Drone Deal: Rebuilding the Story Around Realistic Projections

Nishanth was working with a drone technology company at a time when the sector was attracting significant investor attention, partly driven by the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the visible effectiveness of drones in modern warfare. Valuations across the sector were running high, and the founders had built their financial projections to match the market's appetite.

Nishanth and the team took a different view. They believed that projections built on sector hype rather than operational reality would create a credibility problem with investors down the line. If the company raised on inflated numbers and then failed to deliver, it would damage trust with the very investors it needed for future rounds. The team sat down with the founders and made the case directly.

Rather than presenting the argument abstractly, Nishanth used the Byju's situation as a concrete reference point: a company that had raised aggressively during the edtech boom and was now facing the consequences of projections it could not meet. He walked the founders through the pattern, showing how hype cycles in different sectors had played out, and argued that the companies that survived were the ones that had built trust with investors by delivering on realistic commitments.

The founders agreed. They rebuilt their financial story around conservative, defensible numbers. The revised narrative secured funding from two major VCs and one Indian investor in 2023. In a subsequent raise, the same set of investors returned for the next round, a direct outcome of the trust the founders had built by delivering on what they had originally projected.