors in India’s capital markets and a concomitant explosion of interest in riskier assets (e.g., cryptocurrencies and NFTs). While these newly minted retail traders seek education on downside risk protection, the sheer number and complexity of strategies available to trade options necessitate an in-depth knowledge of finance. Novice traders are, therefore, extremely unlikely to effectively deploy options as a risk rationalization tool.

dRisk plans to leverage this opportunity by developing an easy-to-use de-risking solution that enables users to buy a cover for their trade, offering 100% coverage of their losses. As a platform that abstracts away from the complexity of options to democratize hedging for retail traders in the form of a simple trade cover, dRisk is well-positioned to successfully navigate the boom in India’s retail investing landscape.

EazyDiner is India’s first dedicated online platform that helps users make real-time restaurant reservations and payments while offering exclusive benefits. It also provides expertly curated content, such as reviews and recommendations on dining out by renowned food critics like Vir Sanghvi.

The Company kickstarted by assisting customers with restaurant bookings when India’s dining-out culture was just picking up pace. The confluence of our strong belief in the category formed by our experience with F&B investments and the founder’s deep roots in the hospitality industry as President of The Oberoi Group impelled Saama to back the Company at an early stage.

Today, it has evolved into an end-to-end dining-out solution with the addition of a native payment solution, including credit cards for restaurant use. From browsing a curated list of dining options in the city to paying for their meals leveraging exclusive offers and privileges, patrons can use the EazyDiner platform as a one-stop shop for all their eating-out needs.

Fingo, a California-based company, sought to build an AI-powered personal financial management tool focused on helping millennials and GenZ better understand, manage, and gain actionable insights on their personal transactional and financial data. In this pursuit, they launched Meemo, an AI-driven social finance app that lets users receive personal rewards based on recent activity and transfer money to friends.

Saama’s investment was based on our conviction in a top-tier ex-Google, ex-Snap engineering team with innovative product ideas in the social finance space. Coinbase acquihired the Company in 2021.

FirstHive is a full-stack Customer Data Platform (CDP) that enables consumer marketers and brands to take control of their first-party data from all online and offline sources and enables highly personalized campaigns that drive conversions. The Company provides foundational technology for B2C enterprises to leverage 1st-party customer data with well-developed marketing use cases, enabling nuanced control over CX and accelerating marketing ROI.

FirstHive is effectively the first CDP to deliver enterprises a single source of intelligence that can build unified customer identities and streamline data usage across the enterprise’s marketing and analytics ecosystems. The platform allows consumer marketing enterprises to consolidate all their opt-in first-party consumer data. Once deployed, it becomes the single source of truth for customer identity and data within the enterprise.

As such, it acts as a central brain or system of intelligence that can be leveraged to deliver seamless cross-tool and cross-channel communication for marketing teams for downstream marketing applications. Moreover, its AI-powered out-of-the-box recommendations and assisted decision engine enhance marketing ROI and CX objectives.

Personal finance and wealth advisory platform, Fisdom democratizes access to traditional financial systems for India’s largely underbanked but rapidly growing population. The Company offers a simple app enabling first-time market participants to make intelligent investments in savings and capital-market products (e.g., mutual funds and stocks) along with value-added services (e.g., tax filing).

Recently, with Indians becoming comfortable with investing in assets other than real estate and gold, India has been witnessing unprecedented financialization of household savings. The benefits of this, however, have accrued only to the top of India’s income distribution.

Recognizing this, Saama bought into Fisdom’s vision of opening up the benefits of financialization to folks who don’t only bank with top-tier public and private financial institutions. Moreover, with deep experience across various facets of finance – from venture capital and private equity to investment banking and wealth management – Fisdom’s founding team exhibited the proper context and strategic access to rapidly deploy and scale this business.

Today, Fisdom provides investors access to a multitude of products – including equities, derivatives, IPOs, FPOs, buybacks, sovereign gold bonds, NCDs, currencies, ETFs, etc. The Company has partnered with several banks (e.g., Indian Bank and Uco Bank) and digital partners (e.g., Moneycontrol and Google Pay) to offer financial products to their customers.

Games2Win (G2W) is a leading global mobile games publisher. With over 400 million downloads and over 15 million monthly active players, Games2Win is one of India’s earliest gaming plays in the consumer internet age and aims to be the largest casual gaming platform. G2W is the publisher of global hit titles such as Driving Academy, Decisions, and International Fashion Stylist.

