RAVI ADUSUMALLI
The Elevation Capital founder who backed Paytm, MakeMyTrip and Swiggy early, back when starting a company in India was still seen as embarrassing.
Ravi Adusumalli bet on Indian startups in the early 2000s, a time when telling your parents you wanted to build a company was basically a family scandal. He turned that early conviction into early stakes in Paytm, MakeMyTrip, Swiggy, Meesho and Urban Company. His firm, once called SAIF Partners, rebranded to Elevation Capital in 2020 with a fresh $400 million fund. MakeMyTrip alone returned about $400 million. He still sits on the Paytm and Urban Company boards, which tells you he cares more about the work than the party.
Net Worth
Not publicly disclosed
Verified Oct 2026
Nationality
American
Time Horizon
Long-Term
Risk Appetite
8 / 10
Fund
Elevation Capital
CAREER & BACKGROUND
Adusumalli graduated from Cornell with an economics degree in 1998. He cut his teeth at Credit Suisse and then Mobius Venture Capital before heading east.
In the early 2000s he started backing Indian founders through SAIF Partners, the SoftBank Asia Infrastructure Fund, whose India practice began in 2001. He backed Paytm parent One97 Communications, MakeMyTrip and Justdial early, and later Swiggy, Meesho, FirstCry, Urban Company, ixigo and ShareChat.
In October 2020 he rebranded the India business as Elevation Capital and closed a $400 million fund. He later raised a $670 million fund, and in 2025 to 2026 the firm added a $400 million growth vehicle, Elevation Holdings, and launched a roughly $500 million Fund IX for seed and Series A.
He is Founder and Co-Managing Partner.
COMPANIES & ROLES
Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF Partners India), Paytm, MakeMyTrip, Swiggy, Meesho, Urban Company, FirstCry, ShareChat, Justdial
INVESTING STYLE & PHILOSOPHY
Adusumalli backs the person before the spreadsheet. His whole model is finding a great founder as early as possible, often before there is a real business, and then staying for a decade.
Today he focuses on consumer tech and fintech, mostly at growth stage. He avoids chasing hot valuations, and he holds winners long instead of flipping them for a quick markup.
He also insists that founders solve India the Indian way. Copying a US or China playbook, in his view, is a dead end.
THE PLAYBOOK
Risk Approach
High risk by design. He invests at the seed and pre-Series A stage, where most bets fail and the survivors have to carry the whole fund.
He accepts that math and leans into it by concentrating on a handful of founders he believes in.
Money Habits
He is not a red-carpet VC chasing headlines. His public footprint is almost entirely deals, board seats and the odd interview about the firm.
He still sits on the boards of Paytm, Urban Company, Clear and Axio, which is a lot of operating time for someone who could have coasted on early exits. The tell is that he holds winners for a decade instead of flipping them.
In other words, he would rather be right in five years than look smart this quarter.
BIGGEST WIN
MakeMyTrip is the clean one. SAIF put roughly $25 million into the travel booking site between 2005 and 2008, owned about 41% of it at the 2010 Nasdaq listing, and sold the last of its stake in early 2017.
Reports put total proceeds near $400 million, around 16 times the money in, one of the largest cash exits from an Indian venture deal at the time. Paytm was the other giant.
SAIF was an early backer of its parent One97 Communications, and Elevation still had a board seat there years later. Not bad for bets placed when nobody else would show up.
BIGGEST MISTAKE
The honest knock is concentration risk and patience cutting both ways. Holding Paytm for over a decade meant riding it through a 2021 IPO that lost about a quarter of its value on day one and a 2024 regulatory crackdown on Paytm Payments Bank.
A firm that brags about holding winners long also has to hold them through the drawdowns. He has also admitted, in the 2020 rebrand interviews, that the old SAIF name had become a liability, confused with SoftBank in a market where SoftBank was writing huge cheques.
FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHY
His core belief is simple. Money is easy to find, a real partner is not.
He wants founders who are still as hungry to win today as on the day they started. What compounds returns, in his view, is patience plus deep local knowledge.
He also believes India needs founders who understand what actually works on the ground, not imported strategies dressed up in a pitch deck.
FAMILY & PERSONAL LIFE
Adusumalli keeps his personal life almost entirely out of the press. His public footprint is his work.
EDUCATION
He earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Cornell University in 1998. The finance grounding led him first to Credit Suisse and then to Mobius Venture Capital, where he learned the venture trade before taking the leap to India in 2002.
BOOKS & RESOURCES
Adusumalli has not written a book
For his actual thinking, the best sources are Elevation Capital's own perspectives essays and his interviews around the 2020 rebrand from SAIF Partners to Elevation
QUOTES (1)
We have had conversations every 12-24 months to re-brand ourselves to something which represents us, instead of attaching us to our legacy.
NETFIGO SCORE
Proprietary 5-dimension investor rating
Risk Appetite
Contrarian Index
Track Record
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Related Profiles
Investors
Deep Kalra
SAIF Partners, Adusumalli's firm, backed Kalra's MakeMyTrip early and sold out by 2017 for about $400 million, roughly 16x.
Lee Fixel
Another early foreign investor who bet big on Indian consumer startups, Fixel through Flipkart at Tiger Global.
Vani Kola
A fellow pioneer of India's early-stage venture scene who, like Adusumalli, was investing before startups were fashionable.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Adusumalli was an early backer of Sharma's Paytm through SAIF Partners and still sits on its board.
Head-to-Head
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