Gireendra Kasmalkar

We are living in one of the most exciting times. Our lives are changing as never before right in front of our eyes. And as we all know, AI is what is driving this remarkable disruption. For Pentathlon, with our early stage B2B Tech thesis, this disruption is a huge opportunity. Identifying investment opportunities where […]

There is no doubt that the advent of new Tech allows those lagging in earlier Tech the opportunity to enjoy a level playing field, even leapfrog the incumbents. This happened in India with mobiles and then with e-commerce. The same will undoubtedly happen with AI as well.  Any Tech endeavours to bring personalised and real-time

AI (and now GenAI) are rightfully being talked about as technologies that are bringing up the most dramatic shift in our lives and even for the entire humankind. It appears that no sphere of human activity will remain untouched by the advent of AI, with huge benefits on the one hand, but also huge challenges

Author: Gireendra Kasmalkar For decades, the tech world has been enthralled by the dream of democratising access to technology. From the dawn of the internet era, when digital access started to break down information barriers, to the age of artificial intelligence (AI)— we’ve been chasing the vision of technology as the great equaliser.   However, the

Authored By: Gireendra Kasmalkar The period known colloquially as the “Funding Winter” represented a significant challenge for startups globally.  Characterized by a sharp decrease in venture capital funding, this era forced startup founders to confront harsh realities and make difficult decisions. It was a time when the buoyant market of previous years retreated, leaving many

We, at Pentathlon Ventures, announced the first close of our Fund2 in September 2023. This is a big milestone in the journey of our young fund-house.  Since day one, or rather Fund 1, we’ve been different in our ways. We started with 6 partners coming together. Five of us came with successful entrepreneurial backgrounds, rather

B2B SaaS has become the prevailing norm in the B2B tech industry. Not only are customers benefiting from this approach, but markets are also rewarding companies with better valuations because of their recurring revenue. In 2022, SaaS surpassed Fintech as the leading category among unicorns in India, with a third of the 100+ unicorns being

Following up on my previous article on Serviceable Leadable market, this article details out how exactly SLM is to be defined and then captured.  Think ‘within’ the box  Sudhanshu Srivastav (Anshu), Investor (VC Funds), Advisor – Startups, visualises SLMs, using the concept of multi-dimensional “box”. Anshu asks his mentees to aim to be #1 in

At our fund for seed stage B2B Tech startups, the Annual Recurring Revenues (ARRs) are typically 100k USD onwards. But in every deck that we see has the Total Available Market (TAM) pegged above a Billion Dollars! Then the Serviceable Available Market (SAM) and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) are often some percentage of the TAM.

In the last vlog on culture of scalability, you talked about ‘driving’ rather than being ‘driven’. What does it mean and why is it important? We are talking about the culture of scalability and growth. This idea has changed quite significantly over a period of time.  Earlier it was all about capital deployed. The machines