ICICI Bank’s former CEO recently launched her own YouTube channel (under the radar with with just 7K subs)

In her most episode, Chanda Kochhar interviewed Deepak Parekh (ex Chairman HDFC) and what he said on her show made me jump off my seat ⤵️ Deepak Parekh: “It's never been talked in public but I'm willing to share it now, (you asked me) why don't you come back home?”

i.e. Chandha Kochhar had proposed a merger between ICICI Bank and HDFC Ltd

Important historical context: ICICI served as the “sponsor” to help Hasmukh Thakordas Parekh (HDFC’s founding chairman) secure the license. Exact details of financial help if any, are unknown. But suffices to say - HDFC’s roots were indeed from ICICI.

Hence, Kochhar’s comment “come back home” is very valid

Deepak Parekh clarified: “I thought it won't be fair. It won't be proper with our name (HDFC) and the bank and all…” So, it didn’t happen and later the HDFC Bank <> HDFC merger took place

We (India’s youth) are very different from our parents

They have a savings mindset - gold, real estate, no credit card, home loan etc. Money was saved for tomorrow’s betterment (retirement, children’s education etc).

We have a spending mindset - MFs, many credit cards, fancy sneakers, international travel. Money is spent for today’s experiences & indulgences.

These are anecdotes.

Here’s some data which shows how India’s youth spends money ⤵️ 1️⃣Where are we spending? Hint: 40% on EMIs

Discretionary spending in India is a luxury.

40% of our spends are towards (financial) obligations e.g. home loan, car loan, education loan.

Btw, obligation spending is is HIGHER than necessities - utilities, groceries, medical.

Necessities is ~ 32% of spending. Discretionary comes in at the end with ~29% of spending.

Note: If you can’t relate to the above, consider yourself very privileged.

Jio will be launching 3 Mutual Funds in India shortly which are using Blackrock's ALADDIN model.

ALADDIN literally stands for Asset, Liability, and Debt and Derivative Investment Network

In total, ~200 global institutions use the analytics platform which represents ~₹1,750 lakh crore in AUM.

First time that ALADDIN will be launched in India by any institution: Jio Financial Services got off to a slow start post the spin-out from RIL Industries but it is slowly gathering momentum:

1. Converted to a Core Investment Company from regular NBFC
2. Launched Jio Finance super app
3. Launching Jio Blackrock AMC
4. Launching Jio Blackrock MF

I read the entire 340 page "AI Trends" report by legendary investor Mary Meeker which was released 48 hours ago.

Mary used to publish the famous annual “Internet Trends” before most of us were born - her insights are invaluable.

Sharing 10 takeaways from this report ⤵️ Index for this post

(1) About Mary Meeker
(2) About Bond Capital
(3) Fav Quote from report
(4) India’s AI usage --“Jai Jio”
(5) Innovators Dilemma RIP
(6) ChatGPT use - Engagement Trap
(7) ChatGPT is under attack
(8) AI has low APRU (for now)
(9) Goodbye Vertical SaaS?
(10) Next Billion Users will be AI native?

LIC owns ~4.9% of CSK — a 30X return over a 18 year holding period (>> 20% XIRR) — the story behind this is quite fascinating:

India Cements paid ~₹395 crore (over 10 years) to buy the CSK franchise — it is probably their best capital allocation decision to date: CSK is now worth as much as India Cements 😉

Quick history before we cover how LIC landed up with the stake ⤵️

(1) In Feb ‘08, India Cements offered $91M for CSK — $1 = ₹43.4 then — i.e. ~₹395 crore price

(2) This was to be paid over 10 years (from 2008 to 2017)

(3) MCap (Feb ‘25) of CSK = ₹7,400 crore as per InCred Money unlisted shares feature

👌Works out to >> 20% XIRR*** — beats the Nifty hands down during this period (~13.5% CAGR | even after excluding the ‘08 - ‘09 drawdown) 💡Here’s how LIC got the CSK stake

(a) CSK was originally a division of India Cements

(b) In 2015, India Cements spun CSK out as a separate company

(c) As on 9th Oct ‘15, if you were an India Cements shareholder, you would have got 1:1 CSK shares for our India Cements shareholding

(d) LIC was an India Cements shareholder as on that date w/ ~5% ownership

(e) The shares were warehoused in an entity called India Cements Shareholder Trust

(f) Shares were distributed to India Cements shareholders in FY23

I now have stupid % of cash net worth in Zomato & Swiggy (after the post correction buying) based on my Quick Commerce thesis.

