What gives us an edge?
It's always people.
We’re a young team that shares the same bias for action and the same mission – to co-build the next generation of consumer brands with Indian founders.
Meet the Team
Manu Chandra
Founder
Manu is an entrepreneur at heart, passionate about applications that solve everyday problems, which led him to invest in companies like Revolut and Melio. Whether consumer or enterprise, he looks for companies that are highly product-centric.
He is excited about India having the highest density of AI talent, a crucial factor for the region to become a key player in this new paradigm. The ecosystem is maturing and coming to fruition, with young talent now aspiring to build technology careers instead of pursuing banking or consulting as they did a decade ago. Additionally, a second generation of individuals who have experienced the startup world before are truly world-class. He enjoys bringing this expertise to entrepreneurs to help them compete globally.
If he asks one of his founders, “Who really inflected your business?”—he wants to be that person.
Hot Sauce
Private Pilot / Weekend Cooking / Sailing / Pink Floyd
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“Finding true product market fit is indistinguishable from magic – I’m inspired by founders obsessed with finding it.”
Yash Dholakia
Partner
Yash is a Partner at Sauce, a senior leader in the investment team since 2022. Yash believes early stage investment is a contact sport rather than a strategy game, and spends most of his time huddled with founders working with them on solving critical problems and navigating important decisions around building the brand and scaling.
My first few years were all about building brands, not backing them. As a marketer at Lodha, I worked on new product categories and first-to-India concepts, being part of a young team that scaled the business from around 2,000 cr to 8,000 cr in a few years. Post this, I took a sharp turn into investing, joining a very successful consumer CEO’s family office, looking at businesses across categories and geographies. But even while I was looking at companies around the world, the recurring thought in the back of my mind was: the most interesting, long-term opportunity is still the Indian consumer. That’s what pulled me back to set up Tomorrow Capital, an operator-style consumer fund, where I built the team and led the first few investments in consumer businesses and worked closely with the founders – hiring teams, sorting working capital, improving margins, raising capital, and eventually exiting. It was the closest thing to being a co-founder without actually being one, and it cemented something for me: I enjoy early-stage, 0-1 company building more than anything else.
Around this time, I met Manu. Sauce was just starting up, and our conversations kept circling back to the same idea: early-stage consumer investing should feel like a contact sport. You don’t just write a cheque and send a quarterly email; you sit with founders in the messy middle, help them think through product, brand, distribution, teams – and you stay for the long haul. That’s really what brought me to Sauce in 2022.
At Sauce, I’m a Partner and a senior leader in the investment team. I spend most of my time with founders – evaluating new opportunities, going deep on consumer insight, and sharpening product, category and brand strategy as companies move from idea to early PMF and beyond. Beyond the first cheque, I’m responsible for end-to-end portfolio management: deciding when and how we double down with follow-on investments, partnering with founders on scaling teams, margins and governance, and working with them towards thoughtful, well-timed exits. I also lead fund operations and compliance, making sure the engine under the hood runs smoothly so the team and founders can focus on building rather than paperwork.
I studied Chemical Engineering from Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, followed by an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
Hot Sauce
Manchester United / WWII Films / Chess Openings / Pink Floyd
It felt like the right place to put all my experiences together – operator, investor, brand builder – and spend my time with founders who are trying to build enduring, scaled and profitable brands people will genuinely love.
Two brands that have challenged conventional thinking around brand building for me are Hocco Ice Creams and Loopie.
Hocco wasn’t built as a start-up, but as an inspired team with a great mix of multi-generation experience and youth, going into a very crowded market against well entrenched incumbents with decades of legacy and brand love. Building a highly complex back end – greenfield manufacturing, frozen supply chain and a blazing fast distribution network across general trade and e-commerce in record time – while building an amazing brand and achieving profitability at scale has led me to rethink the pace and manner in which brands can be built in India by the right team.
Loopie, on the other hand, is building in a nascent category where it equips new age parents with the tools to make modern parenting a joy, designing their own products from scratch based on the lived experiences of the founder. Watching a founder build the brand while raising her own child, who is customer no. 1 for the brand, is a true embodiment of ‘build for yourself’ as a philosophy which is finding a strong resonance with consumers.
India is currently the world’s fastest growing and also fastest premiumising consumer market, and catering to this phenomenon of a digitally native premium audience is a huge opportunity.
The macro themes around which huge opportunities exist: building for the emerging rich India – brands built around premium design, quality and narrative, e.g. EDT, Sleep Company, Mokobara; living better – improving quality of life through better food, nutrition, sleep and pain management, and better homes; and looking better – enhancing self-confidence through transformation, from skincare and cosmetic procedures to brands built around emerging sub cultures like Korean lifestyle and food, sneaker and streetwear culture, and fitness culture (Hyrox, pickleball, running).
The micro drivers for building successful brands: founder led authentic brands built around transparency, consumer education and visibly proven performance (The Whole Truth); owning product design, R&D and manufacturing – design and make in India (Innovist, Hocco Ice Creams); design as brand identity (EDT, Mokobara); and building for yourself as a consumer, with 100% transparency and no compromise.
