Managing Director for @Crane_vc here in APAC. former Partner at @peakxvpartners and before that @sequoia in India and APAC.
Singapore
Joined July 2008
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What 10+ years of building and investing at @SequoiaIndiaSEA ! It’s been a ride and a half let me tell you :)
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
Values only matter if people live them daily. At @BrightMoneyCo, DEEDS means challenging tedium, owning your work, and backing your colleagues in every team.
A closer look at DEEDS in action: lnkd.in/p/d-keYRPG
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
First JOHNAIC just got manufactured in our new factory and there's plenty of space to scale the production!
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
Fantastic piece by @karandi65 and @adityasinha004 on what could be a major unlock for deeptech companies in India.
With RDIF, the capital question is being addressed. But in our conversations with deep-tech founders across various sub-sectors, one consistent theme emerges: procurement.
The product has been tested, and yet there's no clear path for a government agency to buy it.
The General Financial Rules (GFR) were written for products with known specs. Deeptech has none yet.
A dedicated innovation procurement chapter can solve for that.
For deep-tech startups, the government's first order can be the reference customer that opens up the floodgates.
PS: When procurement for deeptech startups came up in one of our meetings with a very senior, seasoned bureaucrat, he quipped with refreshing honesty: "It's easier for the government to give money than to give orders."
@kris_sg @NITIAayog
Two major challenges facing deep-tech startups are access to patient capital and access to markets.
The ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund is one of the most transformative initiatives of the Modi government towards providing patient capital and catalysing private sector investment in R&D.
But funding alone is not enough. Even startups with innovative products often struggle to find buyers. In several critical technology areas, government agencies can be major, sometimes the only, potential customers.
I and Aditya Sinha @adityasinha004 have argued that an enabling chapter on innovation procurement in the General Financial Rules (GFR) can help bridge this gap, create markets for startups and accelerate India’s journey towards becoming a product nation and achieving Atmanirbharta.
@livemint @NITIAayog
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
We still do Leetcode style interviews. Especially for freshers. Sure AI is writing most of the code but you still need to be able to read it.
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
We are proud to partner with the Ministry of Defence on a joint framework to advance AI adoption across the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.
@pratykumar @vivekrag @AalekhSharan
A significant step towards strengthening sovereign AI capabilities for India’s Defence Forces.
HQ Integrated Defence Staff and Sarvam #AI have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on AI applications, research, knowledge management, training and decision-support across the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force.
The partnership will focus on building secure, sovereign and scalable AI capabilities, with strong emphasis on data sovereignty and ensuring responsible AI based solutions.
#Defence #SovereignAI #IndianArmedForces #Innovation #AtmanirbharBharat
@DefenceMinIndia
@SethSanjayMP
@SpokespersonMoD
@MIB_India
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
When we first met @acharyaamrit and @srinathramki, we couldn’t have predicted everything Zetwerk would become, but we knew we wanted to be in business with them. From seed to IPO, it’s been a privilege to watch the business model evolve, from software to marketplace to orchestration, and now its own facilities, each time solving deeper and more nuanced problems in Indian manufacturing.
Congrats team @zetwerk!
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
The era of good enough software built by good enough people is over
I thought AI would make software cheaper - but the fact that AI is ooms more effective at finding vulnerabilities than it is at building good software means that the cost of software is going up. WAY UP.
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
We ran an experiment: how well does our speech-reasoning backbone do on plain speech recognition?
We took Chariot-1 and pointed it at ASR. The result is Chariot-1-ASR Realtime, live today.
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
Been lucky to work closely with the ePlane team over the last few months. The team is focused, ambitious, and technically elite.
A new era of flight is here. Congratulations folks.
"Cars are going electric, so will the planes. It was only a matter of time. So, do I spend today pretending that this future isn’t coming, or do I help build it?"
Prof. Satya Chakravarthy breaks down the e200X-PT01, our full-scale, 2.2-tonne eVTOL prototype designed & built in the ePlane HQ in Chennai.
#ePlaneCompany #e200X #flyingcars #AirTaxi #UAM
i am so excited for this to come out ! will change the world , especially India urban life :)
"Cars are going electric, so will the planes. It was only a matter of time. So, do I spend today pretending that this future isn’t coming, or do I help build it?"
Prof. Satya Chakravarthy breaks down the e200X-PT01, our full-scale, 2.2-tonne eVTOL prototype designed & built in the ePlane HQ in Chennai.
#ePlaneCompany #e200X #flyingcars #AirTaxi #UAM
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
"Cars are going electric, so will the planes. It was only a matter of time. So, do I spend today pretending that this future isn’t coming, or do I help build it?"
Prof. Satya Chakravarthy breaks down the e200X-PT01, our full-scale, 2.2-tonne eVTOL prototype designed & built in the ePlane HQ in Chennai.
#ePlaneCompany #e200X #flyingcars #AirTaxi #UAM
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
We’re thrilled to welcome Crane Venture Partners to DeepVerse, our Centre for DeepTech innovation and Anandamoy Roychowdhary, Managing Director, to the Advisory Board.
Crane backs people building the foundational technologies and startups that will shape the future, and helps them build globally. Crane believes that the biggest breakthroughs increasingly happen where disciplines, technologies and markets meet, and it looks for founders who connect ideas others keep separate, across AI, infrastructure, data, security, deep science and the emerging edges of enterprise technology.
