RAVI ADUSUMALLI
The Elevation Capital founder who wrote first checks into Paytm, MakeMyTrip and Swiggy back when starting a company in India was still seen as embarrassing.
Ravi Adusumalli bet on Indian startups in 2002, a time when telling your parents you wanted to build a company was basically a family scandal. He turned that early conviction into first-check 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. Eight of his companies have gone public. He runs it all from Park City, Utah, which tells you he cares more about the work than the party.
Net Worth
Undisclosed
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 2002 he started backing Indian founders through SAIF Partners, a pan-Asia fund seeded by SoftBank and Cisco. He was first-check into Paytm parent One97 Communications, MakeMyTrip, Justdial and later Swiggy, Meesho, FirstCry, Urban Company and ShareChat.
In 2011 he raised the first India-only fund at $350 million and slowly cut the cord from the China and pan-Asia operations. In October 2020 he rebranded the whole shop to Elevation Capital and closed a $400 million India fund.
He later raised a $670 million vehicle. He has made the Forbes Midas List of top tech investors more than once.
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.
Elevation keeps each partner to just two or three new deals a year. That is on purpose.
Fewer deals means more time to actually help. 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
Here is the surprising part. One of India's most important tech investors does not live in Mumbai or Bangalore.
He runs Elevation from Park City, Utah, a ski town of about 8,000 people. His wife is a doctor and they have two kids.
He is not a red-carpet VC chasing headlines. Colleagues describe him as disciplined and allergic to hype, the kind of investor who does not play mark-to-market games to make his fund look good on paper.
In other words, he would rather be right in five years than look smart this quarter.
BIGGEST WIN
MakeMyTrip is the clean one. Elevation backed the travel booking site early, rode it through its US listing, and fully exited around 2017.
Reports peg the return at roughly $400 million, more than 20 times the money in. Paytm was the biggest multiple of all.
Adusumalli has said Paytm delivered the highest multiple his firm ever made, and it became one of Elevation's largest positions. Justdial returned more than 12 times.
Not bad for bets placed when nobody else would show up.
BIGGEST MISTAKE
He passed on both Ola and Flipkart, two of India's biggest startups. The reason is painfully honest.
Every time he met the founders he walked away impressed, then plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet and could not see the business getting past $100 million to $150 million in revenue. He was wrong.
His own lesson from it, in his words, is that you can almost always talk yourself into believing a market is too small, and he has made that mistake more than once. It is the classic VC trap.
Betting on the model instead of the person.
FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHY
His core belief is simple. Money is easy to find, a real partner is not.
He has said flat out that capital is a commodity. What compounds returns is patience plus deep local knowledge.
He thinks the biggest mistake a VC can make is talking yourself out of a great founder because the market looks too small on paper. 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 is married to a doctor and they have two children. The family lives in Park City, Utah, far from India's startup hubs.
He keeps his personal life low profile.
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 source is Elevation Capital's own perspectives essays and his 2020 Forbes India interview, where he lays out why the copy-paste playbook from the US and China no longer works in India
QUOTES (5)
We get a lot of companies come say 'this worked in China, the US—this will work in India.' That playbook is over.
In most cases one can almost always convince oneself that the market's not large enough and we've made that mistake a couple of times.
When I first started investing in India in 2002, it was very difficult for a founder to convince his family he wanted to start a company. That was taboo.
I love working with founders that are looking for a partner, not just capital. Capital is a commodity.
Storytelling is one of the most underrated characteristics of a strong founder.
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Related Profiles
Investors
Deep Kalra
Elevation backed Kalra's MakeMyTrip early and exited around 2017 for a reported 20x-plus return.
Lee Fixel
Another early foreign investor who bet big on Indian consumer startups, though Fixel famously caught the Flipkart deal Adusumalli passed on.
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 one of the earliest backers of Sharma's Paytm, which became Elevation's highest-multiple win.
Head-to-Head
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