Early stage investing at pre-seed and seed – rolling up sleeves and getting into the fine details, solving for PMF alongside founders rather than just advising from afar. The translation of a macro phenomenon into micro trends that go on to create new brands, and finding the right teams that operate at this inflection point. And building breakthrough products or ideas into large profitable businesses by helping build teams, processes and decision making based on actionable insights.
“My motto – dream like an artist, think like a scientist, execute like a general.”
Mayur Maheshwari
Head - Finance and Fund Operations
Mayur has over 14 years of experience across finance, fund operations, compliance and taxation. He is a Chartered Accountant from The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.
Prior to joining Sauce, Mayur worked with organizations including JP Morgan, ICICI Venture, Honeywell, and AXA, where he gained experience across finance, accounting, operations, and alternative investments. During his tenure at ICICI Venture, he was involved in fund accounting, operations, and compliance matters relating to private equity and real estate alternative investment funds.
At Sauce, he heads the Finance and Operations function and is responsible for fund structuring, investor reporting, transaction execution, regulatory compliances, and day-to-day operations across multiple investment vehicles managed by Sauce. He works closely with investors, legal counsels, and advisors to help build scalable operational and governance frameworks as the firm’s AUM continues to grow.
Hot Sauce
Bollywood Movies / Travel / Box Cricket / Family Time
The opportunity to be part of a fast-growing investment platform where I could contribute across fund structuring, operations, compliance, and finance in a more hands-on manner. After spending years in larger financial institutions, I wanted to work in an environment where finance and operations play an active role in enabling growth and building scalable systems from an early stage. I was also excited by the opportunity to grow alongside Sauce as the firm continues to expand its team, portfolio, and AUM.
I am particularly excited by how the venture capital and alternative investment ecosystem in India is evolving, especially with the increasing focus on institutional governance, fund structuring, regulatory frameworks, and investor transparency. I closely follow developments around SEBI regulations, taxation, investment structures, and the growing opportunities emerging through GIFT City. I am also interested in how technology, AI, and automation can improve finance, compliance, reporting, and operational efficiency across platforms as the ecosystem continues to mature.
Working on fund structuring, finance, taxation, and regulatory compliance within the venture capital ecosystem. Building strong operational and reporting frameworks that help funds scale efficiently while maintaining governance standards. Understanding evolving legal, FEMA, and tax regulations impacting alternative investment funds and startup investments. And networking with finance professionals, legal advisors, and investors to exchange perspectives and stay updated on industry developments.
“Work hard, stay curious, and let the results do the talking.”
Zoeb Ali Khan
Vice President
Zoeb is driven by a simple conviction: the earliest years of a company are where the most consequential decisions get made, and the right support at that stage can change everything. As a founding member of Sauce, Zoeb has spent the better part of his career building the fund from the ground up. He leads investment origination across consumer verticals, owning the process end-to-end from sourcing and thesis development through to deal completion. A significant part of his role is dedicated to portfolio management. Zoeb works with founders across varying stages of scale – some relationships spanning over seven years – acting as a trusted thinking partner on challenges both strategic and operational. Beyond deal work, Zoeb also plays a central role in LP engagement, helping investors understand Sauce’s evolving thesis and reinforcing the partnerships that underpin the fund’s long-term continuity. Internally, Zoeb works closely with the compliance and brand teams – ensuring Sauce stays ahead of governance best practices while actively shaping how the fund presents itself to the world as the defining voice in Indian consumer investing.
Sauce has shaped Zoeb, and Zoeb has shaped Sauce. After years of laying foundations, he believes the fund has now reached its true launch moment – and the ambition from here is only incremental.
Hot Sauce
IMDb Top 100 / Pistol Shooting / Daft Punk
My path to Sauce started with a string of college internships that did exactly what the best internships should – they didn’t just expose me to the working world, they made me want to build in it. I joined two startups: a bootstrapped Indian SaaS company selling to global customers, where I led scrappy, data-driven growth experiments with every rupee accountable, and a VC-backed quick commerce startup in pharmacy, where I owned offline marketing, branding and consumer research. Between the two, I had inadvertently assembled something useful: a view of early-stage building from both ends – the engine room and the shopfront. By the time I met Manu, Sauce didn’t yet have a name. But the conversation was enough. The risk felt obvious. So did the opportunity. I took the leap, and I’ve been building ever since.
Every portfolio company teaches you something. But occasionally, one of them changes the way you think altogether. Innovist did that for me. On paper, this company had every reason to not make it – a hard pivot away from a customisation-led BPC thesis, an overhauled business model, a restructured channel strategy, and the cost of failed experiments absorbed along the way. Despite high-quality investors on its cap table, it reached a point where raising fresh capital felt nearly impossible. And yet it survived, and emerged as one of the largest VC-backed outcomes in the Indian consumer market. What Innovist taught me is that we must, at times, be radically optimistic – and that our job as investors is not just to back business models, but to back the resilience of founders. Because survival itself is a compounding asset. You can never be certain a company will survive. But you can choose to support the ones that refuse to stop trying.
Two shifts define how I think about the next generation of great Indian consumer brands: one is about what brands say, and the other is about how they make people feel.