The biggest discussion point with my grandfather* has been Blinkit v/s a global comp Instacart (US listed | $12.53bn MCap | IPO in Sept ‘23)

Zomato (Eternal) MCap is ~$24bn today — per Analysts, Blinkit is approx. 50% of that ($12bn MCap) i.e. like-for-like — Blinkit has the same MCap as Instacart… So, we tend spend time looking at Instacart’s public filings

Instacart generated ~$450M in profit for 2024 — just goes to show how powerful at an scale consumer commerce platform can be!!

Few notes below ⤵️ 👍 of course, Instacart is NOT the same biz as Blinkit:

(1) US is different from India
(2) Instacart does store pick-ups v/s Blinkit’s dark store model
(3) Instacart focuses on ‘stock-up’ orders v/s QC in India is still ‘top up’ orders focused
(4) Instacart is grocery heavy (~85%) v/s QC in India is expanding categories beyond grocery

🤔But, what are Instacart’s metrics viz Blinkit?

Gross Order Value (GOV): $33.46bn v/s Blinkit’s annualized $3.5bn

Avg Order Value (AOV): $112 v/s Blinkit’s ₹707 (~$8)

Paid subscribers: 5.1M Instacart+ users ($99 p.a.) v/s 0 for Blinkit

No. of orders: 294M v/s Blinkit’s annualized 380M

Avg order frequency: 2-4 orders per month v/s Blinkit’s 5-10

Look @ difference in AOV & subscription income which drives Instacart profit.

India is short of 50 Lakh medical professionals right now. The majority of medical staff (> 60%) aren’t doctors or nurses — they are AHPs (Allied Health Professionals).

Due to a global shortage of ~ 1.8 crore AHPs, many countries ‘import’ AHPs who are trained in India…

Traditionally, these roles have not been seen as the preferred career path but this is fast changing:

In the past 2 years, a few startups have been founded to capture a slice of the $200bn annual opportunity in Healthcare training, staffing & recruitment: This is a “big money business” i.e. these startups are founded by experienced (repeat) founders who raise big war chests —

BorderPlus raised a $7M Seed round yday
Emversity raised a $11M Seed round in 2024
Virohan raised $7M in 2023.

Even RED Health (the 10-minute emergency ambulance business which raised $20M+) has floated a new venture called RED Versity in the AHP training space.

The core of what these companies do is Upskill India’s talent to provide healthcare services globally — our people are our most valuable resource & one of our largest exports ($129bn in inward remittances for 2024).

Zepto’s meat brand Relish is already larger than Licious on quick commerce — Relish was launched in Oct’23 whereas Licious was launched in Oct ‘15.

Zepto last reported ~ ₹30 crore in monthly Sales from Relish (excluding eggs — which would add ~₹10 crore extra per month). As usual, distribution trumps product (to some extent).

Data: Licious does ~20% of its ~₹750 crore of Sales via QC & other 3P online channels.

As a regular Licious customer, I personally found this data quite contradictory so I decided to dig into the Zepto private label strategy: 1️⃣ Zepto has 2 private label brands

Relish (meats & eggs) launched in Oct 2023

Daily Good (dried fruits, oil, dals, millets etc) launched in March 2024

2️⃣ As QC goes mainstream, we should expect ALL QC players to do more private label based on what we have seen across commerce in History:

DMart’s private label contribution = ~ 5.16% of GMV | last known stat FY 23

Amazon Basics = ~4% of GMV | last known stat from 2018

BB owns Fresho (meat brand); Swiggy had its own meat marketplace.

