Harshjit Sethi

Congrats to @SarvamAI on the phenomenal milestone of launching India’s first sovereign LLM! As the company’s first investor, I couldn’t be more excited about what this means for our ecosystem. This is India’s “Sarvam moment,” reminiscent of the US’s “ChatGPT moment” in Nov 2022 and China’s “Deepseek moment” in Jan 2025. Ecosystems galvanise around local champions - companies that show the world what a country’s best and brightest are capable of. Over the past two weeks, Sarvam has launched a suite of fantastic products: from hyper-realistic voice models that effectively code-switch between languages, to the world’s leading OCR for Indian scripts. They have proven what superior research, engineering, and a deep understanding of a diverse local market can produce. I’m reminded of the first conversation I had with @pratykumar and @vivek_raghavan, before the company even existed. The vision was clear then, as it is now: bring the power of AI to every Indian in the mode and language they are most comfortable with. We called it “UPI for AI,” a thesis I wrote about with my former colleague @TrivediVedant back in 2023: peakxv.com/article/sarvam… Congratulations to Team Sarvam and to India’s AI ecosystem, supported by the efforts of @GoI_MeitY, whose GPU grant was critical in making this milestone happen. Here’s to many more successes for our ecosystem!

After a decade at Sequoia India and Peak XV, I’ve decided to leave the firm and explore a new innings. It’s been a journey rich in learning and relationships. When I first moved back from the Bay Area in 2015, both India and venture capital were experiments for me. Looking back, I’m glad I made the choice. The Indian startup ecosystem has evolved tremendously – the ambition of founders, scale of companies, digital infrastructure on which they are built, and the vibrancy of our capital markets have all grown faster than I first predicted. I have had the fortune of working with founders who turned early conviction into businesses of scale and consequence. Thank you for trusting me to be a part of your journey. To my partners, colleagues and co-investors, it’s been wonderful building together. I’m grateful for the many friendships that I will carry with me. As I reflect on my professional journey and what’s next, I keep returning to a line by Rumi, “Let the beauty we love be what we do.” There are few things that give me more joy than partnering with founders at the earliest of stages when belief matters most. Excited for the next decade!

Huge respect @pratykumar @vivek_raghavan. Carrying the nations aspirations on your shoulders. Take tips from the #Indian Cricket team !! Great job in co-leading the seed investment here @HarshjitSethi @peakxvpartners

A $140m fundraise deserves to be celebrated with some sugar 😀 @chennamaneni @thedarwinbox

@9sthakur Shraeyansh, you have been a key part in helping us build the early stage business in India. Thank you for the friendship and partnership for the past decade. Excited to see what you build and achieve over the next decade!

I am excited to share some personal news: After an incredible 9+ years at Peak XV / Sequoia India, I have decided to embark on a new entrepreneurial journey. The next 10 years are going to be India’s golden digital decade and our founders now have true belief to create the world’s best companies from India. Over the years, I got the privilege to see several category creators get built from an idea to becoming leading digital businesses in their respective markets in India. It’s hard to have not felt the entrepreneurial energy from seeing these journeys up close. It’s been a long dream of mine to be an entrepreneur and I am excited about the journey ahead. I’m grateful to my partners and colleagues at Peak XV for giving me such a wonderful opportunity and the platform to have learnt so much about investing. It’s been a privilege to have worked with such smart people and learn from them over the years. More to follow soon but for the next several months, I will continue to be with the firm and work with portfolio companies. Here’s to the next chapter 🚀

Great to meet with the @OpenAI leadership team today @sama @bradlightcap @snsf @kevinweil I left the meeting amazed with 1/ the breadth of things they are working on and how quickly they ship and 2/ their relentless drive to get feedback on their product and business. Truly remarkable at their scale of business and org size. Thanks @pragyamisra for having us. @RajanAnandan @peakxvpartners

Amazing to see this come together, hopefully the first of several such initiatives to put India on the global AI map. Carpe Diem! 🚀

The ground swell to build a SOTA sovereign model for all of India, in their language, is incredible to see. Excited to have the @SarvamAI team take on the mantle to build this. Join us in the effort!