Transparency as a structural advantage: Indian consumers are demanding a higher burden of proof from the brands they buy, and that demand is only intensifying. Creators and brands alike (such as The Whole Truth) have built entire content platforms around a single premise – holding brands accountable. What began as niche consumer advocacy has become mass awareness, and it has permanently raised the bar. I believe the brands that are trust-first by design, not by exception, will be structurally more defensible over time.
Aesthetics as emotional value: Indian brands are increasingly leading on aesthetic quality, elevating the look, feel and overall experience of everyday products. This is related to premiumisation, but it is not the same thing. A beautifully designed object creates genuine emotional satisfaction. It signals care. It signals that the brand considered the person on the other end. The next generation of Indian consumers doesn’t just want products that work – they want products that feel worth owning.
My interest in investing sits at an unusual intersection: the emotional and the arithmetic. I’m drawn to branding not as a marketing function but as a strategic asset – the compounding, often undervalued layer that determines whether a consumer business is merely successful or genuinely enduring. Alongside that, I’m deeply attentive to capital efficiency. In a market where growth is frequently celebrated at the expense of unit economics, I believe ROCE is one of the most honest signals of whether a business model actually works. I also have a sincere curiosity about the consumer and invest significant time in consumer insighting – understanding not just what people buy, but why they buy it, what they feel when they do, and how those motivations are shifting.
“Philosophers and ploughmen,
Each must know his part;
To sow a new mentality,
Closer to the heart.”
Karan Kathpalia
Vice President
Before Sauce, Karan was at CDPQ, investing in infrastructure private equity. Prior to that, he worked with a UAE-based family office in Dubai and in foreign exchange sales and trading at a leading Indian private sector bank.
In 2020, he left the institutional investing world to join what was then a ₹58 crore consumer fund as an intern, effectively starting again from the ground up in the venture capital ecosystem. Over the next five years, he grew with Sauce as the firm itself evolved from an early-stage fund into a broader consumer investment platform, working across investments, portfolio management, fundraising, LP relationships and the many less visible pieces involved in building an investment firm from scratch.
Karan has managed several of Sauce’s long-standing portfolio relationships, including Mokobara, The Whole Truth and Perfora, working closely with founders from the earliest stages through multiple rounds of growth and institutional capital. He was also closely involved alongside Manu in raising Sauce’s first two seed funds and its first Continuity Fund, helping build the broad LP base and foundation from which the platform has continued to scale. More recently, Karan spent time embedded within Align, a managed and flexible workspace provider and an atypical investment for Sauce, with a mandate to help restructure the business and put the foundations in place for the founder and team to build its next phase. Today, as Vice President and a founding member of Sauce, Karan works closely with portfolio companies on performance, strategy, fundraising and the critical decisions that arise as businesses scale. He also contributes across new investments, portfolio communication and Sauce’s relationships with its investors.
Hot Sauce
Formula 1 / Life with his doggos / Music and films
My journey with Sauce began with a Saturday morning meeting at Manu’s home in Pali Hill, Mumbai. I was coming from the relatively structured worlds of trading and institutional investing, while Sauce was still a young fund being built with very little precedent or certainty.
I initially invested in the first fund. A few conversations later, Manu suggested that if I was genuinely curious about early-stage consumer investing, I should stop looking at it from the outside and come experience it properly. That meant leaving CDPQ and joining a ₹58 crore fund as an intern, effectively starting again in a new ecosystem. On paper, it was an unusual career decision. At the time, however, it felt completely right.
What attracted me was the opportunity to build while learning: to sit with founders before the answers were obvious, understand consumers and brands from the ground up, and help create the investment firm itself rather than simply occupy a predefined role within one.
Sauce eventually became much more than a place of work. It shaped how I think about risk, accountability, people and resilience. After stepping away briefly to work inside a portfolio company, returning felt less like going back and more like beginning the next phase with a clearer understanding of the contribution I want to make.
There have been a few, for very different reasons.
Mokobara is probably the most formative. I have managed the company since Sauce’s pre-seed, pre-revenue investment. Almost immediately after launch, COVID brought travel to a standstill, about as existential a challenge as you could imagine for a young luggage brand. One of the decisions we pushed hard on was expanding beyond luggage into backpacks and other bags, giving the brand products that remained relevant while people were not travelling.
What followed has been an incredible lesson in adaptability and conviction. Mokobara emerged from that period as much more than a luggage brand, expanded across categories and offline retail, and most recently raised a ₹170 crore Series C led by Sauce. Watching that journey from the first cheque has taught me how quickly founders and investors sometimes need to abandon the original playbook while staying completely committed to the larger vision.
The Whole Truth (TWT) taught me almost the opposite lesson: sometimes starting narrow is a strength. When I began working with the company, it was largely a protein bar business. As someone already deeply interested in fitness and nutrition, I remember wondering how large a company could really become around such a niche product.
What I underestimated was the trust being built underneath it. By obsessing over transparency and product quality in one category, TWT built a level of consumer loyalty that gave it permission to keep expanding. It has since scaled across categories including protein powders, chocolates and nut butters, with Sauce most recently co-leading its Series D. It fundamentally changed how I think about the value of earning trust deeply before expanding broadly.
Align then gave me the experience from the other side of the table. Working inside a portfolio company made me appreciate how much messier execution is than it appears in an investor update. It made me more empathetic towards founders and far more conscious of turning strategy into decisions that can actually be executed.
