3one4 Summit 2025: India Going Global

At 3one4 Summit 2025, we had the privilege of hosting nearly 300 investors, founders, and partners in Bengaluru for a day of deep engagement and shared purpose.

Over the past nine years, 3one4 Capital’s journey has been shaped by the conviction of exceptional founders and the enduring trust of our investors. The 3one4 Summit is our annual platform to bring this community together to unlock new ideas, align on opportunities, and reaffirm our collective ambition.

As India advances beyond the $5 trillion milestone and accelerates toward becoming the world’s third-largest economy, the forces shaping its rise are clear: innovation, infrastructure, and digital transformation. With structural tailwinds across exports, productivity, and entrepreneurship, this decade marks India’s decisive entry onto the global stage.

Amidst this shift, the startup ecosystem continues to deliver exceptional outcomes, compounding capital, creating jobs, and building globally relevant companies. Summit 2025 spotlighted the founders driving this transformation and the investors backing them, while reaffirming 3one4’s commitment to building sustainable, future-facing ecosystems.

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Portfolio - Investor Connect: Aligning Capital with Conviction

3one4 Capital’s Portfolio - Investor Connect is a curated, high-conviction engagement platform designed to foster meaningful capital alignment between leading investors and 3one4’s most promising portfolio companies. It reflects the firm’s belief that venture capital should catalyse durable, systems-level change in India’s startup ecosystem.

In a market where opportunity is abundant but durable outcomes remain rare, building meaningful, long-term partnerships between founders and investors has never been more important. Capital today seeks not just ambition, but operational clarity, governance maturity, and evidence of resilience across cycles.

Over the course of the morning, more than 120 curated one-on-one meetings were facilitated across key sectors, including AI, consumer, energy transition, deeptech, and manufacturing. 

​​The Portfolio Connect demonstrated that India’s next wave of champions will not be built on narrative arbitrage. They will be built on the compounding of operational excellence and trust across founders, investors, customers, and ecosystems.

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AGM: 3one4 Capital State of the Union 

The closed-door Annual General Meeting offered LPs and institutional partners a detailed look at 3one4 Capital’s progress over the past nine years.

Pranav Pai (Founding Partner and CIO)’s keynote traced the firm’s journey from the launch of Fund I in 2016 to today’s multi-fund platform, Pranav shared key milestones: the achievement of +1.0 DPI on Fund I with a near 5x multiple, $9.6 billion in cumulative portfolio value created, and a track record of winners and fund returners that have emerged from a deeply involved, research-led investment approach.

More than the numbers, however, the keynote emphasised 3one4’s core ethos - of preempting mainstream market theses through ground-up research, backing category creators before consensus forms, and staying deeply involved with founders to drive deterministic outcomes.

Following Pranav’s keynote, Nruthya Madappa, Partner at 3one4, took the stage to spotlight the "Flywheels of Growth" emerging across the portfolio.

She painted a vivid picture of how disciplined early actions, from embedding governance frameworks to global market expansions, have led to extraordinary outcomes even in a challenging venture landscape. Over $700 million was raised by portfolio companies during the recent downturn years, multiple companies moved toward IPO-readiness, and operational excellence became a defining feature of the portfolio.

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Fireside Chat: Lessons in Building Institutions That Endure

With the AGM concluded, the Summit opened its doors to a wider audience of founders, investors, and ecosystem enablers.

The afternoon began with a powerful fireside conversation between two stalwarts of Indian enterprise - Keki Mistry, Vice Chairman and CEO of HDFC, and T.V. Mohandas Pai, Chairman of 3one4 Capital.

Mr. Mistry reflected on HDFC’s journey from a fledgling housing finance company to a $195 billion financial institution, a story built not through hypergrowth tactics, but through governance-first practices, steady asset quality, and disciplined long-term thinking.

His message was clear and enduring: success is not driven by momentum, but by the compounding of trust, governance, and customer centricity over decades. In an era often dominated by short-term valuations and rapid scaling narratives, Mr. Mistry’s insights served as a powerful reminder that enduring value is created through principles, patience, and resilience, not hype.

The session set a grounded tone for the rest of the day: building enduring institutions demands conviction in fundamentals, even and especially when the market rewards speed over substance.

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A Global Allocator’s View: India at an Inflection Point

Following this, Srinivas Pulavarti, CIO of Emory Investment Management, brought a global allocator’s perspective to India's evolving position. His keynote,  delivered with nuance, conviction, and deep insight, highlighted India’s rising importance in global capital flows, the unique demographic and digital advantages India commands, and the need for companies to build not just for today, but for a globally integrated tomorrow.

Drawing from his experience managing one of the world’s leading university endowments, Mr. Pulavarti outlined how India’s demographic strength, structural reforms, digital acceleration, and capital efficiency are positioning it as a key destination for long-term global capital.

He stressed that while near-term volatility may exist, India's structural growth story remains intact, driven by increasing productivity, expanding middle-class consumption, manufacturing scale-up, and a thriving startup ecosystem.

