Scaling Financial Models Across 50+ Startups at Egniol

At Egniol, Keshav built financial models for over fifty early-stage startups across sectors including edtech, fintech, and consumer. Each engagement followed a structured process he developed over time, starting with industry research before any founder conversation.

For each company, he began by reading about the sector to build independent context. He then held a structured call with the founder to understand their revenue model, five-year plan, cost assumptions, and capital requirements. He ran the revenue numbers first, then worked backward to calculate the cost structure required to support that trajectory, covering fixed costs, employee costs, SG&A, and capital expenditure.

Cash flow was the central output he focused on. He calculated burn rate and runway for every model, and where a startup had sufficiently healthy cash flows, he built a DCF in addition to the relative valuation that anchored most pre-seed and early-stage work.

Challenging founder assumptions was a consistent part of the process. When a founder projected growth rates that implied reaching revenues no comparable company had achieved, Keshav built the model to show what that trajectory actually required, then walked through the gap between the assumption and the industry evidence. He used sourced benchmarks for employee costs, SG&A, and sector-specific cost structures to ground the conversation in data rather than opinion.

Across the engagement, he also supported pitch deck creation and investor coordination, helping prepare founders for meetings with VCs, angel funds, and grant bodies. Four to five startups successfully completed fundraising rounds during his time at Egniol.