Together, the three have probably shaped how I invest more than any textbook or investment framework could.
The strongest emerging brands are not merely putting attractive packaging around existing products. They are identifying genuine shifts in how consumers think and behave, and rebuilding the product, communication and experience around them. This is visible across food, beauty, wellness, lifestyle and even traditionally offline categories.
Trust and transparency are becoming increasingly important. Consumers want to understand what they are buying, what goes into it and whether the claims being made can be believed. Brands that treat transparency and consumer education as core principles, rather than marketing campaigns, can build relationships that are difficult for incumbents to replicate.
Design is another meaningful source of value. Indian consumers increasingly want everyday products that not only work, but also feel considered and worth owning. This creates an opportunity for brands that can elevate familiar categories without confusing premiumisation with simply charging a higher price.
Ultimately, I am most interested in founders who can combine a deep understanding of the consumer with the discipline required to build an enduring business. For me, the most exciting partnerships are with founders who have the conviction to build something distinctive, the ability to keep learning and evolving as circumstances change, and the resilience to stay with it long enough for the business and brand to compound.
“Thrive in chaos, find the method in the madness, and have the conviction to make the decision that may not look safest on paper.”
Padma Milhotra
Senior Associate
Padma is a Senior Associate at Sauce, where she has been part of the investment team since 2023. A Chartered Accountant by training and a Delhi University graduate, she brings a rare combination of financial rigour and genuine curiosity to early-stage investing. Driven by a fundamental curiosity about the “why” before the “how,” Padma brings a thoughtful and analytical lens to investing. What set her apart early on was a desire to look beyond numbers – to understand the stories, decisions, and ambitions that shape businesses. This instinct led her naturally into venture capital.
At PwC, she built a disciplined approach to financial analysis and developed the ability to read between the lines of complex financial statements. She then spent three years at Stride Ventures underwriting debt for consumer startups, where she honed her expertise in due diligence and gained first-hand experience evaluating businesses. These formative years helped her develop both the analytical sharpness and the judgment required to back companies at their most formative stages.
At Sauce, Padma plays a key role across the investment lifecycle – from sourcing and evaluating opportunities to leading due diligence and supporting portfolio companies as they grow. She spends her time identifying opportunities in India’s rapidly evolving consumer landscape, evaluating founders and category shifts, and leading the firm’s ecosystem partnerships to help portfolio companies scale with clarity and purpose. While her financial background enables her to identify nuances that may otherwise go unnoticed, her true strength lies in her ability to understand founders – their intent, resilience, and vision. She is particularly drawn to teams that are not just building for scale, but building with purpose. By the time she joined Sauce, she knew exactly what she was looking for: founders who are building something that matters, and the conviction to back them early.
Hot Sauce
Travel / Animal welfare / Music
After working across multi-stage and multi-sector environments, I became clear about where I wanted to focus. It was the earliest, most formative stages of a consumer brand’s journey. This was well before the playbook is written, the stage where the founder’s conviction is really all there is. Sauce felt like the natural home for that. A team that thinks deeply about founders, moves with purpose, and backs conviction over consensus.
Dr. Paws is a company that pushed me to think differently from the start. We backed them pre-revenue, an offline-first brand in a space where we typically focus on digital-first businesses. The usual analytical anchors weren’t there, and yet the conviction was. What drew me in was the intentionality behind the build: an obsessive focus on NPS, an exceptionally high operational bar, and a deliberate pace of clinic expansion designed to protect quality over growth. It’s a business that takes its time – because trust and retention, once lost, are hard to rebuild.
Watching them replicate the model across new clinics while maintaining operational break-even has been a reminder that the best founders don’t just build fast, but also build right.
EDT is another company that inspires me and proves that the right product can disrupt an established market. What sets them apart is a genuine refusal to treat design and function as trade-offs -in a category long shaped by cost optimisation and feature checklists, EDT builds products where thoughtful design, intuitive technology, and safer materials come together as a single proposition, not add-ons to each other. The category expansion has followed the same logic – each launch chosen deliberately, which has given the brand a phenomenal entry point into home appliances. It’s a reminder that a strong design language, anchored in genuinely solving for the consumer, can be as durable a moat as any technical or distribution edge.
I’m most excited by brands that solve a real, often overlooked need- the kind of product or category that makes you wonder why it didn’t exist sooner. Pet care is a segment I’ve followed closely- historically fragmented and surprisingly under-indexed on quality. The opportunity to raise the bar on access and standards in animal healthcare is one I find both compelling and deeply personal. Having backed one brand in this space, my conviction in the category has only grown.
Senior care and wellness are two other spaces I’m actively tracking. As consumers grow more intentional about longevity, health, and quality of life, these categories are undergoing a fundamental shift – moving from reactive solutions to proactive, lifestyle-led offerings. In my view, we are still in the early innings of this transformation, with significant room for brands that have the vision and discipline to define and lead these segments.
And finally- “authenticity”. Not as a superficial positioning lever, but as a core operating principle. The brands that are building honestly, standing for something real, and treating brand-building as a long-term commitment are the ones I find myself rooting for most.
