3F VC

Microgrants for bold and ambitious student founders.

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

Introducing 3F VC

Microgrants for bold and ambitious founders building in Hardware, AI, Deeptech, and beyond.

[Proxima Mumbai @ProximaMumbai]

Proxima is bringing together the best consumer brand founders in Bombay for a super curated mixer this month, 27th June

We're hosting At the Frontier of Consumer Brands, the second edition in our Frontiers series, where we bring together the best of a field to meet each other.

[Dr Aniruddha Malpani, MD @malpani]

We give startup employees ₹1 lakh to run their own projects inside the company. Not equity. Not titles. Actual money to experiment. Because if you can't do something useful with ₹1 lakh, you have no business asking for ₹1 crore. #Intrapreneurship

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

cc: @malpani @ProximaMumbai

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

https://t.co/IRUUrEKqxy

[Proxima Mumbai @ProximaMumbai]

Meet the members of Proxima:
Anindyadeep (@anindyadeeps) is building Litefold. LiteFold combines physics-based simulation and AI to accelerate the design and validation of drug candidates in silico.
Their leading product is Rosalind: An AI Co-Scientist for Life Sciences.

[Yash Panditrao @yashpanditrao]

If you like the AI space want to understand the stack at a deeper level, do give this a read:
https://t.co/cszBi7tasT

[Yash Panditrao @yashpanditrao]

Would you all be interested in this?

If we can get 10–20 people to show up for the livestream, @karansehgal47 and I would be more than happy to do this for every report.

[Proxima Mumbai @ProximaMumbai]

Meet the members of Proxima:
Aryan Wagh (@ironwagh) is building Vanar Robots, an indigenous robotics firm solving for general-purpose humanoid robotics. From a living room. On almost no capital.
They build everything in-house: actuators, manipulators, software. Not general-purpose imported parts, but components built specifically for the mechanical strain that comes from running a robot for hours on end in harsh conditions.

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

cc: @malpani @ProximaMumbai

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

Communities are quietly becoming startup infrastructure.

They help founders move through trust faster: early users, feedback, hires, investors, and intros.

The strongest startup ecosystems will be built around dense networks that help people hire, raise, and grow.
https://t.co/stIuHx00dd

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

cc: @malpani @ProximaMumbai

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

Startups grow inside networks of trust.

Communities help founders find early users, hire, learn faster, raise capital, and build market credibility.

That is why communities are becoming startup infrastructure.
https://t.co/Fw9jtPB4Yf

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

cc: @malpani @ProximaMumbai

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

Industries fueled by passion are the hardest ones to crack.

We figured this out while working on our specialty coffee report. At first, coffee looked like a simple market to map. Beans move from farms to roasters to cafes to consumers. Margins should be visible. Winners should be obvious. But the deeper we went, the less it behaved like a normal consumer category. Everyone in the chain cared too much.

That sounds like a good thing. Passion creates better products, better stories, and more loyal customers. But it also makes the market harder to read. A cafe owner may accept worse economics because they love the craft. A roaster may obsess over a microlot that will never scale. A customer may spend ₹400 on a pour over every week but refuse to buy a ₹5,000 grinder. Rational behavior exists, but it is hidden under taste, identity, ritual, and pride.

This is why these markets punish outsiders. You cannot just enter with capital, branding, or distribution and expect to win. The real rules are tribal. People care about origin, processing, equipment, water, technique, and the person behind the bar. They can smell shortcuts quickly. In passion markets, the customer is not only buying the product. They are buying proof that you respect the thing as much as they do.

The opportunity is still real. In fact, it may be better because of this difficulty. But the best companies in such industries usually do not begin by trying to look big. They begin by earning trust in one small corner. They make one tool, one roast, one cafe format, one supply chain layer, or one ritual meaningfully better. Passion makes the market harder to crack, but it also protects the people who crack it honestly.

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

Read more: https://t.co/eQhilHGEqS

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

@Rethik_D @phpandya28 @gradcapital looking forward to review your application, rethik

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

cc: @malpani @ProximaMumbai

[3F VC @3FdotVC]

Glad to see founders build and share in public.

[praubashi (🇮🇳/acc) @prb5h]

7 days + 7.7k Run Rate + Private Beta == Too much Drama

Oru'el began a private beta with a set number of handpicked researchers, engineers, startups and organisations about a week ago.

Yesterday, we crossed $7.7k in Monthly Run Rate during the first 7 days of the Private Beta.

Was this easy? lol. As a matter of fact, we got a bank account on the last day before our GST permit was gone. We were waiting for it else we couldn't actually sell. Not mentioning that we are juggling 3 payment gateways + bank transfers.

The funny part? We neither own GPUs nor sell compute. We sell one thing that everyone loves to claim in the industry but can't prove. SLAs, or to be bluntly put, Job Completion Guarantee (and a few more gaps the industry ignores).

It took 5mo of playing around to figure that the buyer must change. Sell to the teams already paying for compute, the ones bleeding 60% of their time to this problem.

Our internal research team (one person) led by @chastronomic and Internal Product team (one person) @nihipap ran days and nights.

Ajith sprained his ankle, got his wisdom tooth removed and got food poisoning during this duration while Nihith had to move back to hyderabad and worked 16 hours a day continuously for 3 weeks before the platform was live.

We have identified two crucial segments where compute scarcity hits them like a truck to the wall but haven't been catered to at all. No one serves them properly.

I am aware the post leaves questions like what exactly are these market segments, how do we guarantee job completions, what are the other gaps that are ignored, and a lot more, we will expand on them once the Private Beta is over.

Honoured. Grateful. Hopeful, as more shall come and must come. The private beta is still live. 3 more weeks.

Veer Bhogya Vasundhara.

[praubashi (🇮🇳/acc) @prb5h]

7 days + 7.7k Run Rate + Private Beta == Too much Drama

Oru'el began a private beta with a set number of handpicked researchers, engineers, startups and organisations about a week ago.

Yesterday, we crossed $7.7k in Monthly Run Rate during the first 7 days of the Private Beta.

Was this easy? lol. As a matter of fact, we got a bank account on the last day before our GST permit was gone. We were waiting for it else we couldn't actually sell. Not mentioning that we are juggling 3 payment gateways + bank transfers.

The funny part? We neither own GPUs nor sell compute. We sell one thing that everyone loves to claim in the industry but can't prove. SLAs, or to be bluntly put, Job Completion Guarantee (and a few more gaps the industry ignores).

It took 5mo of playing around to figure that the buyer must change. Sell to the teams already paying for compute, the ones bleeding 60% of their time to this problem.

Our internal research team (one person) led by @chastronomic and Internal Product team (one person) @nihipap ran days and nights.

Ajith sprained his ankle, got his wisdom tooth removed and got food poisoning during this duration while Nihith had to move back to hyderabad and worked 16 hours a day continuously for 3 weeks before the platform was live.

We have identified two crucial segments where compute scarcity hits them like a truck to the wall but haven't been catered to at all. No one serves them properly.

I am aware the post leaves questions like what exactly are these market segments, how do we guarantee job completions, what are the other gaps that are ignored, and a lot more, we will expand on them once the Private Beta is over.

Honoured. Grateful. Hopeful, as more shall come and must come. The private beta is still live. 3 more weeks.

Veer Bhogya Vasundhara.

[Yash Panditrao @yashpanditrao]

We’ve all seen people nerd out on fancy coffee tasting notes and bright acidity.
@karansehgal47 and I spent the last month digging past the flavor talk. We decoded the numbers: farmgate prices, the harvest-to-cup chain, and where value moves and costs land for founders in India.