Godrej Capital will own both the wholly-owned unlisted subsidiaries. Godrej Housing Finance, which was launched in October 2020, will look at prime and affordable housing mortgage loans, while loan against properties and other forms of lending will be carried out by Godrej Finance, a non-banking financial company.

Right at the entrance of its office in Mumbai, FanCode makes no bones about what it dabbles in—sports. Mounted on one of its walls at the reception is an enviable collection of autographed memorabilia—bats and jerseys signed by Indian Premier League (IPL) teams, a pair of gloves from South African keeper Quinton de Kock, what have you. On another is a floor-to-ceiling mosaic of key sporting moments—there’s Md Ali laying into his opponent with a right-hand jab, Kapil Dev and Mohinder Amarnath sharing a laugh with the Prudential World Cup, Roger Federer fist-pumping at Wimbledon, Neeraj Chopra flaunting his Olympic gold, Megan Rapinoe exulting with the World Cup, and many more. Our short wait to meet the founders fly by in an absorbing game of who’s-who, identifying each tile of sporting history.

Four years after Astral was listed, Kairav joined in 2011. The company’s gross turnover then was ₹450 crore. Upon joining, Kairav soon realised the business and brand were controlled by the distributors, and that they lacked the power they should’ve had as manufacturers. “That’s when I thought, why not create a brand out of a product like pipes and get them noticed by end-users like plumbers and homeowners to create demand,” says Kairav, who is now vice president, business development, but handles the pipes side of Astral’s business. This shift in strategy helped as the company witnessed immense growth over the next decade.

After one of his training sessions at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Swimming Pool in Dadar, Mumbai, Milind Soman—then a schoolboy—found a snake slithering on the road. Almost instinctively, he put it in his boots and took the reptile home. For the England-born Soman, who moved to Mumbai in 1973 at the age of eight, the company of animals was more comforting than interactions with people. “He was a loner and an extremely shy boy,” says his mother Usha, adding that her son had got cats, dogs, rabbits and turtles at their Shivaji Park residence.

Pranav and Siddarth Pai, founding partners of venture capital (VC) firm 3one4 Capital, always chose to stand out, not just from the crowd of mushrooming VC firms in India, but also among the startup businesses they chose to invest in. Six years since founding the company, this early-stage VC firm has assets under management of Rs 2,300 crore ($300 million), one unicorn in its portfolio, and is ranked as India’s top performer for two of its funds, according to a 2021 alternative assets report from Preqin, a global financial data and analytics platform.

Around 2012, when Adwaita Nayar was graduating from Yale University, her mother, Falguni Nayar, was looking at foraying into entrepreneurship with Nykaa. From researching what kind of business Nayar could set up to setting up the wireframes sitting in her bedroom, Adwaita has seen all the initial struggles. In tough times, unlike her mother who had a lot more experience, Adwaita found it difficult to remain thick-skinned. “Back then, I was so young… I realised entrepreneurship is so hard and such a roller-coaster—there are so many highs and lows,” she says.

Within three months of raising $450 million (Rs3,439 crore) in September, Cars24 has mopped up a meaty $400 million (Rs3,057 crore) in its Series G round of funding, which had a mix of equity and debt. While $300 million in equity was led by Alpha Wave Global (formerly Falcon Edge Capital) and saw participation from existing investors, $100 million in debt came from diversified financial institutions across India, Australia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The latest funding pushed the valuation of the online used vehicles platform to $3.3 billion from $1.84 billion.

Seven year after Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots took the big screens across the country by storm, a husband-wife duo in Gurugram began directing and producing an unofficial sequel of the blockbuster by rolling out their online-first venture. The theme for Varun and Ghazal Alagh remained the same—defying norms and listening to one’s heart; the plot too mirrored the original movie where the protagonists had to fight formidable odds, and the chances of being dubbed ‘idiots’ was also quite high. There was a difference, though. “We are two idiots,” smiles Ghazal, who along with her husband rolled out toxin-free babycare product startup Mamaearth in 2016.

Meet Mihir Parekh, executive director at Nilkamal, the first member of the fourth generation to join the legacy business. “From back then itself, I started spending time to understand why is plastic bad,” says Parekh. And the answer he came up with: Because it is being used and disposed incorrectly. The problem for Parekh to solve, thus, was—can he build something sustainable and reusable?

Indian fintech company, Razorpay has raised $160 million in fresh funding, in a deal that sees its valuation triple to $3 billion from just last October when it became a unicorn. The new round, series-E of the Bengaluru-based startup, was led by existing investors Sequoia Capital and Singapore’s GIC. Other investors such as Matrix Partners and Ribbit Capital also participated in the round. Razorpay will use the money to expand into at least four Southeast Asian markets, and to make acquisitions of cloud software companies to grow its product portfolio.

During his time at Harvard Business School (HBS), Parth Jindal was keenly aware of the need to move the JSW Group away from cyclical businesses. Steel, its mainstay, was subject to the vagaries of the commodity cycle. Why not explore opportunities in adjacent but less cyclical industries, he thought. It was during his second year that Jindal worked on a project to understand the group and identify new business opportunities. He’d gotten a four-credit course approved by HBS. “There was also the desire to do something on my own and not just spend time in the legacy steel business,” says Jindal, MD, JSW Cement. This would also help him cement his position with employees. He didn’t want his identity to be tied to primogeniture.

India’s debt market remains underdeveloped, being valued at 65 percent of GDP, much lower than the global average of 150 percent of GDP. The lack of finance, besides the irregularity of cash flows due to clients not paying up, has meant that SMEs have been unable to ride out of the crisis after the second wave of Covid. Non-food bank credit growth stood at ₹108 lakh crore in September, up 6.7 percent compared to a year earlier, according to RBI.