- Drawn to businesses with a genuine mission – not as a positioning exercise, but as the animating force behind every product decision and consumer relationship.
- Interested in disruptive categories, spaces where consumer behaviour is shifting faster than incumbent players can respond, and where a sharp, well-capitalised founder has a real window.
- Working with portfolio companies on the details that compound over time, helping founders think through debt structuring, building frameworks for portfolio monitoring, and identifying levers for value creation.
“The thesis I try to live by, in everything I do : Integrity is non-negotiable. Kindness is free. Passion is the fuel. Focus is what actually gets you there.”
Vidit Dugar
Senior Associate
Vidit brings an unusual combination to early-stage investing. He has been a banker, an operator, a content builder, and an investor all at once. From EMEA M&A at Nomura London to Chief of Staff at Bombay Shaving Company, where he ran P&Ls, built brands, and contributed to the Barbershop Fund’s consumer portfolio, he has always found his way back to the question of what makes a business worth backing. Along the way, he has also run his own business, which has only sharpened that instinct further.
At Sauce, he works across the full investing lifecycle – sourcing new deals, evaluating founders, and supporting portfolio companies as they scale. He is drawn to founders building with genuine conviction in consumer, D2C, and brand-led categories, and brings to every conversation the perspective of someone who has built, backed, and been in the trenches himself.
Hot Sauce
Hiking / Vipassana / Bachata / Manchester United
I’ve always been drawn to early-stage consumer brands, the messy and exciting moment before a business becomes obvious. When I came across Sauce, what stood out wasn’t just the portfolio but how they showed up for founders. Genuinely present, deeply helpful, focused on outcomes that go beyond the cap table. That’s the kind of investor I’ve always wanted to become, and joining Sauce felt like the natural next step.
Founder-led brands are the ones I find myself rooting for most. When the person building the company is also its most compelling voice, the relationship with the consumer becomes something a legacy player can never manufacture. That same energy is allowing a new generation of brands to walk into categories that seemed untouchable and take real share from incumbents who have been coasting on distribution for years.
The e-commerce wave of 2015-16 did this once already. Quick commerce feels like that moment again, maybe bigger – in BPC and FMCG, the moat large companies spent decades building around retail distribution is suddenly much thinner. On the consumer side, two shifts feel underappreciated. GLP-1 drugs are going to quietly reshape what people eat and what they reach for out of habit. And the label-reader is already here, someone who wants to know exactly what they’re putting in and on their body. Brands built around that honesty from day one will have a lasting edge.
And then there’s the quality of founders coming into the ecosystem. Career operators are now starting companies – people who have spent years inside great businesses and are bringing that depth with them. The bar is going up, and that’s exciting for everyone.
Founder-led content. Building culture and community through brands. And identifying strategic whitespaces in overcrowded categories.
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Debansh Sahoo
Senior Analyst
Born in Odisha, raised in Sydney, and through the teenage years in the US, moving between contexts became a fairly normal part of growing up. By college, the count of new schools, new friend groups and new countries had long stopped mattering. What stayed was a comfort with unfamiliar environments and a habit of working things out quickly.
His first real exposure to venture came during university, through Xelpmoc and then Biome Ventures. The work ranged across sectors and involved building theses, spending time with founders as companies took shape, and eventually joining the founding team as Biome built its venture studio. Being close to companies at that stage made one thing particularly clear: a lot of what matters about a company isn’t in the pitch. The most interesting founders were rarely the ones with the most polished answers. They knew their problem deeply, had usually spent years thinking about it, and had a level of conviction that was difficult to manufacture.
That perspective carried into two years at Ankur Capital, investing in deep science across AI, advanced manufacturing, agritech, energy and climate. The work demanded a much deeper understanding of the technology itself, what was genuinely new, where the hard technical risks sat, and what needed to be true for a piece of science to become a venture-scale company. Yet the more technical the diligence became, the more important the same questions felt: why this problem, why now, and why this person?
The companies that tend to stand out sit at that intersection: genuinely difficult problems, technology worth getting excited about, and founders who are unusually deep in what they’re building. Technical curiosity matters, but so does understanding the person behind it, their view of the problem, what they’ve seen that others haven’t, and what keeps them working on it when the obvious path stops working.
He studied finance at Jindal School of Banking and Finance, where he was a three-time Dean’s Scholar, followed by the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University.
At Sauce, most of his work is finding companies, getting past the pitch, and spending enough time with founders to understand what they’re really building. A lot of the best learning happens away from the desk: how someone thinks, what they notice, what they can’t stop thinking about. Then there’s the cart, the closet, the kitchen. He likes companies that make you notice something you hadn’t really thought about before.
Hot Sauce
Competing / Cooking / Good Hikes / Forward progress
Consumer brands are just theories getting tested against reality, and I’ve always wanted a front-row seat to that. What actually pulled me to Sauce was watching how deep this team goes with founders, not just intros and check-writing, but actually in the room for the hard calls: pricing, hiring, when to pivot, when to hold the line. That’s the kind of investing I respect, and it’s the kind of investor I wanted to be.
