Z47

There isn’t a better time to build in India for the world! Listen in as Sudipto Sannigrahi , Himanshu Uniyal and I dive into story of Wootz.work , future plans, and opportunities in global advanced engineering solutions. https://lnkd.in/gbpgzBKH

At Z47, we continue to be strong believers in India's manufacturing potential and the Make in India opportunity. The first wave of India's B2B companies were marketplaces—both horizontal and vertical— that solved for discovery, quality, trust, wastage/efficiencies and credit.  Now, the second generation of companies is taking Indian manufacturing and engineering excellence to the global stage! On this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, I sat down with Karan and Himanshu, founders of Wootz.work to cover their journey and vision of building India's largest advanced engineering exports company. In this episode we explore Karan's background at Invest India and Himanshu's experience at ITC and how that motivated them to venture in this space. We also discuss some of the best practices for building B2B exports companies including the focus on build to spec (owning the design), hiring a strong engineering team early (not software but hardware!), building exports quality manufacturing, choosing the right customer segments (high CMs, no WC) and the right sales/GTM strategy to crack global demand. For anyone passionate about manufacturing, engineering innovation, or the evolving landscape of Indian exports, this should be a fun conversation to tune into! https://lnkd.in/dM8JETcs Z47 Digitizing Make In India Avnish Bajaj Anurag Srivastava Yashasvi Madhogaria Naviya Singh

💪 Where Indian founders excel - hunger, product, and design ❌ What holds us back - jugaad mindset. We should invest in talent, product foundations, and relationships and take a long-term view. Longer post due! Coming from someone who's seen it all - Dheeraj Pandey. We enjoyed hosting him and the DevRev team yesterday for an interesting session on AI-native playbooks. Ashwin Vikram Madhav Z47 Veenu Gaurav

I had the pleasure of interviewing Manny Medina, the mad genius behind Outreach. Talk about a full-circle moment — I was an early Outreach customer and advocate back in 2016. Huge thanks to Aaron Bird and Pienza for putting this together. Another full-circle moment since I was also a Bizible customer (Aaron's previous company) before it was acquired by Marketo. The startup world really is just one big, chaotic family reunion. Some raw insights from Manny that I'm still digesting: 1. Be close to your customers (or in their office) Manny shared how in 2011, he was building GroupTalent - tech for recruiters. AppDynamics was a customer, and Manny was in their office trying to upsell them. They only had two outbound recruiters, but one casually mentioned, "You should talk to sales." Instead of nodding politely and forgetting about it, Manny literally walked across their office that day and demoed to the sales team. Result? 50 seats signed on the spot. GroupTalent pivoted into Outreach, and the rest is history. Physically walk your customers' halls. The answers are literally in the building. 2. Pick uncomfortably small markets "Your ICP needs to be 100 accounts, not 10,000,". VCs told him email was dead, Salesforce would crush him, market was tiny. Didn't matter. The narrow focus let them build features that felt like magic to those 100 accounts. The magic feature for outreach was reply detection. It sounds small, but a game-changer for hungry sales reps. 3. Look beyond the Bay Area Tech companies are oversold to. Everyone is fighting for the same 500 logos. Manny expanded early into other markets - namely telcos and financial companies with large, neglected outbound teams. These sales teams were getting a fraction of the love (read: cold emails) that Bay Area teams were drowning in. Sometimes the best customers are the ones everyone else is ignoring. PS: This can be an opportunity for Indian founders. If Indian founders spend too little time in the US, SF founders spend too little time outside SF! 4. Move mountains for your dream clients My favourite story: Manny wanted American Express as a customer so badly that he flew to another city just to be on a CNBC panel with an Amex board member. He built that relationship, eventually convinced the board member to join Outreach's board, and through him, finally landed Amex. Guess how long it took? 3 years. Jofin Joseph thanks for organizing this!

Are Indian founders finally cracking global markets or GTM - while others struggle? On the latest episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast Tarun Davda, Rajat Agarwal and Rajinder Balaraman reveal how India’s supply chain advantage, lower-cost growth engines, and smarter performance marketing are fueling the rise of global consumer brands like Skillmatics and H'You. The edge is real, but only for those who know how to use it.

