Akshat Thirani

Meet the founder who quit a 20-year global career to prove that you don't need to own land to get a loan The answer is Hardika Shah, Founder & CEO of Kinara Capital. In 2026, while most apps are fighting for city users, Hardika has built a fortress by supporting the real backbone of India: the small shopkeepers and local manufacturers👇 1) Hardika didn't learn business in a fancy office. She learned it watching her mother run a small grocery store in Mumbai. She saw how hard it was for small owners to grow because banks always asked for "collateral" (like a house or land) which they didn't have. This shaped her big idea: Don't bet on the land, bet on the person and their business 🧠 2) Before Kinara, if you didn't have property to pledge, you had to go to local moneylenders who charged huge interest. Hardika changed the game. Using smart tech, Kinara looks at how a business actually makes money (its cash flow) instead of asking for property papers. If a shop owner has a family emergency, they use data to be lenient instead of aggressive ⚖️ 3) Hardika noticed that women entrepreneurs face the biggest "trust gap." That’s why she built a women-majority team and the "HerVikas" program. It gives women-owned businesses special discounts and a 60-day "repayment holiday" to help them get started. She isn't just lending money; she’s building confidence 🛡️ 4) Hardika famously said that copying Western business models won't work here. She built a Hybrid Model: use the app for a 1-minute check, but keep 125+ branches for a personal "doorstep" touch. This balance is why her business is thriving while others struggle - proving that in India, high-tech needs a "high-touch" human connection 🏛️ 5) The results are massive. Kinara’s assets grew by 150% in just two years. By 2026, her work has helped support over 390,000 jobs in local neighbourhoods. She proved that when you give a small business owner a fair chance, they don't just pay you back - they hire more people and grow the whole community 📈 The ➡️ Insight: The 2026 winner isn't the one building for the rich 1%. It’s the founder who gives Financial Dignity to the 99% who were ignored. Hardika Shah didn't just build a lending company; she proved that "unbankable" is just a lack of imagination. ➡️ The 2026 Blueprint is "Localised Empathy." If you respect the struggle of the small business owner as much as their profit, you don't just build a startup - you build the country.

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India just committed $1.1B to a state-backed AI venture fund. Blackstone took a majority stake in an AI compute startup for $600M. Every major AI CEO is in Delhi this week. Everyone's racing to own AI infrastructure. But most are buying the wrong layer. GPUs and compute are first-order infrastructure. Necessary, but commoditizing fast. The second-order infrastructure — the layer that controls how AI actually touches customers, enforces compliance, and compounds data — that's where durable value lives. Compute is the highway. We're building the toll booths. While $2B+ flows into GPU farms this week, the real moat is being built quietly: AI systems that own the customer engagement layer for entire industries. Which layer of AI infrastructure are you betting on? #SecondOrderThinking https://lnkd.in/esPXVG8P

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The classic VC debate — enterprise vs. consumer — is obsolete. The reality is many of the biggest Vertical AI businesses will be both. Nikhil Basu Trivedi at Footwork, a $400M AUM early-stage fund, has a strong view on this. He believes B2B vs. B2C can be a false dichotomy... and one that leads founders to overlook the full potential of their vision. That conviction traces back to some of his earliest investments. In 2014, he led a seed round into a consumer design tool called Canva. 12 years later, it's doing $4B+ in ARR — with $500M+ and ~100% YoY growth from enterprise. Today, ~75% of Footwork's 25 investments purposefully straddle both enterprise and consumer use cases in their markets. Why is AI blurring the line between consumer and enterprise faster than ever? The answer ties back to what LLMs do best — natural language. AI's most powerful use cases involve automating communication. That collapses the distance between the B2B buyers and end consumers. This week on Verticals, Nikhil walked us through how he's seeing the convergence of enterprise-consumer AI in his portfolio:  → Elicit for both self-serve academics and top pharma companies.  → Onton for both B2C home decor discovery and retail storefronts.  → Fuse for both credit unions and consumer borrowers. Nikhil's lesson — Vertical AI founders who consider their "crossover" opportunity earlier will drive bigger, more defensible outcomes. TLDR: 1️⃣ Your true Vertical AI opportunity is often both enterprise and consumer. 2️⃣ Ignoring one or the other for too long is an increasingly costly mistake. 3️⃣ Check out our full episode with Nikhil at Footwork below to learn more. https://lnkd.in/gEkMpK8n

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Design is where the real value in electronics gets created, it’s where IP is built, roadmaps are defined, and margins are won. In a $3.5T global electronics market, owning design is the next frontier. India has made huge strides in scaling electronics output now ~$120B, but design-led manufacturing remains a gap. That’s the opportunity iDO Devices is going after. They're building full-stack capabilities, from firmware and hardware design to system integration — to enable world-class consumer tech to be designed and developed from India. Thrilled to back this vision at Merak Ventures alongside Blume Ventures. #Electronics #ODM

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Building on Scott's post re: VC for real (physical) world companies, as I like to call them: the GTM and $$$ investment required to get market signal follow a very different curve from SaaS. An entrepreneur in this space needs to make startup life or death decisions with a fraction of the customer signal (e.g., <5 customers....) compared to what a SaaS cloud play gets. Brand is built over years through relentless execution and a willingness to grind through failure out on the field with customers watching, with initial distrust/disapproval turning into respect as results come out of the commitment. The challenge for VC who are used to SaaS is that at this earlier stage, from their perspective, failure is nearly indistinguishable from building enduring brand.

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In robotics, the real flex isn’t a backflip. It’s a purchase order! While much of the humanoid robotics category is still polishing demo reels, our portfolio company, Agility Robotics, just landed a production deployment with Toyota Motor Corporation — seven Digit robots are now operating at a Canadian RAV4 factory. This isn't a proof of concept. This is production. Robots-as-a-service. Real workflows. Real output. Agility is the only humanoid robotics company operating at this level — production-grade deployments with Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and now Toyota. Everyone else is still in pilot mode. Agility is in production. At MFV Partners, we've always believed that getting to 90% in robotics is the easy part. It's the last 10% — the outlier scenarios, the edge cases that make robots fail, the messy integration, the maintenance cycles — that separates cool videos from real deployments. Our portfolio reflects this philosophy. Chef Robotics is doing it in commercial kitchens. Ati Motors is doing it in factory logistics. Agility is doing it with humanoids. The gap between demo day and deployment day is where most robotics companies go to die. Agility keeps widening that gap against the competition. Congratulations to the Agility and Toyota teams. This is just the beginning. 🤖 https://lnkd.in/gUcWYJUw Peggy Johnson Jonathan Hurst Pras Velagapudi Daniel Diez Matt Ocko Bruce Leak

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