GenePath Diagnostics is a next-generation molecular diagnostics company with a clinical lab and product focus. The Company builds in vitro molecular diagnostic, genetic, and genomic testing kits and assays for infectious diseases, oncology treatments, and genetic disorders. They also offer clinical diagnostic services for the same in the Indian market.

With its ability to evolve and develop new tests apace with global developments in the field, the Company has received immense recognition from the medical, healthcare, and allied communities for making high-quality, affordable, and rapidly deployable-at-scale diagnostic products. Led by a serial entrepreneur and a scientist with 20+ years of molecular biology and healthcare experience, the team’s vision is to continue building and deploying affordable and innovative diagnostic solutions for infectious diseases, cancers, and genetic disorders, to provide the best possible outcome and experience for millions of citizens globally.

Genesis Colors brings an eclectic mix of designer labels from India and across the globe, ensuring the consumers are spoiled for choice, from opulence to effervescence by par excellence brands. Genesis is the holding company of renowned Indian fashion brand Satya Paul and premium Indian lingerie brand Bwitch. Satya Paul is known across the globe for its iconic prints and vivid color palette that transformed how the world viewed the traditional Indian sari. The brand has successfully reinvented the sari and moved on to include ‘ready-to-wear’ and accessories with a universal appeal. Under its arm Genesis Luxury, the company holds the exclusive marketing and distribution rights to several international luxury labels in India, including Armani, Bottega Veneta, Burberry, Canali, Etro, Jimmy Choo, Michael Kors, Paul Smith, and Tumi.

The founders of Genesis understood and told the story of aspirational India better than anyone. They envisioned that in the new age, the Indian woman who traditionally wore garden silk saris would want to buy Satya Paul, and the younger, modern woman would want a dress from a European fashion brand. They took a long-term view to brand-building and helped create a new class of discerning consumers across India. Genesis was acquired by Reliance Brands, which is now the most coveted partner of choice for international brands looking to enter India.

GlobalFair is a B2B cross-border procurement marketplace for construction materials – starting with granite, quartz, marble, ceramics/tiles, and steel fabrications.

The construction industry, a $1.4T market worldwide, has been traditionally unorganized with limited technology penetration. GlobalFair seeks to modernize it by automating the discovery-to-delivery lifecycle of an order. The Company works directly with overseas buyers, servicing them through a network of managed suppliers. Their USP is providing overseas buyers and importers with a hassle-free, one-stop procurement solution managed end-to-end by GlobalFair.

The Company takes ownership of the entire process, from sourcing to organizing production, price negotiation, quality inspection, technical evaluation (with pattern designing), cost-effective shipping, and ensuring timely delivery. The vision is to build a technology platform that transforms the industry’s order placement paradigms by introducing supplier ratings and reviews, video-based sampling, real-time shipping alerts, and paperless supplier/buyer onboarding, delivering a bona fide digital-first experience to end-users.

Go Zero is creating a guilt-free healthy desserts brand in India, starting with a range of better-for-you ice cream products, such as zero sugar, low calorie, high protein, vegan and keto ice creams.

There is huge demand for healthy snacking products made with natural ingredients and without artificial flavor additions. There is also a paucity of options for lactose intolerant and vegan consumers. The Company’s goal is to start a revolution of “guilt-free happiness” for consumers to satisfy their cravings without feeling any guilt.

The founder has deep experience in the world of ice-cream. He led the expansion of his family ice cream business, Apsara Ice Creams, from a single outlet in Mumbai to over 100 across the country in just six years. As an early player in this fast-growing category, Go Zero has the opportunity to carve out significant market share in India.

The Goa Brewing Co. is a new-age, contrarian beer brand for the discerning drinker who is not looking for a run-of-the-mill product but seeks a more complex, multi-dimensional beer. Run as a greenfield brewing venture in North Goa (India), the Company manufactures and distributes an exciting portfolio of modern craft beers, catering to urban millennials on the lookout for premium quality beers at a reasonable price.

True to its rebellious ethos, the Company markets a line of ‘non-conformist modern beers’. Its first brew, a double dry-hopped oat cream Indian Pale Ale (IPA) with a tropical fruit aroma, viz. Eight Finger Eddie became an instant hit. Adding to its quiver of industry-first innovative variants, GBC also markets a breakfast cereal stout, a wheat ale, a heritage rice-based lager, and limited-edition seasonal brews.