We're excited to introduce our exceptional panel for 'Digitizing Make in India - The Final Frontier', our exclusive SpaceTech event, this Wednesday. Prepare for an evening of insightful discussions with perspectives from industry leaders, policy makers and investors who are shaping India's space ecosystem: 🔸Brijesh Soni, Deputy Director, IN-SPACe 🔸Rakesh B., Head of Space Group, TATA Advanced Systems Limited 🔸Srinath Ravichandran, Founder and CEO, AgniKul Cosmos They'll be joined by Vishesh Rajaram of Speciale Invest and Z47's own Sudipto Sannigrahi and Anurag Srivastava. This rare gathering brings together government leadership, corporate innovation, startup disruption, and investment perspectives all in one room. Limited seats remain, register in the link in the comments. DeVC | Avnish Bajaj | Aakash Kumar | Mohit Sadaani | Sunil Cavale | Divyanshi Chowdhary | Rahul Mathur | Yashasvi Madhogaria | Naviya Singh

We're excited to introduce our exceptional panel for 'Digitizing Make in India - The Final Frontier', our exclusive SpaceTech event, this Wednesday. Prepare for an evening of insightful discussions with perspectives from industry leaders, policy makers and investors who are shaping India's space ecosystem: 🔸Brijesh Soni, Deputy Director, IN-SPACe 🔸Rakesh B., Head of Space Group, TATA Advanced Systems Limited 🔸Srinath Ravichandran, Founder and CEO, AgniKul Cosmos They'll be joined by Vishesh Rajaram of Speciale Invest and Z47's own Sudipto Sannigrahi and Anurag Srivastava. This rare gathering brings together government leadership, corporate innovation, startup disruption, and investment perspectives all in one room. Limited seats remain, register in the link in the comments. DeVC | Avnish Bajaj | Aakash Kumar | Mohit Sadaani | Sunil Cavale | Divyanshi Chowdhary | Rahul Mathur | Yashasvi Madhogaria | Naviya Singh

AI-native companies aren’t just using AI - they are built entirely around it. On the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Pranay Desai maps out the core traits of AI-first businesses - where LLMs drive workflows, UX is dynamically generated, and monetization moves beyond traditional SaaS pricing. As AI-native companies redefine moats, will they reshape market dominance too?

Last week, the DeVC team attended Mumbai Tech Week — Asia’s largest AI conclave. We spent 2 days meeting a bunch of AI founders, engineering students & fellow investors — sharing 5 short takeaways from MTW 2025: 1️⃣ “Agents are going to rule the world” Most Tech savvy employees & companies are exploring the use of agentic automations (including us at DeVC) — I left with a long bunch of notes from speaking to other practitioners. 2️⃣ “AI Application Software is on 🔥, models are commodity” Most developers we met were application builders — and explicitly called out that they don’t care about foundation model releases — similar to how they don’t care about cloud improvements. Foundation models are mere (replaceable) APIs endpoints for them — the endpoint just keeps getting better! 3️⃣”The next consumer AI unicorn will be built by fresh engineering graduates” This is what Aakrit Vaish from IndiaAI Mission told us — I found it hard to believe at first, until… 4️⃣ “The next generation of software engineers are AI native” This is what we saw 1st hand — first semester students from NxtWave Institute showed us their hackathon projects — the Tech Stack was MERN, it was Lovable & V0 by Vercel 🤯  New grads are being trained to be Gen-AI engineers! 5️⃣”The hype around AI is unreal” But, so is the ROI — we heard stories of clients ramping up for several agentic companies. And, we’re seeing this ourselves as a VC first which is using AI — the ROI is also unreal. Many thanks to the MTW organizers — Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM) and Government of Maharashtra (GoM) — DeVC is proud to have been a partner for a 2nd year in a row 🙏 I’m looking forward to Mumbai Tech Week 2026 — but in the meantime, it is back to building with AI & investing in AI companies for both DeVC & Z47 team 😀 #startups #india #ai

🔹The Opportunity: India's Unique AI Market Great energy across AI meetups with Krutrim in Bangalore, Delhi, and Mumbai. Founders and engineers building India-focused AI companies experimenting across use-cases including commerce, fintech, healthcare, education, entertainment, productivity, manufacturing, retail and services sectors. 🔹Why India Needs Its Own AI Stack and Models Western LLMs and hyper-scalers fall short: 🔻Prohibitive costs for Indian startups  🔻Inadequate support for local languages and context  🔻Limited customization options for local business needs 🔻 Data sovereignty and private cloud   The meetups unveiled tons of insights on model and infra choices, and a big thank you to Bhavish Aggarwal, Navendu A., Sunit S., Sambit Sahu and Chandra Khatri for hosting these discussions and launching Krutrim AI Research Lab. Inviting founders, operators, developers, and researchers to reach out and discuss where you’d like to use AI-models in your business.    Rajinder Balaraman | Sudipto Sannigrahi | Rahul Mathur | Prajwal Kumar | Madhav Chadha | Vineet Kanabar | Vishnu Kamath Check out Krutrim AI Research Lab in the link in the comments.