Represent is the one that stands out most. George Heaton built it capital-efficient and founder-led, and he’s remained the loudest voice for his own product, which is part of why it’s become something of a blueprint for how a streetwear brand can scale without losing what made it work in the first place. The growth backs it up, they stayed mostly self-funded through their fastest years, only taking outside capital recently to accelerate expansion rather than out of necessity. Heaton is also behind Cadence, the hydration drink, alongside Ross MacKay. What’s interesting there is the approach, they went after salt when the rest of the sports drink category was avoiding it, effectively arguing the industry had gotten the science backwards, and self-funded the launch, testing it quietly in the UK before bringing it to the US once the supply chain was ready. It’s still small next to Represent, but the underlying instinct is the same, build the thing you personally can’t find on the market, and let the product make the case instead of the marketing.
I’m the kind of person who’ll go down a rabbit hole on how something is actually made, whether that’s an eri silk weave from Shillong or how an inference chip gets fabbed. The specifics of the process are just genuinely interesting to me.
Slow fashion and Indian textiles are probably where this is most obvious. I’m into Kardo and Kiniho for exactly that reason you can tell someone actually cared about the weave, not just the photoshoot. But it’s not really about clothes. It’s the same curiosity that has me reading about semiconductor fabrication or how a specific ingredient gets sourced for a supplement brand. I just like understanding how the physical world gets built, one layer below what most people bother looking at.
I’ve also been competing at something since I was six. It was sprinting, wrestling and football back then; these days it’s lifting, pickleball, some Pilates and yoga. The sport changes, but the obsession with getting a little better doesn’t. I end up trying half the nutraceutical and functional food brands that cross my desk for the same reason, I want to understand what’s actually in them before anyone pitches me on it.
Friends have been coming to me for product recommendations for years, which is probably the real thread running through all of this. I’ve always been the person who wants to know why something was built the way it was. Investing just gave that curiosity somewhere useful to go.
“Every company is a small theory about the world, tested against reality everyday.”
Kunjan Ganatra
Senior Analyst
Kunjan spent four years at NatWest Group in Mumbai in credit underwriting, before moving into listed equity research and family office investing at Vadilal Ice Cream and later at Tycho Ventures. Across roles, the thread has been consistent – understanding how businesses work and where value is actually created. At Sauce, Kunjan works across brand evaluation and portfolio support, from early-stage category research through to execution on funding rounds.
Hot Sauce
World Cuisine / Keyboards / Car Enthusiast
I’d always been the kind of person who looked past the label, less interested in the product itself than in who built it and why. I had been closely following the Indian consumer brand story for years: how brands were being built differently, who was buying them, and what was changing in the relationship between Indian consumers and the things they chose to spend on. When Sauce came up, I looked at the portfolio and recognised brands I genuinely cared about. The fit felt obvious. I didn’t need much convincing.
FoodKraft. The company was building into ready-to-cook and organic staples, a new category largely from scratch. I got to watch the process from early ideation all the way through to packaging, and it shifted something in how I think. Evaluating a brand from the outside is one thing. Watching a team navigate the decisions that never show up in a pitch deck – how a product is positioned, what its packaging needs to communicate – is something else. It made me a more grounded analyst.
The shift towards cleaner food ingredients in India is already underway. Consumers are reading labels more carefully and actively seeking brands that meet a higher standard. What excites me is the response to it – brands are genuinely innovating to reformulate and simplify. The cleaner label is a product decision and not a marketing one. The ones doing it honestly are building something that will be hard to displace.
The market gaps that established players have overlooked, and how new-age brands are quietly filling them. And how to develop a genuine sourcing edge – the discipline of identifying high-potential brands.
“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”
Ritika Jajoo
Senior Analyst
Ritika started her professional career in public policy and spent two years working closely with a former Indian Minister of State for Finance. She has also spent two years at a climate-tech fund, where she learnt the ropes of early stage investing. She cleared Level 1 of the CFA Program. Having spent the early years of her career in the world of policy and impact, she later decided to move to the other side of the table. At Sauce, she spends her time evaluating consumer brands and working closely with portfolio companies across various stages.
Hot Sauce
Book clubs / Wildlife safaris / Curating playlists
I was looking for a platform that would let me go deep into a new space by working closely with founders, while staying on mission with consumer investing. Sauce stood out as the right place to learn consumer investing, while also understanding the nuances of building large businesses from the ground up.
Haus & Kinder pushed me to think differently in two ways – how to translate an offline-first category into an online journey, and how the problem-sets change entirely once a brand starts to scale.
I’m excited by how fast consumer perceptions shift – and how brands actually keep up. The ones that stand out are those that evolve with real behaviour change, not just trends.
Engaging deeply with consumers on why they choose what they do. Building connections and partnerships, and creating value through them. And tracking emerging markets through real shifts in consumer behaviour.
“Do it scared!”
Subhashree Bhuyan
Deputy Manager
Subhashree has built a strong professional foundation through her experience with reputed organizations including Apex Fund Services LLP, Computer Age Management Services Ltd., and Sourjya & Biswajit CA Firm. Her diverse background has strengthened her adaptability, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. Known for her composed and proactive nature, she consistently contributes to smooth fund operations and handles responsibilities with efficiency in fast-paced environments.