His keynote also noted that venture-backed companies, particularly those with operational discipline and global ambition, are uniquely placed to ride this wave. Capital allocators, he said, are increasingly seeking exposure to Indian innovation, but they are prioritising governance, profitability, and resilience as key markers of quality.

India is no longer a peripheral emerging market story - it is becoming a core part of global investment strategies.

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Frontier AI: India’s Homegrown Tech Leap

In a world racing toward AI-driven transformation, the dominant narrative often focuses on breakthroughs happening in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, but the founders on this stage proved that India’s unique opportunity lies not just in cutting-edge research, but in creative, large-scale deployment.

Lal Chand Bisu, Co-Founder of Kuku FM, highlighted how his platform leverages AI to personalise vernacular audio content for millions across India’s non-English speaking markets. From dynamic voice modulation to content recommendation engines, AI sits at the heart of making storytelling accessible across 10+ Indian languages, democratising knowledge and entertainment for Bharat’s next billion users.

Sudarshan Kamath, Co-Founder of Smallest.ai, introduced a reimagined future for voice-driven interaction. Smallest.ai has developed the world’s fastest non-autoregressive TTS model, generating 10 seconds of speech in just 100 milliseconds, setting a new standard for real-time, ultra-realistic AI voice. Its flagship products, Waves (for text-to-speech, voice cloning, and conversion) and Atoms (for live voice agents integrated with CRMs and messaging platforms), are powering next-generation voicebots for 5,000+ SMBs and enterprises across India and the US. With sub-second latency, multilingual support, and high-fidelity speech, Smallest.ai is making AI-powered voice accessible, scalable, and cost-effective.

Vikalp Sahni, Co-Founder & CEO of Eka Care, showcased how deep healthcare challenges can be addressed using AI not as a luxury, but as a necessity. Eka Care is building India's most comprehensive health record ecosystem, powered by AI-driven diagnostic insights, health data normalisation, and predictive analytics - a monumental step towards preventive healthcare at a national scale.

Each founder’s story was a reminder: while India may not (yet) lead the world in fundamental AI research, it will lead in applying AI creatively, inclusively, and sustainably to solve the most urgent problems for billions.

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CentreStage: Notes from the Frontiers of Disruption

As the day progressed, CentreStage offered a window into the emerging ideas, companies, and sectors quietly shaping the next phase of India's entrepreneurial economy.

Ankur Dahiya and Adwait Vikram Singh Co-founders of Rozana, spoke about building India's rural commerce infrastructure, connecting small-town consumers with reliable supply chains and expanding market access across underserved geographies. Their journey underscored the growing importance of India's smaller cities and towns in driving the next wave of economic growth.

Subramani Ramachandrappa, Co-founder of Fermbox, outlined a vision for the future of food production through precision biomanufacturing. By developing scalable, sustainable fermentation-based systems, Fermbox is addressing global needs around health, nutrition, and supply chain resilience.

Siva Rajamani, Co-founder of Everstage, discussed rethinking incentive management — moving away from traditional manual processes toward more transparent, data-driven systems. As companies adopt performance-linked models globally, platforms like Everstage are helping make incentive structures more efficient, fair, and accountable.

Ankur Gigras, Co-founder of HexaHealth, spoke about building an integrated platform for surgical care in India. HexaHealth manages the full patient journey across high-ASP surgeries from pre-operative consultations to post-operative recovery across multiple specialities. HexaHealth improves clinical outcomes, enhances patient experiences, and creates more efficient healthcare delivery models.

Jani Pasha, Co-founder of Lokal, captured the pulse of Bharat’s new internet. Lokal's hyperlocal content and classifieds platform, built for small-town India, is not just providing information; it’s creating community-driven digital economies where none existed before.

Salil Srivatsava, Co-founder of Scimplify, closed the session with an extraordinary account of how an IP-first approach to speciality chemicals is placing India at the forefront of global innovation. By building a digitally connected, research-driven chemicals ecosystem, Scimplify is unlocking global supply chains and market access for Indian innovation, all without the traditional, capital-intensive models that have dominated the sector.

Taken together, the conversations at CentreStage pointed to a broader shift underway:
An ecosystem moving beyond familiar categories, focusing instead on solving complex challenges with resilience, depth, and long-term thinking. 

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Closing Reflections: The Road Ahead

Siddarth Pai (Partner, CFO, and ESG Officer) closed the day with a vote of thanks - a heartfelt recognition of the partnerships that have powered the firm’s journey so far and the immense responsibility that lies ahead.

Summit 2025 wasn’t merely about showcasing progress. It was a reaffirmation of 3one4 Capital’s founding belief: The future doesn’t happen to us. We create it. Every single day.

At its best, venture capital is about building systems that endure not just funding outcomes, but shaping them through active participation, long-term conviction, and shared alignment.

As India moves into its next phase of growth, 3one4 Capital remains committed to standing at the intersection of innovation and institutionalisation, offering the access, discipline, and support required to help founders build the defining companies of this generation.