SHAILENDRA SINGH still remembers the first time he met Kunal Shah, the newly appointed global head of WhatsApp.

It was sometime in early 2011, and Shah was busy building Freecharge, a company that offered free coupons for mobile recharge. A philosophy graduate, Shah had launched Freecharge in August 2010 and was busy tapping into India’s fast-growing mobile recharge segment, at a time when data and call prices were still steep, and before Mukesh Ambani and Reliance Jio changed India’s telecom sector forever.

“As the meeting was finishing, I said, look, we would love to invest,” Singh, MD at venture capital firm Peak XV Partners, tells Fortune India. “I wanted to know about his customer acquisition cost (CAC). When I asked him in the meeting what his CAC was, he asked me what CAC is. So, I said, well, you are acquiring all these users, and you must have CAC. He said, well, what is CAC? I don’t spend anything.”

It’s another thing that Shah has most certainly figured out what CAC is, and perhaps even gone one step ahead in mastering it, considering how he sold a 20% stake in his latest venture, CRED, to Meta for a staggering $900 million. The deal valued CRED at $4.5 billion.

For Singh, though, stories like these are only a drop in the bucket, given that his firm, Peak XV Partners, has been at the forefront of India’s startup ecosystem for much of the past 20 years. With over $10 billion in assets under management, and some 450 investments, of which around 36 have gone on to launch their IPOs, Peak XV started out as Sequoia Capital India in 2006, before expanding into Southeast Asia.

In 2023, Sequoia Capital restructured its global business into independent entities, leading to the creation of Peak XV Partners for India. Singh leads Peak XV Partners, along with six other managing directors.

Among others, Peak XV Partners’ investments in India include those into billion-dollar firms such as Zomato, Groww, MobiKwik, and Freshworks. “Our business is very unique where, in a strange way, there are positive surprises lurking around the corner,” says Singh.

“You don’t know which meeting you will show up on a Tuesday or on a Thursday or any given day of the week, where you will be wondering, wait, what did this guy just pitch? Is he really going to go build this? And if he succeeds, then you know this will be a giant company and will likely change the industry,” he adds.

Of course, that also has its flip side. In fact, Singh himself has had to face brickbats, especially in full public view, over fallouts with founders — the infamous Rahul Yadav episode, where the former founder of Housing.com accused Singh of torpedoing his company, and even hiring his co-founders! Then there was the fallout with Ankiti Bose of Zilingo, a portfolio company, with the boardroom drama reportedly going on for almost 10 months before Bose was shunted out. Zilingo has since shut down after being valued at nearly $1 billion.

“Let’s say somebody is a great researcher or a scientist, and they are trying to do breakthrough research,” Singh says about facing brickbats. “Most people would have to take a great deal of personal risk. But if they make this breakthrough, it’s good for society. So, people who push the wall forward must always be willing to deal with brickbats. That’s how it works.”

Building steady: Sequoia came to India in 2006 through its merger with Westbridge Capital Partners, a venture capital firm from the country. But long before that, it had already built a name for itself in the U.S. after investing in global technology firms, including Apple, Google, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp. Westbridge had by then established two funds worth $340 million in India, and the acquisition came at a time when India’s startup boom was beginning to take shape.

Soon enough, the company raised $400 million, followed by another $300 million in 2007 — becoming the first Silicon Valley venture capital firm to have more than $1 billion in exposure in India. Sequoia also invested $11.5 million in SKS Microfinance, then India’s largest micro-finance company.

“Between 2006 and 2011, our investments were focussed on financial services, infrastructure, microfinance, and IT services companies,” says Mohit Bhatnagar, MD, Peak XV Partners. Bhatnagar was one of the early hires at the firm, and in his own words, started out as an operator, someone who provided hands-on, tactical support in areas such as marketing, finance, talent acquisition, legal, and technology to help startups scale.

One of the earliest investments for Sequoia, Bhatnagar recalls, was in Prizm Payments, then run by a 50-something Loney Antony, who focussed on setting up ATMs across the country for private banks. “It was a time when a 50-plus entrepreneur who was probably the right horse for the right course, who could walk into a boardroom of a bank and say, ‘You don’t put out your own ATM and your point-of-sale network, I will do that for you’,” Bhatnagar says.

In a similar vein, Peak XV also pumped money into Noida-based Pine Labs in 2009 with an initial $1.2-million seed cheque. Over a 16-year period, they deployed about $35 million and turned it into a billion-dollar windfall through the company’s IPO.