With our investment experience in alco-Bev, Saama had witnessed the premiumization story play out for the wine category. As such, with instant product love for GBC’s founder’s design-led innovative mindset, our conviction rested in the Company’s ability to disrupt the hitherto banal beer segment in the Indian alco-beverage landscape.

Koparo is focused on creating a premium home cleaning and personal hygiene brand in India. The Company develops and markets a line of plant-derived and toxin-free home cleaners and personal hygiene products – ranging from air fresheners, floor cleaners, and laundry liquids and detergents to dish, hand, and body washes – that are safe for children, pets, and the environment.

The Indian household cleaning market is large and currently dominated by traditional FMCG players who have not innovated in the last two decades. Moreover, accelerated by the pandemic, consumer behavior is shifting towards eco-friendly, green, and natural products.

Koparo is capitalizing on this trend to create an insurgent brand with a “better for you” and “better for the world” value proposition. The Company is intensely product-focused and committed to full ingredient transparency for its consumers. As one of the early players in a new and growing category, we believe the Company has the opportunity to carve out a significant market share in India.

Fintech company Lendingkart has developed an algorithm-based online real-time technology platform that can recommend a credit underwriting decision. The Company uses this platform to disburse small ticket size, unsecured, short-term business loans to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. In addition, the Company’s platform is also leveraged by many of India’s largest banks to gain exposure to priority sector lending, a key focus of the RBI.

Facing a credit gap of ~$380 billion, the Indian MSME sector is severely underbanked. This substantial, underserved population of potential borrowers does not lend itself easily to fit the existing credit assessment and loan disbursement system.

To overcome this structural issue, Lendingkart has developed technology tools based on Big data analysis – that analyze thousands of data points from various data sources – to assess small businesses’ creditworthiness rapidly and accurately.

Our belief in the need to transform small business lending, coupled with the founder’s deep domain experience in the banking sector, propelled us to become an early backer of the Company.

Mezi, a Sunnyvale, CA-based company, was developed as a mobile-first AI chat-based app that could enable fast and bespoke discovery of online products and services. Initially built for a wide range of use cases, such as shopping and gifting, the Company pivoted to focus only on travel.

Using Mezi as their personal travel assistant, users could book flights, hotels, and restaurants and receive customized recommendations. Mezi also offered a white-label “travel-as-a-service” solution for travel management companies and agents.

Mezi was the founders’ (a twin brother duo) second rodeo, having previously cofounded the Bollywood music streaming service Dhingana, which Rdio acquired in 2014. At the time of Mezi’s launch in 2015, AI had not yet been leveraged to personalize shopping experiences.

At the end of 2016, Mezi started working with American Express on a pilot to power its AskAmex concierge service. Seeing that Mezi was instrumental in providing superior service to its clientele, Amex sought to deepen its engagement with the Company and acquired Mezi in early 2018. Just as an FYI, we have invested in the founders’ new venture, Zeni, through our fourth fund.

Mokobara is a homegrown, modern direct-to-consumer travel products brand. The product portfolio comprises thoughtfully designed luggage, bags, backpacks, and travel accessories that seamlessly work together for #GoingPlaces, in line with the Company’s mission of “elevating the joy of travel.”
As a digitally native brand, Mokobara enjoys high product visibility across channels and a direct brand connection with its customers in a product category that has seen little to no product or customer experience innovation over several decades.

The Company is well on its way to being the travel brand of choice for the modern consumer for whom travel is a lifestyle choice and a state of mind. Mokobara’s brand philosophy is centered around a strong focus on the millennial and Gen Z consumer with a fresh outlook on travel and discovering new places. With design innovation that lends itself to unique and sharp aesthetics and a seamless, superior customer experience, the Company’s value proposition clearly distinguishes it from incumbent players.

MyMuse is India’s first intimate wellness and lifestyle brand that markets high-quality gender-neutral sexual wellness products designed to bring a luxe customer experience to the bedroom.

Frustrated by the lack of material product innovations in the sexual wellness industry despite the growing recognition of sexual well-being as a salient facet of overall health and wellness, the founding team started MyMuse during the Covid-19 pandemic – to develop products designed to help the modern Indian both celebrate and nourish their sexual journey with a sense of unapologetic ownership.

