Titan Capital

Timeline

1. 2011Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal begin writing personal cheques into founders, with no fund and no thesis.
2. 2011A founder shows Bahl a way to book a cab without standing on the street; the investment in Ola becomes the first of the firm's 100x returns.60,000 dollars, fully exited in late 2021
3. 2014Snapdeal, the company the two founders built, is at its peak as one of India's largest online marketplaces.
4. 2015Titan Capital writes its first cheque into Urban Company as part of a 10 crore rupee seed round alongside Elevation Capital and Accel Partners.
5. 2015Several press reports date the founding of the firm itself to this year, the point at which personal investing became an organised activity.
6. 2016Mamaearth is founded, and Titan Capital backs it early enough to hold shares through to its listing seven years later.
7. 2017Razorpay, in which Titan Capital is an early investor, becomes one of the most valuable payments companies in the country.
8. 2019Moneycontrol reports that the Snapdeal founders have created an investment firm called Titan Capital.September 2019
9. 2020The firm keeps writing pre-seed and seed cheques through the pandemic, including into businesses that later turned profitable at scale.
10. 2021Titan Capital exits Ola fully and sells part of its Urban Company stake, both at or near the peak valuations of those companies.
11. 2021It leads a 340,000 dollar pre-seed round in WickedGud and joins pre-seed rounds in consumer and software startups through the year.
12. 2022It backs Anveshan in a 2 million dollar pre-Series A and Project Hero in a 3.2 million dollar round.
13. 2023Titan Capital makes a 100x return on Credgenics and is reported to have added Ola, Urban Company and Mamaearth to the same club.November 2023
14. 2023Partial or full exits are reported in Bewakoof, Unicommerce, ANS Commerce and Netmeds.
15. 2024The Winners Fund takes shape, first reported as a 300 crore rupee pool and the firm's first vehicle with capital from outside investors.April 2024
16. 2024The fund announces that it has reached its target corpus of 200 crore rupees, with Bahl and Bansal as its largest investors.August 2024
17. 2024Titan Capital launches the Indicorns index of profitable Indian startups with revenue above 100 crore rupees.
18. 2024The Winners Fund marks its final close at 333 crore rupees, about 40 million dollars, after a green-shoe option was exercised.October 2024
19. 2024Bipin Shah, then managing partner, leaves to start his own micro venture firm, Zeropearl.
20. 2025The firm launches a dedicated investment vertical for defence and strategic technology, covering hardware, aerospace, cybersecurity and manufacturing.May 2025
21. 2025The Indicorns 2025 list is released at India Internet Day with 202 companies and combined FY24 revenue of 1,51,137 crore rupees.
22. 2026Titan Capital states that it has backed more than 300 companies and 650 founders since 2011, and continues to write pre-seed and seed cheques from Gurugram.

What it does

Titan Capital is a venture capital firm that invests at the earliest stages of a company's life. It writes pre-seed and seed cheques, which usually makes it the first institutional money in a business, arriving before the company has a product that works reliably, a revenue line worth modelling or a market that other investors have agreed exists. The firm sets out its approach in three lines on its own site: back the founder over the market, back conviction before consensus, and stay involved after the cheque clears.^[1]

The firm is run by its two founders rather than by a large partnership. Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal built Snapdeal, and they began investing from personal capital in 2011, writing cheques into founders before the word startup had entered common Indian usage. Titan Capital's stated identity, founder first and operator led, comes directly from that history: the two investors have run a company through a boom, a failed merger and a hard reset, and they sell that experience alongside their money.^[2]

What the firm offers beyond capital is a network. Its own account describes access to a 15 year network of more than 650 founders, corporate partners and domain experts, introductions to a bench of professionals for hiring, fundraising help from targeting to close, and counsel during crises. In a seed market where several funds can write a similar cheque, that support layer is the part a founder is really buying.^[1]

Titan Capital also publishes research about Indian startups. Its Indicorns index lists Indian companies that have crossed 100 crore rupees in annual revenue and turned profitable, an argument made with a list rather than an essay, that the country's best businesses are not always the ones with the highest valuations. For a seed fund, an annual public dataset is an unusual asset.^[8]

History

Titan Capital did not begin as a fund. In 2011 Bahl and Bansal started putting their own money into founders, without a mandate, a committee or a pool of outside capital, and the story the firm tells about its first deal is deliberately unglamorous: a founder stopped Bahl on his way out of a conference to show him a way to book a reliable cab, and that company became Ola. The first cheque was 60,000 dollars, and the position was held until late 2021, when the firm exited fully at a time when Ola's valuation had reached 7.3 billion dollars.^[4]