At Sauce, Subhashree is known for taking care of smooth fund operations and all regulatory compliances. She manages fund operations and regulatory compliance for both SEBI and IFSCA-regulated funds. She works closely with internal teams, fund administrators, and stakeholders to ensure smooth day-to-day fund processes, accurate reporting, and adherence to evolving regulatory requirements. Her role involves bringing structure and efficiency to fund operations, while helping the team navigate compliance seamlessly across jurisdictions.
Hot Sauce
Nature / Reading / Stories
I was always keen to work at the front end to explore and experience the real approach and process of handling the whole fund operations and compliances.
I’m excited by ideas that combine education, culture, and technology to create more meaningful learning experiences. I believe there is huge potential in building systems that help people study in a way that connects with their cultural background, language, values, and real-life experiences. What interests me most is creating platforms that make learning more accessible, engaging, and community-driven – where education is not just about academics, but also about preserving culture, encouraging creativity, and helping people grow personally and professionally.
Interested in handling challenging responsibilities and contributing to smooth business operations. Keen on learning new skills and adapting quickly to dynamic work environments. Focused on professional growth, continuous improvement, and organizational success.
“Conquer yourself, for the rest of the world is mere illusion.”
Richa Oberoi
Executive Assistant
Before joining Sauce, Richa built her experience working with leading organizations like Capgemini, Microsoft, and American Express. These roles shaped her ability to adapt quickly, handle complex responsibilities, and work seamlessly across teams.
At Sauce, Richa is an Executive Assistant, where she plays a key role in keeping day-to-day operations running smoothly behind the scenes. From managing priorities and coordinating schedules to supporting leadership with critical tasks, she ensures everything stays organized and on track in a fast-paced environment. She is known for her proactive approach and calm problem-solving mindset. She thrives in dynamic situations, always staying one step ahead to support the team and make things happen efficiently.
Hot Sauce
Family Time / Travel / Shopping / Beach Getaways
I was drawn to Sauce as it gave me the opportunity to work in a venture capital environment for the first time. Coming from structured corporate environments, I was excited to be part of a fast-moving, entrepreneurial setup where I could learn and take on new challenges.
Richa is excited by how new-age consumer brands are growing in the VC ecosystem, especially in the D2C space. She finds it interesting to see how brands in lifestyle, wellness, and food & beverage are building strong customer connections and scaling through digital platforms. Being closely involved in a fast-paced environment, she enjoys observing how innovative ideas evolve into impactful businesses.
Enjoys being in fast-paced, people-driven environments where she can stay busy, solve problems, and keep things moving smoothly. Likes to take initiative, stay organized, and ensure everything is in place – both at work and in everyday life. A ‘get things done’ kind of person who finds satisfaction in making things easier, more efficient, and seamless for everyone around her.
“Stay positive, take ownership, keep growing.”
Namita Nayal
Executive - Admin & Operations
Namita holds a Master’s degree in Political Science and joined Sauce as Executive – Admin & Operations, bringing a background in program support, donor management, and stakeholder relationships from her time in the development sector. At Sauce, she leads partnerships and sits at the intersection of fund operations, portfolio support, and operations – the connective tissue that keeps the firm’s people and its processes moving together.
Partnerships, for her, are really an extension of portfolio support: connecting founders with the right people (talent, capital, brand partners), in such a way that these relationships can actually help a business grow, not just exist on paper. That same instinct shows up in how she brings people together more broadly- whether that’s a small, curated gathering for a portfolio company or a larger moment for Sauce itself. It’s less about running an event, and more about building the kind of trust and visibility that compounds over time, for the fund and for the businesses in it.
On the operational side, she keeps an eagle eye on everything that keeps the fund dependable: investor onboarding, fund compliance alongside the Fin Ops Manager, and the deal pipeline and portfolio tracking that supports the investment team so the details are always in order and the bigger picture stays clear.
She’s the person who can take a big, moving-parts project and quietly get it running smoothly end-to-end, bringing people and pieces together in a way that just works.
Hot Sauce
Trekking & Outdoor Adventure / Cultural Exploration / Soulful Feasts
Coming from the development sector, Sauce felt like a completely different lens focused on the question I had always been chasing: how do you create real, lasting change? In development work, it meant community infrastructure and long-term programs. Here, it involved backing early-stage brands – the scrappy, unproven ones that don’t yet know if they’ll work. Watching early capital and the right support turn a raw idea into something people genuinely love felt less like a departure and more like the next, more exciting chapter of the same story.
This one’s less about a single brand for me as I am involved with partnerships and operations and not directly with investments. What’s challenged me more is realising, that across the portfolio, no two brands run the same way — what helps one founder unlock distribution might do nothing for another one who is still figuring out their supply chain. That has reshaped how I think about support altogether: it is less a fixed playbook which can be applied universally and more an approach built around what each brand actually needs, depending on its stage in the investment journey.
I am genuinely excited by brands rebuilding everyday Indian categories with real craft — food, personal care, homewares — the ones that don’t just look good on the shelf but have real product depth behind them. Watching investments like TWT, Hocco, and Innovist grow has sharpened my eye for what early conviction actually looks like, and helped me quickly spot founders quietly building something great long before anyone else has caught on.
