The firm’s cheque sizes typically range from $1-4 million, with the firm largely backing companies at the pre-Series A and Series A stages.Before Bala Srinivasa became a venture capitalist, he spent years chasing revenue targets, sitting across customers, and scaling businesses from the inside out.
That operator’s muscle memory still defines how he invests today.
From Wall Street equity research to CXO roles at fast-growing startups, and now as managing director at Arkam Ventures, Srinivasa brings an unusually ground-level view of what it takes to build large companies in India.
“My job has always been customer- and revenue-facing. When a founder is pitching, the real nuance is in the ‘how’: how are you going to build and scale this,” said Srinivasa, managing director at Arkam Ventures to ETEntrepreneur.
That perspective has carried through his two-decade journey across operating roles, public markets, and venture capital, eventually leading him to co-found Arkam Ventures with former co-founder and managing director at Helion Venture Partners, Rahul Chandra in 2020, with a thesis anchored in removing friction across India’s largest markets.
For Srinivasa and Chandra—both BITS Pilani alumni with decades of investing behind them—the answer lay in timing. By 2018-19, India had begun to show credible venture outcomes, but Srinivasa believed something deeper was shifting.
“Our belief was there is an opportunity to go out and partner with founders who were bold enough to imagine building for the next four hundred million Indians, beyond the top 50 million that most start-ups were chasing till then. The prize is the once-in-a-generation opportunity to build very large, category-creating companies in India that were not possible before,” Srinivasa proclaimed, who also previously served as Partner at Kalaari Capital.
Solving the friction problem
Arkam’s investment lens is intentionally sector-agnostic, but philosophically tight. Srinivasa frames it as a single question: where does friction still block consumption, productivity, or scale for hundreds of millions of Indians?
“While India is viewed as a very large consumption story, there is tremendous friction to consumption across financial services, consumer products, and small businesses. Can the right founder–who is able to leverage the right kind of technology–reimagine business models in a way that opens up markets that didn’t exist before?” he explained.
That thinking shaped Arkam’s earliest bets.
KreditBee, Arkam’s first investment, scaled lending to 98 per cent of India’s PIN codes and crossed nearly $400 million in revenue in under six years. Others followed: Jumbotail, Jar, and later Skyroot Aerospace, each tackling unique inefficiencies in massive markets.
“It typically takes a bank two decades to get to the scale that KreditBee has reached. Kreditbee’ success has to do with fearless founders who broke down the traditional business model and rebuilt it for the digital age” Srinivasa said.
The venture capital firm mainly invests in startups across fintech, AI, deep-tech, manufacturing tech and consumer tech. Some of its other investments include, Krebitbee, Jar, Spotdraft, Skyroot Aerospace, Signzy Wint Wealth, Vaya, Mirana Toys, Chara Technologies, Optimist, Ringg AI, TransBnk, etc.,
A founder’s founder as an investor
Srinivasa’s own operating background shapes how Arkam partners with entrepreneurs. Prior to his venture investing days he led global sales, marketing, and product roles at Amba Research—later acquired by Moody’s. Prior to Amba he led product marketing and sales at Vistaar Technologies, a US-based pricing analytics startup.
But that experience also taught restraint.
“It’s great to be a sounding board with on-the-ground experience, but eventually you want to let the founding teams make the decisions, live by them, and sometimes fail by them. That’s how great companies get formed,” Srinivasa added.
Arkam reviews nearly 1,000 startups a year and backs about eight.
When asked about what separates the few, he said, “Most of our founders have immense self-belief, and often that self-belief comes from being outsiders to the industry. They ask, why is this not being done in a better, faster, more efficient way, irrespective of how it’s done today.”
To sharpen its view of shifting consumption patterns, Arkam launched the Limitless program, working closely with Gen Z cohorts and student communities.
“The idea behind Limitless is to get real-world evidence of how new generations behave: how they buy, learn, and interact with products. If you don’t deeply understand the next 80–90 per cent of your customers, you can’t back the right products,” he added.
The firm’s cheque sizes typically range from $1-4 million, with the firm largely backing companies at the pre-Series A and Series A stages.
“Over the next five years, we want Arkam to be a top-five VC in India that founders want to partner with because we deeply understand India, spend real time with our companies, and build alongside them,” he said.
That philosophy extends to the kind of founders the firm seeks to back. Arkam tends to back founders who question established ways of building in traditional sectors, using product and technology to rethink business models and assemble profitable outcomes.
Looking ahead, Srinivasa believes India is underestimating two forces.
“We are woefully underestimating the impact of AI in India, for India. You’re going to see an entirely new set of B2B and B2C companies rebuilding user and business journeys with AI at the core,” he said.
The second, Srinivasa believes, is manufacturing.
“I would pick the largest markets in India and rethink them with an AI-first mindset. The opportunity for a new entrant is not that it’s a greenfield opportunity, but that you can come in faster, cheaper, with more value,” he added.
Five years in, the firm is still early in its journey, but its focus remains the same: backing founders who are willing to take on large, complex markets and stay the course. For Arkam, the long game is just the beginning.
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