For most of the following decade the investing ran alongside Snapdeal. The two founders were running an e-commerce company that had raised large rounds and later fought through a difficult period, while their personal capital went into seed rounds of companies such as Urban Company, Mamaearth, Razorpay, OfBusiness and Unicommerce. Moneycontrol reported on the arrangement in September 2019, describing Snapdeal's founders as having created an investment firm called Titan Capital.^[3]

Several press reports date the firm itself to 2015, when the informal investing became an organised activity with a team and a portfolio strategy rather than two founders' personal balance sheet. That is the year Urban Company's seed round closed with Titan Capital in it, alongside Elevation Capital and Accel Partners, and the year from which later counts of companies backed are measured. Both dates are true in different senses: personal investing from 2011, an institution from around 2015.^[4]

The 2020s turned the reputation into returns. Credgenics became a 100x return, and by late 2023 the firm was being written about as having a club of investments that had multiplied a hundred times over, including Ola, Urban Company and Mamaearth, with partial or full exits reported in Bewakoof, Unicommerce, ANS Commerce and Netmeds. Those realisations are what made it possible to raise outside capital without changing what the firm does.^[4]

In 2024 that happened. Titan Capital raised its first fund with external investors, the Winners Fund, and launched the Indicorns index in the same year. In 2025 it added a defence and strategic technology vertical and published the second Indicorns list. By 2026 the firm's own count of its record stood at more than 300 companies and 650 founders, with the office still in Gurugram.^[2]

Founders and leadership

Kunal Bahl is the co-founder of Snapdeal and of Titan Capital. His position on investing is that the person matters more than the category: categories change, timing changes, the model changes, while the founder building usually does not. He has described the firm's work as backing founders at the point where there is more conviction than evidence, and his comments in the Indicorns releases are about profitability and durability rather than valuation.^[2]

Rohit Bansal is the second co-founder, and the firm presents him as the operator who has already lived most of the decisions founders bring to him, from the first ten hires to pricing that is not working to the quarter that does not go to plan. He is a co-author of the same strategy, and the two are described in press coverage and in the firm's own material as acting together on the fund.^[14]

The team around them is small and plainly organised. Chetan Rana is chief financial officer and chief compliance officer, and Aakriti Kakkar is vice president for corporate development. The investment side is split into technology and consumer teams, with Manik Pasricha and Utpal Raman Sharma as vice presidents, and an early growth team under Shiv Kapoor that works on the Winners Fund's follow-on mandate.^[14]

One departure is worth recording because it was reported. Bipin Shah, who had been managing partner, left in late 2024 and launched his own micro venture firm, Zeropearl, focused on being the first cheque at pre-seed stage.^[11] He closed its maiden fund at 159 crore rupees in September 2025.^[12]

The Winners Fund

The Winners Fund is Titan Capital's first vehicle raised from outside investors, and its mandate is narrower than the firm's own activity. It invests exclusively in follow-on rounds of breakout companies from the seed portfolio, so it does not hunt for new deals: it concentrates capital on the companies the firm already knows best. Moneycontrol first reported the plan in April 2024 at 300 crore rupees, and the fund announced that it had reached its 200 crore rupee target in August 2024.^[7]

Bahl and Bansal are the fund's largest investors, which is the structural detail that matters most. A manager that anchors its own fund carries the same downside as the outside limited partners, and the firm said the money would be used to support founders of portfolio companies in later rounds rather than to widen the portfolio. The book was reported to include family offices, chief executives and founders of leading companies, and figures from the venture capital industry.^[5]

The final close came in October 2024 at 333 crore rupees, about 40 million dollars, after the firm took up a green-shoe option to accommodate extra commitments. The fundraise was completed in less than six months, and the management team includes Chetan Rana as chief financial officer. For a first time fund in a market where institutional limited partners are careful, moving from a 200 crore rupee target to a 333 crore rupee close in two months is a statement about the record behind it.^[6]

The follow-on strategy is the one the firm's exit record supports. In Ola, Titan Capital entered at 60,000 dollars in 2011 and sold fully in late 2021 when the company's valuation had reached 7.3 billion dollars. In Urban Company it entered the seed round in 2015 and made a partial exit in 2021, when the company was valued at 2.8 billion dollars during an employee share buyback. In Credgenics it is reported to have made a 100x return. Those are exactly the positions a follow-on fund exists to add to.^[4]