Per BluSmart’s founder, 90% of trips are single passenger. This one key insight has led to the creation of Gensol Ezio (a 2 seater fleet vehicle) designed by Gensol Engineering.

I’ve been tracking Gensol Engineering for over 18 months now — the company has expanded beyond solar EPC into EV mobility (via its affiliate BluSmart Cabs) and has now entered EV manufacturing.

I first came across the company because of BluSmart Cabs but have been continually impressed by their ecosystem development strategy around their core solar EPC biz⤵️ Jan ‘19 → entered EV charging via BluSmart Charge Pvt Ltd (subsidiary)

Jan ‘19 → entered EV mobility via BluSmart (affiliate)

July ‘22 → entered EV manufacturing by acquiring Strom Inc

Sept ‘24 → entered green hydrogen via a JV with Matrix Gas Ltd

💡Coming to their EV manufacturing push, the story & stats are super interesting:

As 10 minute food delivery becomes the battleground — there is a parallel $ bn opportunity which some founders are pursuing.

The opportunity → Building the next Dominoes or McDonalds out of India (our 2nd Quick Commerce investment thesis)

To understand this, we need to rewind the clock.

History tells us that each time a new distribution channel emerges (e.g. print media, linear cable TV, Internet, E-Comm) — new Consumer Brands emerge to take advantage of the channel arbitrage.

This happened with Consumer Brands and Quick Commerce in India — fast movers emerged like Go Zero (70% of revenue from QC) & Slurrp Farm (30% of revenue from QC). And, some incumbents like Nestle (35% of revenue from QC) also played the channel arb.

Now, as 10-minute food delivery is taking off, there are 2 models being pursued: (1) Brand (i.e. full stack) ← Zepto Cafe, Swish, Zing, SNACC by Swiggy, Bistro by Blinkit etc

(2) Platform (i.e. aggregation) ← Bolt by Swiggy, Zomato Express, MagicNow by Magicpin etc

The brand play is full stack i.e. kitchen + delivery + customer exp.

The platform play is aggregation i.e. delivery + customer exp. but with partner restaurants

🔁When Swiggy & Zomato 1st took off — it created an opportunity for Rebel Foods type cloud kitchen businesses to grow via their platform (CAC was being off-loaded along with delivery).

🚀Now, as Bolt etc take off — there is a limited time opening to build a dark kitchen business catering to this 10 to 15 minute delivery window (which requires a VERY different config)

Herein lies the opportunity:

The M&A landscape for Consumer Brands in India is on absolute 🔥🔥 right now.

1️⃣July 2020 — Zivame (founded 2016 | Lingerie) acquired by Reliance Retail for ₹1,200 crore

2️⃣Oct 2021 – The Moms Co (founded 2016 | baby products) acquired by Good Glamm Group for ₹500 crore in cash & stock equivalent

3️⃣March 2022 — Clovia (founded 2012 | Lingerie) acquired by Reliance Retail @ ₹1067 crore valuation (89% stake bought for ₹950 crore)

4️⃣Dec 2022 — OZiva (founded 2016 | supplements) exited to HUL @ ₹517 crore valuation (51% stake bought for ₹264 crore)

5️⃣July 2023 — Plix (founded 2018 | supplements) exited to Marico @ ₹636 crore valuation (58% stake bought for ₹369 crore)

And, now, the blockbuster ⤵️ 💣January 2025: Minimalist Skincare (founded 2020 | BPC) rumored to be selling to HUL at a ₹3,000 crore valuation.

As a side note: Minimalist was a online heavy brand, it began a major offline push via EBOs in March 2024; offline retail was ~10% of the biz back then.

Commendable execution throughout! And kudos for being profitable right through the journey.

Every time someone says that “outcomes for Consumer Brands in India are capped”, it seems that the “known” cap gets lifted 😆

⚠️Note: Above, I have only have mentioned new-age consumer brands (i.e. founded post 2010) where valuation @ exit is ≥ ₹500 crore. There have been almost 100 consumer brand exits since 2020 (!!)

