How We Underwrite

I spent years inside regulated industries before I ever looked at a cap table. The question we asked before launching anything wasn't "will this sell?" It was "what breaks first, and what happens when it does?"

That instinct never left me. It just found a new home in venture.

How we evaluate

When we look at a company at Chakra, we're not starting with the market size slide. We're starting with the team — how they think under pressure, how they've handled the moments that didn't go their way, whether they're building something because they understand the problem deeply or because the timing looks right. Market knowledge matters enormously, but founders who truly understand their customer's pain — operationally, not theoretically — are the ones who build products that stick.

From there, we go into the structure. Not as a legal exercise, but as a way of understanding how seriously the founders think about their stakeholders. How is the cap table built? Are governance rights designed to protect all parties or just the founders? In regulated industries — BFSI, clinical workflow, compliance technology — structure isn't administrative detail. It's a signal of how the company will behave when things get complicated. And they always get complicated.

We also stay close after the check is written — not to micromanage, but because that's when the real work begins. Governance rights matter because they give us the standing to help when it counts. Information rights matter because you can't support what you can't see.

Why we're built for this

What makes our process different is that our team has sat on the other side of these decisions. Sri has run business units and led M&A. Rampi has managed large-scale transformation inside global financial institutions. I've worked inside highly regulated environments where wrong calls had real consequences. We're not pattern-matching from a distance. We're evaluating from experience.

That changes the questions we ask. It changes what we trust and what we pressure-test. And it means that when we get conviction on a company, it's grounded in something more than a model.