With products ranging from sleek, full-body personal massagers and mood-setting luxury soy wax candles to water-based lubricants and all-natural massage oils, MyMuse is building a new-age, homegrown, sex-positive brand. Operating in a culturally sensitive category, the company aims to enhance the sexual wellness journey of modern Indians through its easily accessible pleasure-wellness products and highly informative yet quirky educational content.

The core of our investment thesis is anchored in our faith in the founding team’s ability to build a category-leading business in India’s nascent yet rapidly evolving sexual wellness (white-) space.

MyShubhLife (formerly Shubh Loans) is a full-stack financial services provider for India’s underbanked population, offering a digital lending and savings platform for financial inclusion. The Company has developed unique data science models – based on alternative data and real-time analytics – to democratize credit for millions of borrowers from the ‘Next Half Billion’ segment, who are currently excluded from the formal credit system.

MyShubhLife has built partnerships with some of the leading lending organizations in India and also holds its own non-banking financial company (NBFC) license. Through its ‘Shubh Saathi’ membership program, the Company serves corporate partner firms’ employees alongside providing customized employee benefits programs, tax filing, and micro-investing solutions for mutual funds and gold.

Nourish is an early-stage startup developing and selling high-quality, all-natural ingredients-based healthy snacking products for health-conscious individuals across demographics. Catering to the evolving Indian consumer, who is increasingly conscious about the nutritional value of the food she consumes, the Company markets a range of high-quality product variants within the following categories: Cookies, Breakfast Cereals, Savory Snacks, Health Bars, Nuts and Seeds mixes. Nourish aims to provide its customers with a range of healthy snacking alternatives made from wholesome ingredients, primarily grown organically, and free from harmful chemicals/pesticides.

Started by two 21-year-old college graduates, Now&Me is your warm, caring home on the internet. They are building a one-stop global solution for mental health anchored in a creator-community approach. Starting with an emotional support network, the Company’s platform allows users to share thoughts and experiences with compassionate strangers in a judgment-free zone with a zero-tolerance policy for abuse within the community.

The platform enables anonymous peer-to-peer interactions with 24/7 moderation that keeps bullies away and supports trigger warnings for sensitive content. Access to the forum is free and available on all devices (web and mobile), with additional expert resources continuously added. The platform offers creator-community interactions with expert Q&A sessions, blogs, community meetups, masterclasses, habit-forming wellness challenges, etc.

Oddr is a vibrant Silicon Valley startup looking to disrupt the archaic Invoice-to-Cash processes for the Professional Services industry. Founded by three seasoned veterans with a cumulative experience of 50+ years in this industry, Oddr aims to fix the broken billing, collection, and payment processes that result in significant revenue loss for firms.

Firms’ archaic billing, collection, and payment processes lead to longer invoice-to-cash cycles, higher write-offs, and unnecessary operational costs. No matter how the bills are delivered, the current methods for sending out invoices are tedious and error-prone. Further, invoices become untraceable once sent, and the entire process lacks intelligence and automation, resulting in unreliable cash flow predictions. All these fragmented processes and inefficiencies result in low customer satisfaction and loss of the firm’s time and resources.

Leveraging AI, Automation, and Data Intelligence, Oddr helps firms streamline and automate their manual and paper processes to enhance their growth strategy while lowering bottom-line costs.

One97 Communications is the parent entity of India’s leading mobile payments and financial services company, Paytm. One97 delivers mobile content and commerce services to millions of mobile consumers, starting as a mobile value-added services (VAS) company. Paytm was launched in 2009 as a digital payment platform to facilitate cashless payments. Through its network of subsidiaries and businesses, the company offers a range of digital payment and financial services to consumers and merchants in India and mobile advertising, marketing, and payments for merchants.

We invested primarily out of immense conviction in Vijay Shekhar Sharma, one of the most mercurial founders we had encountered, in whom we clearly saw the vision to build something significant, something game-changing. Vijay understood the three pillars of finance, mobile, and technology. His journey of pivoting and evolving Paytm from a mobile recharge voucher business into the flagbearer of India’s Fintech revolution is truly remarkable, with Paytm filing its IPO in 2021, then the largest IPO in India’s history.

Today, Paytm is one of India’s most symbolic brands and has been a true socioeconomic equalizer, enabling and empowering all strata of society. We co-led the company’s first institutional round and were privileged to have a front-row seat to one of the most remarkable startup stories of all time, watching the twists and turns of the consumer internet business, the post-demonetization boom of the cashless economy, and the unmistakable phrase in the minds of every Indian shopping online – “Paytm Karo.” After a successful early exit to Alibaba, Saama’s founder Ash Lilani was later invited to join the Board of Directors as an Independent Director prior to the company’s IPO.

