Pranav Pai, Founding Partner of 3one4, sits down with Rohit Yadav to unpack what has actually changed in Indian startup ecosystem over the last decade, and what has not. Ten years of Seed, roughly 10,000 companies pitching in a single year, and a view of deep tech, AI and energy grounded in what actually gets built.

3one4 is an early stage firm based in Bangalore, just past its tenth year. The team backs 30 to 35 companies per fund, and about 70 percent of those are first cheques into businesses that are still two or three people with a laptop. Of a 36 person team, only nine sit on the investment side. The rest work with companies after the money goes in, on finance, governance, revenue and capital markets access, which Pranav argues has quietly become the differentiator in a market where most global VC models stay hands off after the wire.

Pranav is an engineer by training, did his masters at Stanford, was employee number three at a SaaS company that had a great exit, and came back to India to build the firm he wished existed. Whether you are a founder raising a seed round, an LP sizing up India, or an operator trying to read where deep tech and energy go next, this one is worth the hour.

🔑 Key insights you will walk away with:

➡️ Why deal flow growing from 1,000 to 10,000 pitches a year matters more than any single fund's returns

➡️ How the Indian exit picture actually looks

➡️ Why a compounding bank stock is the real competition for every Indian VC raising domestic capital

➡️ The founder side and the investor side of the risk off argument, argued honestly from both

➡️ Why deep tech in India runs on talent first, then patent and grant reform, then a real first customer

➡️ How three decades of global R and D centres built an engineering base that almost nobody counted

➡️ Why fine tuning open models is the practical AI path here, and what that does to cost and time

➡️ Why fixing domestic supply gaps may matter more than chasing the frontier

➡️ Which parts of the energy problem are venture scale and which belong on a corporate balance sheet

➡️ The contrarian view hiding in plain sight: 10,000 chemical factories fighting over local demand instead of selling globally

Links:

Pranav Pai: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranavpai/

3one4 Capital: https://www.3one4capital.com/

Rohit Yadav: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohityadav23/

Newsletter: https://yadavrohit.substack.com/