@crane_vc | @smdcmc | @krishnav | @scott_sage |
@Sid_1_0
@ShwetaRKohli | @AvantikaGode | @Shubhangip611 | @akankshaghosh13 | Oishika Ghosh | @bforbaruah
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
Deedy you are right about some aspects of the past, but its more nuanced then this, and likely different going forward. am sticking to the perspective of founders (vs employees & vcs).
If you were building for India consumer, the last 5 years have shown that you absolutely could have built significant cos and personal wealth by being in india (>$5b cos - flipkart, zomato, lenskart, meesho, groww, paytm, phonepe, swiggy, policybazaar, nykaa… ) and execs at these places also saw a lot of value being created. I was in a room of startup founders by @ETAwards on friday night and there were a lot of billionaires there! and 50+ other venture backed cos in the $500m-5b range, where also the outcomes have been significant for founders and execs.
if you were building for global software buyers, you need to be closer to the customers and the US is that. market insights matter more then cost of engineering. many global software cos have large india teams (zscaler! wealthiest indian american in the US) but the bulk of the value to founders and execs are in the market they serve. it still makes sense for most global founders to be in the US if thats what you are creating, and we have good examples like freshworks, postman and composio where cos started in india and migrated over various points in the past decade.
other areas like manufacturing/“deeptech”/atoms based businesses, India has significant advantages and we are just starting to see the outcomes. ather energy ($6b), skyroot ($3b), zetwerk (going public soon) are showing the way, and these cos have far lower costs to develop and manufacture vs other places.
finally, there is something to be said for patriotism or impact on soceity. zomato helps employ 1% of india (or something like that) and thats a stepping stone to a brighter future for many. skyroot inspired some young kid somewhere that said i’m gonna do that too. building a enterprise sw product in palo alto is awesome, but for some gives less intrinsic motivation.
building in india has many challenges (most self inclicted), but a good choice for many smart people vs a couple of decades ago! we do now have healthy capital markets, a better policy environment, and very smart young people (now enabled by AI!). we absolutely need more risk capital and some of us are working to do that!
The smartest Indians continue to come to build in the US for the simple reason that the economic incentives are far far better.
Perplexity ($20B), Skild ($14B+), Baseten ($13B), Together ($8B), Glean ($8B), Modal ($5B), Rubrik ($25B), Harness ($5B), Blacksmith, Parallel, Greptile, CodeRabbit, Composio, Distyl ($2B), Resolve, Luma, Cartesia, Wispr, dMatrix, Arize and many more - all started by at least one Indian-born founder.
The US is a far easier to raise capital in with far less dilution. Most Indian companies are switching where they're domiciled to get access to the US capital markets. Every single Indian venture firm is trying very hard to invest in the US or risk not participating in the AI race (ironically, the management fees of venture firms are so high in India relatively that this is the one group that net of carry actually has incentive to be in India because they take home well north of a living wage whether or not funds perform do)
While Zomato ($35B now, $8B at IPO) might be the biggest outcome in Indian venture, Cursor ($60B), Reflection (potentially $20B+), World Labs ($8B), OpenRouter ($8B), HuggingFace ($12B) and of course the $1T+ big labs quickly make those outcomes seem small and happen on a much smaller time scale, with much higher IRR.
Engineers at these startups regularly get paid $1M/yr, and make $10M+ on exit. Even in BigTech, it is trivial to pull up levels fyi and see that if you're L6/L7+ with ~10 years of experience, you're making $1M/yr there too. And of course, we all know the slew of Indian CEOs of companies here, not to mention a huge bench of lesser known executives across the board in public and private companies.
I say all this because every time there is a slight immigration hiccup in the US, I hear the online pleas to "build in India", I struggle to understand why most engineers, academics or founders would do that net of desire to be close to family, failure to obtain visa and devout patriotism.
This is not a superiority thing or a US v India thing. The economic incentives at least for technologists to being in the US outweigh India by at least an order of magnitude.
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
When the @crane_vc team introduced us to Armatrix earlier this year, we were super impressed.
Founded in 2024 by IIT Kanpur engineers Vishrant Dave, Prateesh Awasthi and Ayush Ranjan, this Bengaluru-based deeptech startup builds snake-like robotic arms that can thread through confined, hazardous spaces (ship hulls, fuel tanks, reactors) so people don't have to go in themselves. The demos they showed us were very compelling.
They were a natural fit for our 100 Desi DeepTechs cohort. Just months later, they've won the Best on Campus award at the @StartupAwardsET
It was a proud moment to watch them receive the award from Minister @PiyushGoyal yesterday, and look forward to working with them through DeepVerse, SPF’s Centre for DeepTech Innovation.
Congratulations! 🎉
@satyan @sruthijith @samidhas @deepshikhasET @SPF_India @armatrix_IN @_VishrantDave @smdcmc @Sid_1_0 @krishnav @scott_sage
Anandamoy Roychowdhary retweeted
What does it cost to rent an always-on 8×H200 cluster for a year?
AWS (p5en.48xlarge), On-demand, Mumbai (on Oct 26): ~$660K/year
And the cheapest AWS rate I found needs a 3-year commitment. At that point you've committed like an owner, without owning anything at the end.