People Interactive is one of India’s first genuine consumer internet companies. Shaadi.com, the flagship brand of People interactive, is the world’s largest matrimonial service. It was founded with one simple objective – to provide a superior matchmaking experience to Indians worldwide. The company pioneered online matrimony in 1996 and has continued to lead the matrimony category for 25 years. The service has touched the lives of 35 million people globally and helped over 6 million people find their matches. Its sister brand, Sangam.com, is a matchmaking service created for parents looking for a life partner for their children.

The Company is an early-stage venture focused on building an AI platform for writers. Today, the process of writing stories is antiquated and inefficient all along the value chain. For writers, collecting, organizing, and integrating research is a monumental task, producing large quantities of words is arduous, and the rules of language are hard to follow. For producers and publishers, the process of discovering stories is biased and inefficient, good writers are not scalable, there are no reliable markers to predict success, and large amounts of money are wasted on R&D and abandonment of rejected stories.

To overcome these structural issues, Poetics is developing an app that will work as a brainstorming partner suggesting plot points for narratives in seconds, catering to passionate and aspirant novelists and short-story writers. Eventually, the Company will deploy its foundational technology to partner with publishers, producers, and agencies as the applications range beyond novels to movies, television, theatre, etc.

Praman seeks to build the world’s largest global exchange for horticulture commodities. Powered by its proprietary AI-based image recognition technology for product quality assaying and grading, Praman envisions making horticulture trade accessible and trustworthy.

The Company originally developed AI/ML-powered hardware and software solutions that utilized machine vision technology to enable rapid and custom sorting and grading of horticulture produce. In late 2020, post a change in agriculture trading regulations, the Company pivoted to building a B2B horticulture exchange using its aforementioned core technology – real-time, highly accurate quality assaying solutions.

Praman seeks to solve the inherent information asymmetry that persists in the horticulture trade due to the highly perishable nature of the commodity, lack of objective quality standardization, and high fragmentation on the supply side, making it incredibly tough to aggregate and assess quality manually. To help seamlessly execute orders, Praman’s exchange facilitates trade discovery through a digital bidding platform, quality assurance powered by its grading software, and trade settlement services like payments, credit, and logistics.

Prizm Payments is a leading provider of payment services using ATMs and POS systems to banks and financial institutions in India. An early play in India’s digital financial services growth story, Prizm built a robust customer base of major financial institutions and know-how of payment systems, cash operations, and management systems for financial institutions. The company was among India’s leading, fastest-growing payment solutions providers and was acquired by Hitachi in 2014.

Raw Pressery is a pioneer of High Pressure Processed (HPP) cold-pressed juices in the Indian market. As an industry-first category creation play, it produces and markets a range of healthy, fresh, and wholesome cold-pressed juices in single or multi-ingredient product blends. Wingreens Farms acquired the Company in a strategic sale in 2021.

Scalenut is a unified content intelligence SaaS platform that helps companies manage their entire content lifecycle from content planning, creation, and collaboration to distribution and analytics. With Scalenut, one can get unlimited content ideas for blogs, product descriptions, ad copies, email headers, blog intros, and more at the click of a button. Their innovative AI tool produces long-form content pieces in a matter of seconds!

Today, only a handful of end-to-end content marketing solutions are available, primarily targeted at large enterprises. SMEs rely on a fragmented set of disparate tools, open marketplaces, and marketing agencies, ultimately misallocating resources with poor return on investment (ROI).

To capitalize on this opportunity, Scalenut leverages AI and deep learning to offer a one-stop shop that empowers SEO and content teams by supercharging their organic marketing efforts and helping them grow sustainably. The Company aims to become the de facto content lifecycle management solution for SMBs and mid-market enterprises.

SCIO Health Analytics provides healthcare analytics solutions and services globally. It provides care optimization, network optimization, reimbursement optimization, risk adjustment, quality measurement, and integrated data management and insights platforms. SCIO was recognized as a leader in health insurance analytics, assisting insurance companies in the US with claims processing, and was acquired by EXL Health in 2018.

Shriram EPC (SEPC) is an end-to-end solutions provider for engineering projects in India, offering multi-disciplinary design, engineering, procurement, construction, and project management services. Backed by the highly regarded Chennai-based conglomerate Shriram Group, SEPC provides turnkey solutions in business segments such as infrastructure, mining & mineral processing, power, process & metallurgy, and water. Saama successfully exited its investment at the time of SEPC’s IPO.

