Kaytes: Building a Sector View on a Deep Tech Fund from Scratch

Akhil took on the valuation of a deep tech fund that had started investing when deep tech was not yet a mainstream investment theme in India. He had no prior exposure to the specific sub-sectors the fund had backed, and the portfolio spanned technically complex areas that required domain knowledge to evaluate.

Rather than going into the first meeting with the investment team cold, Akhil built a sector hypothesis first. He read reports on the global and Indian deep tech landscape, analyzed transactions across multiple geographies, and reviewed the investor updates the fund had shared. By the time he sat with the investment managers, he had a working view of how the sector had evolved and where the fund's thesis sat within it.

He was transparent about the limits of his knowledge. He told the investment team directly that he was valuing the fund for the first time and asked them to walk him through what he had missed. This framing opened up a detailed briefing: the managers explained the sub-sector dynamics, the technical depth required to evaluate companies, and the fund's early conviction calls. The fund had been a pre-seed investor in a space launch startup at a time when almost no one in India was backing the sector. The investment had returned multiples of the original capital.

Akhil used the briefing to refine his sector model and complete the valuation. The process gave him a working framework for deep tech that he carried into subsequent mandates.