Ashish Sajwan

Bengaluru-based wealthtech startup PowerUp Money has raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners, with Accel, Blume Ventures, Kae Capital, 8i Ventures, and DeVC participating. The funding comes just six months after its $7.2 million seed round. Founded in 2024 by Prateek Jindal, PowerUp Money is a SEBI-registered, zero-commission mutual fund advisory platform that charges users a subscription instead of earning distributor commissions. The capital will be used to strengthen research and advisory capabilities, scale paid products, and invest in financial literacy. In eight months, the platform has onboarded over 500,000 users and tracks more than Rs 65,000 crore in assets. Its flagship product, PowerUp Elite (Rs 999/year), has 25,000+ paid members. Read the full article, link in the comments. By Sayan Sen #PowerUpMoney #FundingNews #WealthTech #MutualFunds #IndianStartups #VentureCapital #YourStory

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Most founders don't talk about what launch month actually costs 🤫 But Akshay Bathia and Krishil Shah from Protein Wala did... and the breakdown might surprise you. £3,112. One month. Building a snack brand from scratch. Show them some love in the comments 👇

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𝗜𝗳 𝗜𝘁 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮, 𝗜𝘁 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 𝗔𝗻𝘆𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲—𝗢𝗿 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗜𝘁? A founder pitched his SaaS Product. “India first, then global.” Investor: “Why India first?” “Indian customers are toughest. Enterprise quality at startup pricing. If we survive here, we win anywhere.” Investor nodded. Then: “Have you tried the US market?” Pause. “Not yet. We’re not ready.” — 𝗧𝘄𝗼 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 “𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮-𝗙𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁” One is strategic. One is avoidance disguised as strategy. ↳ Strategic: Building for extreme constraints creates innovation that scales ↳ Avoidance: Labeling difficult markets as “training” while dodging markets requiring different capabilities — 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵 #𝟭: Constraint-driven innovation works. Low bandwidth, price-sensitive customers, fragmented infrastructure—these force elegant solutions. WhatsApp succeeded globally solving for Indian internet. Zoom’s architecture came from emerging market connectivity. You can’t hide bloated features or mask poor UX. Legitimate strategy. 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵 #𝟮: Some founders confuse “hard to sell” with “makes us stronger.” What they’re avoiding: ↳ Enterprise credibility they haven’t built ↳ Regulatory expertise they don’t have ↳ Brand positioning beyond “cheaper alternative” ↳ Different buying experiences Western customers expect — 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝘀𝘁 Your India strategy works if you’re: ↳ Building for constraints that create portable innovation ↳ Mastering unit economics that scale ($3 to $50 ARPU) ↳ Testing global markets early to learn what transfers It fails if you’re: ↳ Perfecting product before facing “sophisticated” buyers ↳ Avoiding markets requiring different sales approaches ↳ Assuming local credibility transfers globally — 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Am I solving for constraints that create innovation, or avoiding markets that expose gaps? If I launched in the US tomorrow, what breaks—and am I building those capabilities now? That reveals whether “India-first” is strategy or stalling. — 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁-𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀. 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁-𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗱𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘀. #Leadership #Startups #ProductStrategy #GlobalExpansion #SaaS