“Pine Labs said you really don’t need six point-of-sale terminals from six different banks,” Bhatnagar explains. “I’ll give you the Pine Labs terminal, and I’ll intelligently route it to HDFC, ICICI, or your bank of choice based on which card you present me with. That’s the disruption it brought about.”

By 2011, the landscape had begun to change. Westbridge’s founders demerged the company to go their separate ways, while Sequoia’s leadership stayed on. “I think in 2011, when the three of us took over [G.V. Ravishankar, Shailendra Singh and Mohit Bhatnagar], we said, look, these are great investments, but honestly, this is not what Sequoia’s core is… it led to investments in technology, as its global business had done in companies such as Google, YouTube, NVIDIA, Cisco, Apple, Airbnb, and ByteDance, among others,” he recalls. It also helped that the mobile internet boom was beginning to take shape in the country.

The scale-up: With its investment philosophy firmly in place, Sequoia then began doubling down on technology investments. Alongside, the company had also forayed into markets in Southeast Asia with investments in Gojek, Tokopedia, and Traveloka. “You are only as good as your next investment,” says Ravishankar. “So, you are on the edge trying to prove yourself all the time, and that’s what it takes.”

By 2015, Sequoia also emerged as India’s biggest investor by number of deals, with investments in companies such as OYO and Zomato. “Indians were now coming on their mobile phones to discover new products and services,” Bhatnagar adds.

The inflection point came in 2016 with the launch of Jio, and earlier with Aadhaar, which helped solve the issue of identity. There were also demonetisation and the launch of UPI, which rapidly changed India’s fintech sector for good, even as consumer internet solutions were beginning to see a huge windfall. “Suddenly, post-2016, there was the ability to pay through UPI, and we saw this big shift in our consumer internet companies,” Bhatnagar adds. “That was a golden phase.”

“We partnered with them in 2018,” says Lalit Keshre, founder, Groww. “They have always been supportive throughout the journey of the company. They also helped us connect with relevant folks. In addition, they have an operations team that helps whenever companies need assistance.”

By 2019, Sequoia also launched Surge, the VC’s early-stage accelerator and incubation programme. At that time, Surge had committed to back 10-20 early-stage startups twice a year, and invest around $1.5 million in each of them. The launch of Surge also helped Sequoia invest in nearly 50 startups in 2019, making it the largest in the country. Today, the Surge programme combines up to $1.5 million to $5 million in capital with a 16-week company-building curriculum, mentoring, and a global founder community.

The surge ahead: Today, Surge has come to become the mainstay of Peak XV Partners’ operations.

Led largely by Rajan Anandan, the former India head of Google, and Singh, the annual revenues of the Top 10 Surge companies have already exceeded $1 billion. Peak XV Partners invests between $500,000 and $5 million in seed capital and has partnered with some 350 founders so far. The company also offers an eight-to-12-week immersion programme, allowing founders to interact with icons and other founders to understand what it takes to build enduring companies. But getting in is also a tough affair, with only the top 0.4% of founders ultimately making it.

“Because the reality is, as a seed-stage company, you only have one objective, which is to get to great product-market fit,” says Anandan. “Because if you can get to that, everything else becomes easier. We look at thousands of applications to partner with 15 or 20 companies per year.” Among others, Surge companies include Minimalist, a skincare company later acquired by Hindustan Unilever; Airalo, which built the world’s first and largest eSIM marketplace; and quantum computing firm Horizon Quantum.

“We want to keep it as an open architecture,” Anandan adds, allowing founders the flexibility to work with both existing and new investors as they scale. “I think what has changed is the composition… when we started, only 10% of [Indian] companies were building for the world. Today, 60% of companies are building for the world.”

Among them is seven-year-old Plum Insurance, an employee insurance provider that counts some 6,000 organisations across India — including CRED, Meesho, PhonePe, Swiggy, Tata CLiQ, Urban Company, WeWork, and Zomato — as its clients, delivering insurance and healthcare benefits to more than 600,000 employees. The company has processed more than 500,000 claims, with the median cashless hospital discharge time reducing to 47 minutes, from 180 minutes in 2019, compared with the industry benchmark of 90 minutes.

“There is a cohort of early customers that you get right from the community itself,” says Abhishek Poddar, the founder of Plum, which is, currently, valued at $125 million. “I think there is a lot of institutional knowledge that they have built over a period of time, and they did a great job at just sharing those experiences in a very structured format, which helps founders such as myself with little experience.”

Not an easy path: With India’s startup activity shaping up, deal sizes declining amid a funding winter and a sharper focus on newer frontiers, Sequoia is also drawing on the strength of its leaders — some of whom have completed two decades — for its next phase of growth.

