If ride-hailing in urban India is a $6 billion market, solving bus transport is a $20 billion market in smaller towns and beyond—opportunities like these is leading this VC to place bets on startups catering to rural India
Manish Kheterpal, managing partner, WaterBridge Ventures, says one must look beyond the obvious to spot the Bharat opportunity
Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India
In 2006, Manish Kheterpal made his first big contrarian bet. After spending almost a decade in the US with top global private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms such as Actis and Rho, the IIT-Delhi and Standford Graduate School of Business alumnus came back to India in 2005. The move made sense for the fund manager. India was being billed as the next big investment destination. The ‘India Shining’ campaign by the government in 2004 tried to sell a dream of a country gearing up for outsized business opportunities over the next decade. The global investors found the pitch appealing.
(This story appears in the 18 June, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)