The Indicorns index

Indicorns is Titan Capital's answer to the way Indian startups are usually measured. Instead of listing companies by valuation, the index lists companies that have crossed 100 crore rupees in annual revenue and turned profitable, a definition that excludes most of the celebrated names in the ecosystem. The first version was published in September 2024 with 186 companies that had collectively generated 1,06,040 crore rupees in revenue and 8,615 crore rupees in profit in the 2023 financial year.^[8]

The 2025 edition was released at India Internet Day and grew to 202 companies with combined revenue of 1,51,137 crore rupees and profits of 7,393 crore rupees for the 2024 financial year. The release also reported geography and sector: Delhi NCR led with 51 companies, ahead of Bengaluru with 42 and Mumbai with 35, while fintech accounted for 50 of the entries, with e-commerce and logistics behind it. All 202 companies had been founded within the previous 15 years and together employed more than 1,46,705 people.^[9]

The index has a commercial purpose as well as a rhetorical one. It maps a population of profitable, unglamorous companies that venture money usually ignores, and publishing it positions Titan Capital as the fund that understands them. Bahl's framing in the 2025 release was blunt: success in the startup ecosystem has been linked to valuations for too long, and the list exists to recognise companies built on profitability and steady growth.^[9]

The firm's own portfolio supplies examples. OfBusiness, Razorpay and Unicommerce all appear in Indicorns reporting, which is the point: a fund that argues for profitable scale needs a portfolio that can be pointed at when the argument is made.^[9]

Portfolio

Titan Capital's portfolio is a list of Indian consumer and technology companies spread across commerce, fintech, services, logistics and consumer brands. Its published portfolio includes Ola, Urban Company, Mamaearth, OfBusiness, Razorpay, Unicommerce, Snapdeal, Shadowfax, Credgenics, Giva, Zouk, Supertails, Mekr, Zingbus, Park+, Invideo, Cart.com and Boba Bhai.^[13]

The pattern in that list is worth reading. Several of the companies are businesses that look unglamorous from the outside, such as logistics, business to business commerce, debt recovery software or warehousing, and several are consumer brands that scaled on repeat purchase rather than novelty. The firm's own founder stories include Mamaearth, Urban Company, OfBusiness, Razorpay, Shadowfax and Credgenics, with quotes from their founders about distribution, profitability and unglamorous work.^[2]

The portfolio is also where the firm's later activity shows up. In January 2026 it backed For Real, a factory outlet marketplace, in a pre-seed round, which is the same kind of small first cheque it has been writing since 2011.^[16]

The spread is wide on purpose. Among the companies it names, Shadowfax is a logistics business, Credgenics sells software to lenders, Giva and Zouk are jewellery and lifestyle brands, Supertails is pet care, Mekr is a software tool for small businesses, Zingbus runs intercity bus services, Boba Bhai is a beverage chain, Cart.com serves online sellers and Invideo makes video editing tools. A seed fund that would rather be early in many categories than concentrated in one is built to meet that variety, and the companies it describes are usually the first external money a founder has taken.^[13]

Investment approach and cheque sizes

Titan Capital writes small cheques early. Its reported pre-seed investments include a 340,000 dollar round in WickedGud in September 2021^[15] and a pre-seed round in For Real in January 2026.^[16] Those are amounts that a seed fund will not usually bother with, which is precisely the gap the firm occupies: enough money to reach a first version of the product, not enough to take the risk away.

The firm's own language about this is about conviction and timing. It says it does not wait for consensus, that the best opportunities often look wrong before they are proven right, and that it is willing to back its own read early. In practice that means a decision made by two founders who have run a company, rather than by a committee, and it means the firm is comfortable being the only institutional investor in a round.^[1]

The follow-on side is arranged through the Winners Fund, which concentrates later capital in the best performers instead of scattering it. Combining an early stage funnel with a follow-on pool is a common structure among experienced seed investors, and it exists because returns in venture capital are concentrated in a handful of companies: most of the money comes from a few deals, so the ability to keep buying into those specific deals matters more than the ability to see many new ones.^[5]

Exits and returns

Titan Capital's public reputation rests on a small number of extraordinary exits. The clearest is Ola: 60,000 dollars invested in 2011, held for a decade, and sold in late 2021 when the company was valued at 7.3 billion dollars. The second is Urban Company: entry in the 2015 seed round, and a partial stake sale in 2021 that is reported to have returned more than a hundred times the money invested, with the company valued at 2.8 billion dollars during an employee share buyback that December.^[4]