Shubham Housing Finance is a leading provider of housing finance solutions to families with informal incomes. Led by two incredibly passionate, committed, and well-experienced founders, Shubham is a pioneer in transcending document-based underwriting to contemporary credit programs that do not rely on paper-based income proofs to provide housing credit.

Saama felt that Shubham’s business met the confluence of several points in our thesis surrounding the broader financial services sector, not least of which was the founders’ novel idea of expanding credit to borrowers in the lower and informal income segments in urban and semi-urban areas; thereby, opening a largely untapped yet extremely sizeable market opportunity. We subsequently exited this business through a secondary sale.

Bharat Financial Inclusion Limited (BFIL), formerly SKS Microfinance, is a non-banking finance company (NBFC) licensed by the Reserve Bank of India. Founded in 1997 by Vikram Akula, the company’s mission is to provide financial services to the poor under the premise that financial assistance to poor borrowers helps to alleviate poverty. Using a commission-based model to encourage loans, SKS formed a network of loan marketers across villages in Andhra Pradesh and eventually across 11 states in India. The platform offers life assurance and a variety of financial loans, including income generation loans, mid-term loans, long-term loans, loans secured on gold, and loans for the purchase of products like cooking stoves, solar lights, water purifiers, mobile phones, bicycles, and sewing machines.

SKS was India’s first large-scale microfinance play, leveraging a massive opportunity to provide financing to the underserved as a for-profit business that created a lasting impact at scale. Led by a charismatic founder, the company garnered rapid scale pan-India and, in 2010, debuted on the Bombay Stock Exchange with an IPO that was oversubscribed 14 times.

SleepyCat is India’s leading holistic sleep wellness solutions brand. It seeks to improve the lives of Indians through how they sleep, starting with their mattresses and extending into bedroom furniture, bedding, and other sleep accessories.

Disrupting a largely stagnant ‘sleep products’ market, the Company offers a premium, digital-first customer experience through high-performance, well-priced products, express shipping, seamless returns, and superior customer service. Championing innovation-driven growth in the sleep lifestyle market, SleepyCat became one of India’s first players to offer doorstep delivery of ‘mattress-in-a-box’ leveraging vacuum pressing technology.

As a consumer-first brand, SleepyCat breaks the clutter of India’s disorganized offline offerings sold by brick-and-mortar retailers to market a line of purpose-driven products enhancing the activity of sleep and in-bedroom relaxation.

Snapdeal is India’s leading pure-play value e-commerce platform. Founded by a young, dynamic duo, the Company sought to recreate the diversity and dynamism of India’s bazaars in the online world. What started as a daily deals platform quickly emerged as one of India’s largest horizontal online marketplaces, providing a trustworthy and frictionless e-commerce ecosystem.

Saama tracked the Company from an early stage and keenly observed its evolution from a Groupon-like coupon model to a mobile-first product marketplace. We invested at the growth stage to support this evolution into one of India’s first unicorn e-commerce platforms. We exited our stake in the Company to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to facilitate even more rapid growth.

Solethreads is building a youth-centric, open footwear brand that retails a line of innovative, comfortable, affordable, and trendy flip-flops. The Company wants to build a brand for young & free-spirited individuals who seek and enjoy relaxed moments and a comfortable lifestyle.

Traditionally, the open footwear category has been dominated by offline-first incumbents (catering to the mass segment) who have failed to innovate and are quickly losing relevance among India’s young, aspirational consumers OR premium brands that are aspirational but too expensive for the mass premium consumer. As such, Solethreads is capitalizing on this opportunity to build an insurgent brand that offers innovative products at competitive prices via an omnichannel retailing strategy.

As a result of the founding team’s expertise in the footwear manufacturing domain, the Company has focused on using technology to create functionally superior products. The Company has proprietary formulas, registered and patented technologies, and a zero-waste recycling process, making its products a case study in groundbreaking manufacturing innovation.

Co-founded by former Myntra, Ajio, and Amazon executives, ShoutO is building a creator-powered online apparel marketplace in India with a mission to drive the “next big social commerce wave in fashion”. ShoutO is focused on creating new and differentiated shopping features that align well with modern consumer preferences (e.g., sustainable clothing and athleisure) that have largely not been catered to by existing marketplaces.