1. How early-stage brands win their first real consumer relationships – and the operational infrastructure that enables scaling success
2. The craft of brand building: what makes a product feel considered, and where creative instinct meets commercial edge
3. The coordination layer of VC: the art of connecting the right investors, founders, and partners at exactly the right moment
“You can be the best at what you do and still leave room to travel, explore, and everything that makes you, you.”
Govind Shrikhande
Ex-MD Shoppers Stop
Govind is a retail veteran with 42 years of experience spanning the entire value chain — from fabrics to apparel to multi-format retail, including department stores, hypermarkets, airport retail, and books and music, he was previously MD at Shopper’s Stop as well. A Textile Technology graduate with a Master’s in Marketing, he believes retail is a blend of art, science, and math, and has built his career around people-first, innovation-driven, consumer-centric strategy — with a mission to “bring back romance to retail.” He currently serves as an Independent Director on the boards of V-Mart Retail, Arvind Fashion , Brand Concept and IR&HPL, and advises private equity firms including Multiples and Sauce, and mentors young founders such as the team at XYXX Crew to name a few.
Arjun Purkayastha
Global e-Commerce and DTC Brands Expert and Venture Capitalist
Arjun brings over 25 years of experience building brands, creating categories, and scaling businesses through their next phase of growth. He currently serves as SVP & Managing Director for Greater China & North Asia at Reckitt and as China CEO, leading a multi-billion dollar business spanning China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. Earlier, he built and scaled Reckitt’s global eCommerce, digital, and ventures organization into a powerhouse, turning digital into a core growth engine for the company. Across Reckitt and P&G, he has doubled a major market’s business with 12 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, expanded margins while growing profit faster than sales, and built brands and platforms across 60+ countries — with deep expertise spanning general management, P&L leadership, innovation, omnichannel commerce, and digital transformation. Beyond his executive role, he actively supports founders building the next generation of consumer brands. Arjun believes enduring businesses are built at the intersection of great brands, exceptional people, and disciplined execution.
Arindam Paul
Chief Business Officer / Founding Team, Atomberg
Arindam is Chief Business Officer and part of the founding team at Atomberg, one of India’s largest and fastest-growing digital-first consumer brands and has scaled the brand from zero to over ₹1,000 crores over the past decade.
A strong academic performer at NIT Surat and IIM Indore, Arindam is deeply engaged with India’s startup ecosystem — regularly sharing learnings from the Atomberg journey publicly, and acting as a sounding board for founders, CMOs, and growth leaders across consumer brands and consumer tech. He is an angel investor in many leading consumer brands like Pilgrim, Zouk, Kilrr, Nestasia, MomsMade, Vutto etc. He also serves on the board of Wakefit as an independent director
Arindam is also the author of the bestselling book Zero to Scale which has become the definitive book for Indian consumer startups. He has been recognised in the prestigious ET 40 under 40 list in 2026 by the Economic Times and has also been awarded the best Young Alumni Achiever award by IIM Indore in 2024
Arindam is Chief Business Officer and part of the founding team at Atomberg, one of India’s largest and fastest-growing digital-first consumer brands and has scaled the brand from zero to over ₹1,000 crores over the past decade.
A strong academic performer at NIT Surat and IIM Indore, Arindam is deeply engaged with India’s startup ecosystem — regularly sharing learnings from the Atomberg journey publicly, and acting as a sounding board for founders, CMOs, and growth leaders across consumer brands and consumer tech. He is an angel investor in many leading consumer brands like Pilgrim, Zouk, Kilrr, Nestasia, MomsMade, Vutto etc. He also serves on the board of Wakefit as an independent director
Arindam is also the author of the bestselling book Zero to Scale which has become the definitive book for Indian consumer startups. He has been recognised in the prestigious ET 40 under 40 list in 2026 by the Economic Times and has also been awarded the best Young Alumni Achiever award by IIM Indore in 2024
Anushka Sani
Founder and Creative Director, Thought Over Design
Anushka is the Founder and Creative Director of Thought Over Design (टी ओ डी), a studio specializing in brand strategy and design for consumer brands across industries. She has led brand thinking and design for over 100 D2C and B2C businesses including brands like Hocco, The Whole Truth, Nykaa, Sleepycat, Luma Fertility amongst many others. She also serves as Chief Creative Advisor at The Whole Truth Foods, a brand TOD has helped build since its inception. Anushka works closely with founders and leaders to turn their business vision into brands that create impact and tell lasting stories in India’s fast-changing consumer landscape. Her approach is grounded in research and cultural insight: understanding people’s lives, their behaviour, and the cultural shifts shaping them to build strong creative brand foundations. She particularly enjoys partnering with purpose-driven, founder-led brands, and believes brands create real meaning when they are rooted in culture.
Atul Phull
Senior Advisor, Capital Formation
Atul joined Sauce as a Senior Advisor in 2026 to help deepen our investor relationships and build a long-term, durable global capital partners. Prior to his formal association with Sauce, Atul has been involved with the firm since its inception in 2019 in a personal capacity as an LP and co-investor.
Atul brings with him over 25+ years of financial services experience across India, Singapore and the US. He has worked in capital raising and business development roles for firms including UBS, Everstone Capital, ICICI Venture, Capgemini and Goldman Sachs. Atul has an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, and undergraduate degrees from Tulane University.
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