Credgenics supplied a third. The firm is reported to have made a 100x return on the debt recovery and legal automation platform, which was valued at 350 million dollars after a Series B round. Mamaearth, which listed on Indian stock exchanges in 2023, was expected to produce a similar multiple, and press calculations at the time of the initial public offering put the two founders' holdings at roughly a hundred times their cost.^[4]

The exits are not all of that kind, and the firm does not pretend they are. Partial or full exits have been reported in Bewakoof, Unicommerce, ANS Commerce and Netmeds, and some portfolio companies have shut down entirely. In a seed portfolio of more than 300 companies, most outcomes are ordinary, a few are losses and the returns come from a handful of positions, which is the arithmetic of the asset class rather than a comment on any one company.^[6]

The timing of the biggest exits is the part worth noticing. Both Ola and Urban Company were sold or partly sold at or near their peak valuations in 2021, before the global funding market reset. That is either discipline or luck, and the firm's own account favours the first explanation: endurance over exits, with the exits taken when the price is offered rather than when the fund needs cash.^[1]

Defence and strategic technology

In May 2025 Titan Capital launched a specialised vertical for defence and strategic technology, the first time it has organised part of its activity around a sector rather than around a stage. The programme targets startups working in hardware, aerospace, cybersecurity and manufacturing, with the stated aim of supporting national security, generating jobs and helping India become an exporter of strategic technologies.^[10]

Bahl's framing of the vertical was about people rather than products: the country needs to back its engineers, researchers and builders to create sovereign, dual use technologies. As part of the programme the firm said it would work with veterans of the armed forces, scientists and experienced technologists who can assess and guide investments with domain expertise that a generalist seed fund does not have in house.^[10]

The vertical also says something about how the firm reads the Indian market. Defence technology became investable in India only after the government opened procurement to private companies and created a dedicated funding route for deep technology, and a seed investor that moves early into a newly opened sector is doing what it did with consumer internet in 2011 and with business to business software later.^[10]

Employees and offices

Titan Capital works from M3M Urbana in Sector 67, Gurugram, and has kept a small central team for the size of its portfolio. Its published team is organised into a corporate group covering finance, compliance, community and marketing, a technology investment team, a consumer investment team and an early growth team for follow-on work, with roughly fifteen named people in total.^[14]

The firm does not run the large platform function that later stage funds employ, and it does not publish a headcount. What it does publish is the network it can reach: more than 650 founders, corporate partners and domain experts, plus introductions to a bench of professionals for hiring. For a seed investor the network is the operating asset, and it is much cheaper to maintain than a large staff.^[1]

The location is part of the strategy as well. Gurugram puts the firm in the National Capital Region, close to the consumer internet companies, family offices and industrial groups that supply both its deal flow and its limited partners, while the rest of India's startup market sits in Bengaluru and Mumbai.^[14]

Competition

Titan Capital competes at the very beginning of the funding ladder, where the other participants are angel investors, syndicates, micro venture funds and the seed programmes of larger firms. Its pre-seed rounds are frequently shared with those groups, so the market for early cheques is collaborative as often as it is competitive, and a founder may take money from a syndicate and a fund in the same round.^[15]

The firm's advantage over a syndicate is that it invests its own money and its own fund rather than assembling a group, so it can decide quickly. Its advantage over a larger seed fund is the two founders' own history: a founder choosing between two similar cheques tends to pick the one attached to people who have run a company at scale through a hard period.^[2]

The weakness of the position is that it is hard to scale. A handful of partners can only be in so many deals, and the Winners Fund's follow-on mandate partly solves that by concentrating later capital in fewer companies. The partner who left in 2024 to start his own micro fund, alongside the many seed funds launched by former operators in the same period, is both a compliment to the model and a sign of how crowded the earliest stage has become.^[11]

Controversies and criticism

The most substantive criticism of Titan Capital's model is arithmetic rather than conduct. A portfolio of more than 300 companies, most of them tiny at entry, is one in which a large number of businesses will fail, and the firm's published material naturally emphasises the ones that worked. Its founder stories page lists six companies, all successes, which is a fair criticism of any fund's marketing and not of its investing.^[2]