The Company’s three-sided platform caters to creators, consumers, and brands. Creators are selectively invited to set up their multi-brand storefront on the platform, recommend products, and monetize based on traction. Consumers browse and discover styles suggested by their favorite fashion creators, thereby enjoying a more personalized and guided shopping experience. Relying on authentic discovery, engagement, and conversion via creators, brands benefit by acquiring large and highly engaged customer bases at a reduced cost.

Sula Vineyards is India’s top wine producer and pioneer of wine production. In addition, Sula has created a top destination for tourism in India with their luxury vineyard properties – The Source and Beyond by Sula, based in Nashik, Maharashtra. Sula is a leader in sustainable grape-growing, winemaking, and viticulture committed to ensuring sustainable growth and development for farmers, communities, and the local environment.

Our early belief in Sula was based on our deep market knowledge of the global wine industry and conviction that a new beverage category could be created for the aspirational Indian consumer. India’s middle class was growing in the 2000s, and Sula introduced many consumers to their first glass of wine. We invested in a nascent but high-potential market, an increasingly discerning set of consumers, and a visionary entrepreneur in Rajeev, who had the global know-how as well as the local smarts to create a new market. After a successful early exit, Saama took the opportunity and leveraged its relationship with the founder to reinvest in Sula from a later fund as a growth investor.

Sunstone is an early-stage EdTech company delivering employment-oriented, formal higher education (postgraduate and undergraduate) programs (MBA, MCA, BBA, BTech, BCom, and BCA) in an asset-light partnership with colleges across India.

Traditionally, most Indian Higher Education Institutes in India have approached curriculum design and teaching processes from an outdated one-size-fits-all vantage point that is woefully out of sync with industry requirements. To overcome this structural issue, Sunstone helps universities become more industry-relevant by designing a curriculum calibrated to entry-level job descriptions based on corporate recruiters’ inputs.

Sunstone manages the entire gamut of activities from student acquisition to faculty training, learning (technology, curriculum, and pedagogy), and placements for universities in exchange for their accreditation and infrastructure. The Company has steered Sunstone towards being a more holistic education brand, which offers outcome-based programs and delivers other quality education courses and global exposure through experiential learning programs.

SuperBottoms is building a modern-day consumer brand that provides sustainable cloth diapering, bottom wear, and other apparel targeting newborn babies and young children. The Company’s core product philosophy is anchored in designing gentle, chemical-free, reusable baby care products – from cloth diapers and nappies to padded and cloth underwear – available at an affordable price.

The Indian diaper market has been dominated by unorganized conventional cloth nappies, which account for ~96% of the total market. While these are available in mom-and-pop stores and flea markets, there is no go-to brand for cloth nappies in India.

Started by a mother looking for a solution for her own son, the brand is driven by a mission to increase the adoption of reusable cloth diapers. It has emerged as the most innovative and prominent brand in this nascent category. Young Indian parents proactively seeking eco-friendly and sustainable products for their babies have become loyal customers and highly engaged brand ambassadors.

Supertails is building India’s top one-stop destination for all pet care needs. Their digital platform supports the ever-increasing pet parent community by providing a single online destination for pet food and supplies, trustworthy veterinary care, and allied services (e.g., behavioral training programs). They have also launched Henlo, an in-house balanced nutrition brand for pets made from responsibly sourced ingredients and crafted by nutritionists.

Saama invested in Supertails at a pre-product, pre-revenue stage based on our conviction in a top-tier founding team with management experience at Licious and Snapdeal. Their vision is to build the largest pure-play pet e-commerce platform in India to empower pet parents throughout their parenting journey.

The Moms Co. is one of India’s leading brands marketing a line of ‘better-for-you’ personal care products targeted at expecting mothers and newborn babies and infants. The Company develops and sells an extensive range of products catering to various use cases, such as baby care, pregnancy, breastfeeding, face, skin, and hair care.

Born out of the parental need to provide their kids with ‘natural’, ‘safe’, and ‘toxin-free’ products, The Moms Co. was started by Malika and Mohit to address a significant gap in the personal care market for expecting mothers and pre/post-natal care for infants and babies. This narrative of authentic founders solving a personal problem resonated well with Saama and formed the crux of our early investment in the Company.