Congratulations to Mohit and Rahul, who we've had the good fortune of knowing for about 15 years in building an authentic brand that has changed the conversation for skincare in India. The team at Minimalist says no to much more then they say yes to, and have stayed focused on creating products that work and building trust in consumers. Starting from a Surge investment to series A (h/t @mayank_porwal18) with many trips to the wonderful city of Jaipur, we witnessed entrepreneurship at its best. To the team at HUL, very nice work. @peakxvpartners @_surgeahead @kriti_kg @KChanchani @Kashyap_Parikh

Today is a landmark day for Minimalist. The journey of Minimalist is one full of narrative violations and they have broken the conventional playbooks in every way possible to arrive here, many of which I would like to mention: 1/Product is the king : While most other brands have focused on building distribution, Minimalist has always kept product innovation at the centre stage. They have invested multifold into R&D team/Infra compared to any other brand of similar scale. Incredible time and energy goes into each launch and only a grand total of 70 Odd SKU’s have been shipped in company’s lifetime. 2/Customer is the best marketer : The company believes their customers are their biggest influencers. Till date they has not paid a single influencer to market the product. 3/Own the process : Minimalist has always manufactured their products in-house and they don't believe in giving the product quality control away. 4/Brand extendibility : Starting from skincare, they have successfully expanded into many new areas like haircare, bodycare, Rx and babycare under the same brand, instead of going the house of brands way. 5/Global scale-up : For an Indian brand to be able to sell globally is an incredibly tall challenge and Minimalist has done a pretty commendable job in building a fast growing and sizeable scale of business across eight countries. 6/DNA of frugality : Mohit and Rahul have quietly built this business from Jaipur while being profitable all along, a feat that is rare to see. Mohit and Rahul have been building businesses for last 15 years and this “overnight success” is a fruit of many failed attempts, including a pivot from Freewill to their current avatar. This article (peakxv.com/article/minima…) from July 2020 announcing the Series A threw me back the nostalgia lane on how this team’s execution, grit and sheer focus convinced us to back them twice, both at seed and series A. Heartfelt thanks to @shaileshlakhani and @RajanAnandan for their support. Best wishes to the Minimalist team, and excited for the future!

We are thrilled to back @rahulpangam & Uttam, seasoned founders with deep experience in machine learning and a knack for attracting the best talent for their ambition to help every company have access to the best (agentic) data science talent. 5/5

Whether it's an auto parts manufacturer that wants to predict demand better, a fin services firm that wants to model risk in a more sophisticated manner or a retail co that wants to improve user segmentation, RapidCanvas can build advanced, tailored models 80% faster & cheaper. 4/

A beautiful thing about new tech is the deflationary impact it has to enable access to a product or service for new users. @rapidcanvas, a flag-bearer for the new Service-as-a-Software movement, is helping cos make sophisticated data-backed decisions. More in 🧵 forbes.com/sites/davidpro…

Over the past 4 years of serving on the board of @lambdatesting, what has consistently stood out is their pace of product innovation to fix code quality challenges for engineering orgs. With some F500 companies as initial customers, Kane AI is their latest launch to fully automate the process - an end-to-end testing platform that authors test cases, intelligently prioritises them and runs them on the Lambatest infrastructure. Excited for the team to bring this to companies across the globe! @asad0801 @msupernaut @mayankbhola @peakxvpartners techcrunch.com/2024/12/10/sof…

The quality of customers Enterpret has been able to onboard is exceptional- something we rarely see in a seed-stage co emerging from India. We are early partners having led the seed round and are excited to see Enterpret continue on their path of helping every co in the world become more customer-centric. 6/6

Enterpret is the prototypical gen AI co. It solves a real business problem in a completely new manner only possible because of technological advancements. It is used by some of the world’s most customer-focused companies - Canva, Notion, Figma - to make business decisions /5

"There is only one boss. The customer." - Sam Walton, Walmart founder. Being customer-centric is a necessity to succeed and @enterpret_ai is helping the best global product companies do this. Congrats @varunconfirms & @arnavshr! economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/funding/c… 🧵 on why we're excited about Enterpret ⬇️