Bajaj Finance employs 53,000+ staff today across 4,145 locations in India.

PAT has grown from ₹30 crore to ₹ 19,000 crore over a 17 year period since inception.

Last week, Bajaj Finance held an Analyst meeting & released a terrific set of slides on the history, present & future of Bajaj Finance.

Sharing my 3 takeaways from the report — it has laid out its vision to become a “FinAI” company⤵️ (1) The 17 year retrospective ⏳

💸PAT has grown 644x → from ₹30 crore to ₹19,300 crore

💪 Credit quality has improved → Net NPAs down from 7% to 0.37%

🎚️Operating leverage has kicked in → OPEX as % of NII is down from 58.1% to 34%

🤯 Bajaj Finance market share (as % of India overall credit market) is just 2% today. Lending is a LARGE, fragmented & fast growing market.

Even a behemoth like Bajaj Finance is a small fish in the big pond!

A question which I get asked often: “Why does a VC firm which invests $1M into a startup end up raising a $300M+ fund?”

This is a fair question & mostly a misconception because of how social media only focuses on the initial investment made by a VC fund… You must have heard about Accel’s $1M investment into Flipkart.

And, then you’ve read the news that Accel made $1.5bn+ on this investment. Except that the news forgot to highlight that Accel invested an additional $50M to $100M into the company over subsequent rounds.

Most VC funds have something called a ‘reserve’ allocation i.e. a portion of the invested corpus which gets invested into existing portfolio companies which are performing.

Few points regarding this ⤵️ (1) Each time a company raises a new financing round, new shares get issued to incoming investors.

Hence, if you don’t add capital in the new round, your % ownership in the company as an investor reduces over time.

Your returns as a VC = % ownership a exit * Valuation / Market Cap at exit

(2) Also, at each successive round (in theory), the business gets further de-risked (longer track record, fewer unknowns, more data etc).

Therefore, investing (more) money in later rounds should be a better risk adjusted return.

Typically, later stage rounds (e.g. Series A etc) have enough room for an existing investor to write a larger cheque too (double benefit: lower risk & more info on company)

Massive respect for Blume -- they've published part II of the Omega Files report and done a few things which few other venture firms would do:

(1) Their Fund I & Fund IA XIRR figure
- Fund I & Fund IA have produced a pooled 21.5% XIRR
- Fund IA was 31.2% XIRR, Fund I was 19.8% XIRR

This finally puts to rest the question about "is India VC performing or not?" Blume IA was expectational, I was decent..

PS: In the Omega files part I, they had only published the MOIC (multiple on invested capital) which was ~6x which led some people to conclude it was a 15% IRR...

But, that is just the start: (2) Sasha from Kae Capital shared Kae Capital I's MOIC and XIRR

- Sasha is notoriously media shy so I think Blume has worked some magic to get him to open the books
- Kae Capital generated ~22% XIRR and 6.5x on capital

Sasha also proves you can be a Mumbai based VC and perform :)

As Swiggy’s IPO opens tomorrow, I thought it would be a good day to commend the Accel Partners India team on this investment: a $500M position, x33 over 9 years.

Now, before you jump to conclusions about how your uncle’s top performing small cap MF has done better, please pause to consider the below ⤵️

Per public sources, Accel India invested across 6 consecutive rounds (2015 to 2017) via the Accel Partners IV fund into Swiggy. Even after this aggressive doubling down, the aggregate unrealized $$ returns is > x33.

For context (*): Flipkart is touted as a x1000 for Accel by news anchors; in reality, Accel had total return of ~x15 to x20 from the entire ~$100M invested into Flipkart across multiple rounds. The 1st cheque in would be closer to a x500, but the total investment would be a x20 over 12 years.

🧠So yes, Swiggy’s x33 over 9 years is ‘better’ than Flipkart’s x20 over 12 years (but, remember, Flipkart was a cash exit, Swiggy is an IPO — the final returns distribution will take a few years & will depend on share price).