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Forget the Silicon Valley Playbook. The 'Blinkit Effect' is the real secret behind India’s next $50B+ operational explosion. While some look at Blinkit as just a delivery app, VCs look at it as an Operational SEAL Team. From the high-pressure dark stores of 2021 to the disruptive founders of 2025, if you want to see where India’s execution-heavy decacorns are coming from, you look at the Blinkit Effect Here are my 5 VC-level insights into why the "Gurgaon Mafia" is currently rewriting the Indian execution playbook: 👇🏻 1) Prithvi Singh - Gameskraft Most gaming founders focus on "fun." Prithvi used his Blinkit-honed high-concurrency roots to build a platform that handles millions of real-time transactions without a glitch. He leveraged the "Zero-Latency" mindset to solve backend engineering hurdles that slower competitors simply couldn't code their way out of ⚡ 2) Varun Khurana - Otipy Varun realised early on that Agritech isn't a "farming" business; it’s a density problem. By treating every tomato like a time-sensitive delivery packet, he solved the "perishability" trap in farm-to-fork. Otipy’s hyper-local supply chain is a direct product of the 10-minute delivery DNA native to the Blinkit war room 🥦 3) Zaheer Khan - Ayu Health Proving that you can bring "Quick Commerce" rigor to healthcare. Zaheer didn't just focus on "Doctors"; he focused on a systemic pain point: fragmented hospital operations. By bringing "Blinkit-level" logistics to hospital networks, he is systematising an industry known for chaos, demonstrating the "Systemic-First" ambition of the modern Blinkit graduate 🏥 4) Manas Gupta - GobbleCube Mastering "Data-Driven Velocity." Manas took the intimidating world of e-commerce brand analytics and made it as fast as a flash sale. By focusing on real-time SKU-level precision and scalable data frameworks, he successfully navigated the "Insight Gap" for D2C brands that were drowning in slow data 📊 5) Abhishek Upadhyay - CubeAPM The invisible backbone of the 2026 enterprise. By launching an observability platform for complex digital stacks, Abhishek is ensuring that "Zero Downtime" is a reality for the global market. He proved that the Blinkit network doesn't just build apps; they build the infrastructure that keeps the world’s most complex systems running 🧊 The ➡️ Insight: The "Blinkit Effect" isn't about the bike or the bag; it’s about Urgency as a Culture. When your training ground is a 10-minute delivery window, your baseline for "fast" shifts. That psychological edge is what creates a high-velocity, $50B+ ecosystem. ➡️ The 2026 Blueprint: Don't just look for a good idea; look for an Execution Moat. The next unicorn won't just have a great product; it will have a founder who can survive the high-pressure "Blinkit" crucible and scale at 10x speed 📈

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Seeing Shop the Look officially go live brings back a lot of memories. The idea started as a simple question during a discussion: if we can already achieve “see it, get it” in images, why can’t video go one step further? A few of us kept exploring that thought, breaking it down, challenging assumptions, and gradually turning what felt like an idealistic concept into something worth seriously validating. The 2024 company hackathon became a particularly special moment. In 48 hours, we built a working demo and stitched together the core loop. That showcase didn’t just help the idea gain visibility — it was the first time we could truly see it in action. It was no longer a slide or a concept note, but something tangible that actually worked. I still remember the excitement of that 0-to-1 moment. What followed was a much longer and more complex journey. Taking an early prototype and evolving it into a scalable, production-ready product required deep cross-team collaboration, constant iteration, and many thoughtful trade-offs. It’s the kind of progress that only happens when multiple teams align and keep pushing forward together. Ideas often grow through a relay of contributions — someone raises the question, someone validates the direction, someone hardens it into a system, someone brings it to market. I’m grateful to have been part of the early exploration, and truly happy for the teams who carried it forward and made it real. There’s something special about seeing a question once sketched on a whiteboard become a product serving real users. Looking forward to watching how this space continues to evolve. https://lnkd.in/grgbpY58

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Excited to announce that Razorpay is now embedded directly into Replit’s build flow. Rolling out in beta, Replit will go live with Razorpay’s Payments Suite, allowing Indian users to pay, receive payments & monetise apps via familiar methods like UPI and cards. From building something on Replit to receiving a payment for it, that gap doesn’t exist anymore. Proud to partner with Amjad Masad, Jeff Burke and Replit on this. This is a strong step toward empowering India’s growing community of AI-first entrepreneurs and micro-SaaS builders.

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I’m happy to announce that BrowserStack is doing a $125 million ESOP and share buyback – our largest yet, and one of the biggest in the Indian startup ecosystem. For years, we’ve handed every new joiner at BrowserStack a copy of Blitzscaling on their first day. Today, it feels like we’ve actually lived it. When Nakul and I started building this, we had a simple belief: if we're going to scale fast, everyone who's part of the journey should own a real piece of it. And BrowserStack has scaled. What began with five products is now a 21-product, end-to-end testing platform spanning functional, visual, and accessibility testing, test management, and debugging. We now support 50,000+ teams and over 3 million tests every day, with AI integrated across the entire testing lifecycle to help teams move faster and ship with confidence. That product strength, combined with profitable, disciplined growth, is what makes this buyback possible. This round will benefit over 500 current and former Stackmates, along with investors, and takes our total buybacks to over $275 million shared with the people who backed BrowserStack from the beginning. Here's to building the next decade with the same conviction.

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