Having carved a niche for itself as an iconic, new-age, homegrown maternity and baby care product company with immense brand loyalty, The Moms Co. was acquired by the Good Glamm Group (South Asia’s largest content-to-commerce group) in 2021 in India’s largest D2C transaction (at the time) in the beauty and personal care segment.

TrueFan is India’s most prominent ‘Celebrity Experience Platform’. The Company’s AI-based digital platform for celebrity-fan engagement leverages a gamified approach to help fans fulfill their dream of interacting with their favorite stars. Starting with personalized video messages from A-list Bollywood actors and actresses (e.g., Ranveer Singh, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Janhvi Kapoor, etc.), TrueFan is expanding its product offering to a complete suite of celebrity engagement experiences – ranging from exclusive content (e.g., podcasts and live streams) to celebrity-run private label brands/merchandise and AR/VR-powered metaverse events.

TutorVista is a pioneering digital education company providing quality online tutoring to students worldwide at an affordable price. With personalized teaching methodologies and a global base of teachers, TutorVista is the premier online destination for accessible education and tutoring services. The platform was acquired by Pearson, the world’s leading education and publication conglomerate, in 2011.

Our conviction in the business was based on our faith in the founder, Krishnan Ganesh, and the massive growth potential of the global tutoring market. The company was ideally poised to leverage the combination of international markets with customers willing to pay for these services and India’s large pool of top-quality teachers who needed supplementary income. TutorVista was one of India’s first EdTech businesses and received global scale and recognition.

Veeba is one of India’s foremost suppliers of sauces, spreads, dressings, dips, dessert toppings, emulsions, etc., to the institutional and retail market segments. In addition to servicing restaurants and fast-food chains such as KFC, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Taco Bell, Domino’s, and Starbucks, Veeba has become an Indian household favorite.

Saama’s investment in the Company resulted from our long-standing relationship with its founder, our faith in his tenacity, and the unique brand of knowledge we had acquired due to our prior F&B investments.

Saama has known Veeba’s founder since his previous role as part of the promoter group of packaged foods firm Fun Foods. In his avatar as CEO, he was instrumental in Fun Foods’ rapid expansion, especially in the retail market, and spearheaded the company’s sale to German multinational Dr. Oetker in 2008. This experience of running a sizeable F&B company has enabled him to lead Veeba through an exponential growth phase into becoming India’s largest and most loved condiments company.

Vistaar Financial Services is a leading provider of business loans for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in India. With a vision to support independent small businesses and create new economic opportunities through credit provisioning for deserving microentrepreneurs, the company makes financing facilities available at a reasonable cost, delivered efficiently and transparently. Vistaar taps into the immense market potential of micro-enterprises such as dairy, power loom, handloom, home-based industries, handicrafts, etc., and provides customized products aligned with the specific needs of smaller enterprise owners based on four key dimensions – loan size, repayment frequency, tenor, and security.

Vistaar was one of our first true seed bets as part of our deep belief in India’s burgeoning financial services ecosystem. We had immense faith in a very comprehensive and well-rounded team and an enormous, untapped market opportunity to serve MSMEs in peri-urban and urban India.

Wellthy is an early-stage digital therapeutics company focused on improving patient health through the intersection of technology and clinical outcomes. The Company has developed a product that improves patient outcomes for individuals with chronic diseases through a lifestyle management platform deployed as a mobile application.

The Company is pioneering Digital Therapeutics as an entirely new category of medicine to address the chronic health epidemic in South Asia and other Asia-Pacific (APAC) countries at scale. The Company has developed a product that improves patient outcomes by advancing the delivery of proven interventions from the clinic to mobile devices and into patients’ daily lives without changing the standard of care.

Zeni Inc. is a California-based company building a “CFO-as-a-service” platform. The Company aims to be an AI-powered finance team for startups and mid-sized enterprises with intelligent bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services.

While the enterprise landscape is crowded with vertically focused accounting and bookkeeping applications, Zeni is one of the first to provide an AI-based full-service finance solution that offers visibility and control over myriad finance functions. Using a seamless blend of artificial intelligence and a dedicated team of certified finance experts, Zeni’s full-service finance concierge performs daily bookkeeping and manages all finance functions in real-time with integrations to bookkeeping, banking, payroll management, HR, and related software (e.g., QuickBooks, Gusto, Expensify, Stripe, Bill.com, SVB Financial Group, and Brex).

Saama has invested in the founders for the second time, following the acquisition of their last venture, Mezi, by American Express. We seeded the Company from the pre-product, pre-revenue stage.