Few finer details worth highlighting: (1) Per public data, at the upper end of the IPO band (& assuming no prior secondary sales); the XIRR from this investment is ~48% p.a. over a 9 yr window !! 🤯

(2) Accel invested across 6 (!!) rounds into this company hence it is a blended x33 bagger.
- If you looked at just the MOIC (Multiple on Invested Capital) from the 1st round (<< $10M valuation), that would be the x200 return (in the Flipkart zone) 😉

FYI: These 6 rounds happened in < 2.5 years. Imagine repeatedly buying stock of a company which has appreciated in value x2 to x4 each time — few would ever do that, Accel did precisely that.

(3) Accel Partners IV was a ~$325M fund (vintage 2015) i.e. per my maths, Accel probably invested < 10% of the fund into Swiggy; and this single investment alone will return the fund >> 1.5x
- The same fund has ~25+ active investments which (may) generate incremental returns.

(4) Accel Partners IV is only getting started on its returns journey: It owns Browerstack, Acko Insurance, Blackbuck (IPO filed) etc — all 1st round cheques into these companies. 💸
- A number of such co’s will be IPO candidates in the coming years

(5) The known investors in Accel Partners IV — UMich Endowment, Rockerfeller Foundation etc allocate a portion of their money into PE & VC funds.
- PE & VC helps with managing portfolio volatility, cashflows & diversification (there are full books written on this)
- Dw, they own a lot of public equities too. So while their money here is slowly going to return profits, their public portfolio has compounded well.

I've been spending some time over the past few weekends updating my website

Have curated a list of ~75 articles from this year which you might find interesting or useful: All Things Commerce (~25 articles)

- Food delivery
- General e-comm
- QC
- Offline retail

➡️rahulmathur.notion.site/All-things-Com…

Blackbuck published its DHRP today; it plans to raise ~₹550 crore from the IPO

I read the ~400 page DHRP; sharing a few of my key observations below⤵️ (1) About Blackbuck

- Started in 2015
- Raised ~$364M across multiple rounds (investors include Accel, PeakXV, Goldman Sachs etc)
- Last round valuation was ~$1bn (July 2021)

In the past few days, a number of big names in the Tech ecosystem have shared nuanced perspectives on AI across various podcasts

Providing a quick summary of these perspectives below ⤵️ (1) Alexander (Scale AI CEO) on Data as a bottleneck

- His POV: Bottleneck to performance improvement in AI is in data availability and not compute availability. Problem is that all low hanging fruit / crawlable data on the internet has been harvested.
- The only data sources left are either proprietary (e.g. JP Morgan has 150 Peta bytes of internal data) or yet to be created by new sources (e.g. Humane AI pin listening to our daily interactions)

Open source models will gain traction because many corporates have realized that their internal data is their primary moat in today's world so they want to train models on premise

I decided to download the JioFinance app yesterday; part of the first batch of users (< 10K downloads)… I was deeply skeptical at first..

But, after spending ~20 minutes in the app, I am genuinely impressed by the entire product journey; sharing some observations below: (1) They’ve put in the effort to make onboarding smooth:

e.g. using the Truecaller API to auto-fill mobile numbers
e.g. using the SMS parser to auto-fill OTPs

(Didn’t think Jio would do this; most FinTech co’s put the effort; most banking incumbents don’t). Good start!

Growing up, I had no exposure to Astrology - my grandparents didn't believe in the "janampatri" & I (yet) don't have friends who closely follow Astrology..

Here's where I was in for a REAL shock: I was assigned to research Astrotalk (an online Astrology company) for a group project at @GrowthX_Club at the start of this month.

I had heard about Astrotalk because a friend works there but I knew nothing about Astrology - and I had ALL the possible misconceptions:

Last week, I sat through one of the BEST Sales call I've ever been a part of.

This wasn't a cold call or cold email resulting in a call for some CRM tool. It was a Sales call with Notion after we had used the product for ~ 3 months at InsuranceDekho..

Here's what was different: (1) The Notion Rep correctly identified me as the primary user 🤯
- I got a personalized email setting the context for the call
- They highlighted some facts: How long I've used the product & me inviting team members