For the past year we have been evaluating the impact of 11 fintechs on women customers. By March 2026, with a combined reach of 1.02 crore women, one finding kept surfacing which rarely reaches a product roadmap: Mentorship (and its value). For women entrepreneurs, mentorship is frequently the missing infrastructure that decides whether capital and… Continue reading Why women entrepreneurs grow as fast as their circle of trust
Available for sale at a local arts-and-crafts exhibition stall in Ahmedabad are miniature crocheted products. The display counter brims with tiny hand-woven superheroes ready to fight, blooming sunflowers, cherries, jellyfish, multi-coloured bumblebees, dogs, and pink hearts. They’re attached to keyrings and hair clips for use as accessories. Selling them is Sitara Zhimo from the Chekiye… Continue reading Women of Bharat: Sitara Zhimo, Nagaland
This playbook is designed to help fintech startups navigate partnerships with various Financial Service Providers (FSPs) including banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), microfinance institutions (MFIs), and similar institutions. It draws on practical insights from years of co-creation and extensive engagements with fintech founders, FSPs, ecosystem partners, and subject matter experts across India’s financial… Continue reading Playbook for Fintech-FSP Partnerships
A rocket was launched every 27 hours in 2025. 329 in total, the highest ever in space history. How? Reusable rockets. The biggest innovation of mankind. For the longest time (read more than 6 decades), boosters splashed down in the ocean and turned into an expensive reef. Now, the booster fires again, navigates itself back… Continue reading Launch Economics: How Reusability Is the Cheat Code
Gitika is a petite, lean woman in her mid-forties. She is dressed in a simple white cotton saree, with pastel splashes along the border. Her tone is measured and even as she greets us at the entrance of her workshed. As she ushers us into the small room, I notice sunlight streaming in through the… Continue reading Women of Bharat: Gitika, Assam
Cooks and cleaners account for 5.4 million of India’s 48 million urban women workers (Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2024). For many, aspirational goals such as upskilling, starting a business and unplanned shocks like medical emergencies create a pressing need for accessible credit. Far from a homogenous demand profile, women in gig work represent a diverse… Continue reading The Last Mile: Understanding Credit Access and Financial Behaviour Among Women Gig Workers
At 87%, India has one of the highest fintech adoption rates, well above the global average. Fintech’s digital distribution across multiple domains: payments, lending, wealth management, insurance, and fraud management, has narrowed the gap for accessing financial services. But when we zoom in on semi-urban and rural women, the picture changes. Uptake remains stubbornly low.… Continue reading Solving the Trust Gap in Fintech: Lessons from Women-Centric Fintechs in Bharat
Abhay Kulkarni, Deepak Anand, and Sudhir Deshpande co-founded MediVault Informatics (MI) in 2019, and onboarded a fourth co-founder, Suraj Garg in 2022. Before founding the healthtech venture, they had been co-workers and friends at a data analytics firm. Over the next few years, MI expanded its technology and client portfolio, raised external funding… Continue reading MediVault Informatics: Negotiating co-founder discord in a growth-stage startup
We all live with constraints throughout our existence. We navigate our lives and purposes around these constraints. Over the course of several conversations with eight to ten women producing silk and cotton products in rural Assam, what emerged was not just a story of enterprise, but one of persistence within deeply embedded structural constraints. In… Continue reading Women of Bharat: Weaving Against the Odds – The Entrepreneurship Journey of Rural Women in Handloom
When Sunita began selling her homemade spice blends from her home in Ujjain, it was not a leap of entrepreneurial ambition but an act of necessity. With her husband’s income uncertain, her enterprise became the household’s spine. She negotiates orders on WhatsApp, accepts UPI payments from customers, and keeps a careful mental account of costs… Continue reading Mind the gap: Financial products that women in India need but don’t have!
Indian health-tech startups, striving to build AI-based products, are often stumped by their limited access to relevant medical data. Most commercial and open-source datasets originate from Western archives based on medical studies conducted on the Caucasian male, who, for the longest time, represented the whole of humanity. Furthermore, unverified third-party datasets are riddled with… Continue reading 5C Network: A Socio-Technical Approach to Building Data Moats
I am at a rural homestead with my colleague in a quiet village in the Kamrup district of Assam. The house is well-built and roomy, with a sloping roof – a deliberate design requirement in this part of the world on account of frequent rain. A couple of goats are tethered to a pole, creepers… Continue reading Women of Bharat: Vibha Kalita, Assam