In 2023, the company underwent a significant reinvention, with Sequoia India & Southeast Asia (SEA) rebranding to Peak XV Partners, with independent operations. Peak XV was the original name given to Mount Everest. As part of the rebranding exercise, the U.S.- and Europe-focussed unit was to retain the parent’s name, Sequoia Capital, while the China unit was to be called HongSham.

“That’s the best thing that actually happened,” Singh explains. “If you ask any team member who’s been around for more than a decade, they will say, whenever in doubt, raise the bar. That is the mantra. So, it was one of those raise-the-bar moments.”

“We’ve gone around to launching and raising a seed fund, a venture fund, a growth fund, a dedicated impact fund, and we’ve become a global firm,” says Sakshi Chopra, MD, Peak XV Partners. “We were India-focussed, and now we are more global in orientation. We have a localised team, a dedicated APAC team, and a cross-border team. We also have a few folks on the ground in the U.S.”

Along the way, the company has also had to deal with internal hiccups, perhaps unlike most of its peers. Early this year, three of Peak XV Partners’ MDs — Ashish Agrawal, Ishaan Mittal and Tejeshwi Sharma — quit the company. Agrawal had led the firm’s early bets on Groww, which gave the former a 94-times return on investment. Mittal had backed companies such as Mamaearth and Razorpay, while Sharma backed startups including CRED.

The exits had followed a similar round in 2025, when MD Harshjit Sethi resigned, preceded by the exits of other senior executives, including Shailesh Lakhani, Abheek Anand, Shraeyansh Thakur and Anandamoy Roychowdhary. Other departures included chief product officer Anuj Sahai, vice president Suraj Agarwalla, and MD Piyush Gupta.

Despite that, Peak XV Partners raised $1.3 billion in new capital commitments for its India Seed, India Venture, and APAC funds early this year. That also means the company remains bullish on India’s startup sector. Startup funding, which reached $38.3 billion in 2021, fell to $10.8 billion in 2023, then stabilised at $12.6 billion in 2024 and $12.3 billion in 2025. But the number of companies securing investments has continued to shrink.

“Strong domestic fundamentals — including moderating interest rates, stable inflation, and resilient consumption — provide a supportive backdrop,” consultancy firm Bain says in its annual “India Private Equity Report 2026”.

“However, tighter global liquidity and valuation gaps are likely to sustain a more selective investment environment. Investors are expected to continue prioritising domestically aligned sectors — such as manufacturing, industrials and financial services — where structural tailwinds and policy support remain strong,” the report adds.

What lies ahead: With India’s startup activity shaping up, deal sizes declining amid a funding winter and a sharper focus on newer frontiers, Peak XV Partners is also drawing on the strength of its leaders — some of whom have completed two decades — for its next phase of growth.

For now, Singh, Ravishankar, Anandan, Bhatnagar, Chopra, Agarwal and Abhishek Mohan — who became a partner in February 2026 — seem to have put the company on track to retain its position as India’s largest investor, and perhaps the foremost.

That means doubling down on three core sectors: AI, fintech, and consumer. “Those are our bread-and-butter sectors,” Singh explains. “But we are also seeing pretty interesting opportunities in, for instance, semiconductors or the compute side or silicon side of AI or spacetech.” India’s space economy is projected to grow from $13 billion to $40 billion by 2030, according to a report by Arkam Ventures.

“When Deepinder first started Zomato, the only company he could see was InfoEdge, which was worth a billion dollars,” explains Bhatnagar. “Today, the founder who’s starting up is seeing Zomato at $25 billion. And their aspiration is to become a first 50-billion-dollar or 100-billion-dollar company in India. The power law is beginning to work in India, where the size of these companies is no longer measured in $500 million, $1 billion, or even $5 billion in valuation. The real winners will become $25-50 billion in value over time. And we are seeing the early green shoots of that.”

So, how does Peak XV Partners want to go about it now, apart from investing in India for all its strengths? “There is now clear evidence that over the past 20 years, we’ve partnered with not one or two, but many dozen founders and helped scale big companies,” Singh explains. “So, it can be done. It’s not a perfect science. Many times, companies will fail, and that will never change because, in the end, the psychological part of being a founder is the hardest part.”

That’s where Peak XV hopes to step in to bring a change, as the ecosystem matures. “The skills, talent, and business strategy — many people can get that,” Singh explains. “But it is keeping founder psychology in a place where you are humble, grounded, and learning, rather than losing sight of all of it, is what matters. We have lots of history of founders whose success led to their own failure. And that happens because the human psychology part is the toughest part of a founder’s journey.”

Singh and his partners have a heavy task in hand to solve. And that takes more than all the money that they frequently raise.