The 100x return claims rest partly on unnamed sources. Entrackr, which reported the Credgenics, Ola and Urban Company multiples, attributed them to its own sources, and the firm does not publish a return history of its own. A reader should therefore treat the widely repeated figures as reported rather than disclosed: accurate in direction, approximate in size.^[4]

The Indicorns index has also drawn the obvious objection that its definition does the arguing. Revenue of 100 crore rupees plus profitability is one way to define a good business, and it happens to select the kind of company Titan Capital backs, while venture capital in other eras has argued with equal conviction for growth over profit. The index is a well documented dataset, not a neutral one.^[8]

Finally, the firm's association with Snapdeal is worth stating plainly. Snapdeal raised large rounds, made acquisitions, attempted a merger with Flipkart that was abandoned, and then rebuilt around a smaller and more profitable business. Titan Capital's investing philosophy, with its emphasis on endurance and on returns taken at peak, reads as a direct lesson from that experience, which is both a strength of the thesis and its origin.^[3]

How the firm works with founders

Titan Capital describes its involvement in a portfolio company in six services, and the list is worth reading because it is what the firm actually sells. A founder network of more than 650 people, so that a founder with a problem can be introduced to someone who has already solved it. A playbook of operational frameworks drawn from operators who have scaled companies to a public listing. Fundraising help that runs from targeting investors to closing the round. Hiring support through introductions to a bench of professionals, rather than through a recruitment funnel. Crisis counsel for the hard moments. And follow-on capital for the companies that earn it.^[1]

The framing of that list matters as much as the contents. A seed fund cannot compete on money, because any of a dozen funds can write the same cheque, so it competes on what happens after the money lands. The firm's stated beliefs are consistent with that: endurance over exits, meaning involvement does not end at the cheque, and it stays through the pivots, the down rounds and the years when nothing is compounding yet.^[1]

The follow-on arrangement turns that promise into capital. Because the Winners Fund exists to invest in the breakout companies from the seed portfolio, a founder who does well has a natural next cheque from the same people rather than a new roadshow, and the firm has a mechanism to protect its position in the winners. It is a structure that only works if the seed portfolio is genuinely good, which is what the first fund's speed of fundraising implied.^[5]

How a seed fund like this makes money

A venture fund earns in two ways: a management fee on the capital it controls, which pays the team, and a share of the profits, known as carried interest, which pays the partners when the fund returns more than it took in. That second part is why a seed investor's reputation is built on its biggest winners rather than on its average deal. For Titan Capital, the economics are unusually clear because the firm's own money sits in the vehicles alongside the outside capital, with Bahl and Bansal anchoring the Winners Fund as its largest investors.^[5]

The size of the first external fund sets the arithmetic. At 333 crore rupees, about 40 million dollars, the Winners Fund needs a small number of very large outcomes to be a good fund, because follow-on cheques into a handful of companies consume the pool quickly. That is why its mandate is restricted to breakout companies from the seed portfolio and why the firm has an early growth team rather than a broad investment team: the fund is designed to add capital to positions that have already proved themselves, not to discover new ones.^[6]

The seed activity and the follow-on fund also feed each other. The seed cheques buy the right to see a company early and to keep buying later, and the follow-on fund gives the firm the money to act on that right without asking a selection committee elsewhere for permission. In a market where the best breakout companies raise several rounds before they list, holding a meaningful stake through to an exit is what turns a 100x entry price into a large absolute return.^[1]

That structure explains much of what the firm says in public. Its stated preference for endurance over exits, its argument that the founder matters more than the market, and its published research on profitable companies are all ways of saying that the money is made by staying invested in the few companies that work, for a long time, and by adding to them when they do.^[1]

Reading the numbers

Four sets of numbers describe Titan Capital as of 2026. More than 300 companies backed since 2011 and 650 founders in its network. A first external fund of 333 crore rupees, about 40 million dollars, closed in October 2024 and anchored by its own founders. Reported returns of roughly a hundred times cost on Ola, Urban Company, Credgenics and Mamaearth. And an index of 202 Indian companies that together reported 1,51,137 crore rupees of revenue and 7,393 crore rupees of profit in the 2024 financial year.^[9]

The interesting thing about those numbers is how little they depend on any one company. A seed portfolio of this size, with a follow-on fund dedicated to the best of it, is designed so that the return comes from a handful of positions while the rest supply information. The Indicorns dataset is the firm making the same observation about the wider market in public: the Indian companies that quietly earn money outnumber the ones that make headlines.^[8]

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