Hello everyone,
Welcome to Edition 7 of Pentathlon Pulse. In this edition we look at durability in B2B tech, portfolio wins, and a quarter spent with founders.
While your coffee is still hot, here is what our Managing Partner, Gireendra Kasmalkar thinks will still matter in B2B tech ten years from now.
Topical Take
In a turbulent market, the useful question is what stays immune to the turbulence. Bezos’s old test applies: ask what will not change in the next ten years. Four things look durable in B2B tech.
- Enterprises adopt deliberately, however fast the technology moves.
- Indian buyers move on regulation and growth, rarely on productivity.
- Distribution is the moat and trusted networks win.
- The founders who take friction out of adoption and become critical to customers well, keep winning.
Everybody knows this. The edge is in the “how,” and that is where we spend our time. And our commentary gives you a much needed respite from “AI”. It doesn’t mention the word “AI” even once nor is it AI generated.
Read more about What Remains Durable
Inside the Portfolio
Fresh milestones from across the fund
iTuring.ai was named Enterprise AI Platform of the Year at the 3rd Credit Risk Management Summit & Awards in Mumbai.
Riskcovry was named AI InsurTech Solution of the Year at the Brainalytics Bharat Insurance Summit & Awards.
TurboHire has entered a strategic alliance with Deloitte India to help enterprises reimagine hiring at scale.
SaleAssist.ai has launched AIVA (AI Video Agent), an enterprise AI Revenue Workforce for customer engagement and sales. The platform is already seeing adoption from leading enterprises including Titan Watches, Eureka Forbes, Hiranandani, reflecting strong early market validation.
Building with B2B Founders
An evening in Delhi
This is what happened last quarter when we caught up with B2B tech founders.
- Top left: Our B2B Ecosystem mixer with AIC Shiv Nadar University in Noida brought a packed house together for a panel on Building B2B Products: Customisation to Scale with Madhukar Bhatia of Pentathlon Ventures, Mayank Gupta of Zopper, and Sanjay Varnwal of Spyne.
- Top right: A portfolio dinner in Delhi turned into a late evening of founders comparing notes on scaling and enterprise sales.
- Bottom left: At Founders Huddle by Pentathlon Ventures at IIT Delhi, we had focused one-on-ones with five early-stage teams building across enterprise AI, cybersecurity, and conversational AI.
The conversations in these rooms are a reminder that company building is hard, but founders rarely have to figure it out alone.
Read more about “The Most Expensive Word in a Startup Is Yes”
Operator Notes
The Old SaaS Metrics are Lying to You
Abhinav Mahipal, Senior Associate
For SaaS businesses ARR used to be the gospel. Monthly cohorts behaved. NRR told you whether customers loved the product. Those metrics worked because the product had a stable unit of consumption: a human logging in, doing work, generating activity data.
When the AI is the primary worker and a human checks a dashboard once a week, the entire metrics architecture collapses.
Here’s what specifically breaks.
Read more about AI company SaaS metrics
The Road Ahead
Ready for the next quarter
Every quarter brings a new technology trend. The winners, more often than not, are decided by things far less fashionable: execution, customer understanding, and persistence.
We saw all three this quarter, in the founders we met and the team we backed. We look forward to sharing more of those journeys ahead.
We’d love to hear from you. Your feedback helps us sharpen what we share.
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