The Next Generation
Bengaluru, from Hyderabad · Early-stage investing
He works in growth and investments at Campus Fund, which backs companies started by students and recent graduates. Five generations ago his family were indigenous bankers, lending against the harvest to people trying to build something. The instrument has changed. The job has not.
Campus Fund
The ancestral firm, M/s Dayaram Surajmal, were indigenous bankers as much as they were traders. Their business was to look at a merchant, a mill or a season’s crop and decide whether it would come good — and then to put money behind that judgement, long before any of it was certain.
Sanket does the same work in a different currency. At Campus Fund — a Bengaluru firm founded in 2020 to back companies started by students and recent graduates — he works in growth and investments, which means finding founders early, understanding what they are building, and helping turn conviction into a company. The fund has backed more than forty businesses.
Seed-stage investing is the old family trade with the collateral removed: you are still deciding whether to believe someone, and you are still deciding it too early to be sure.
The difference is that a nineteenth-century banker in Gulbarga lent against a standing crop. A seed investor has no crop, no ledger and often no product — only a founder, a market and an argument. What survives from one to the other is the discipline of judgement under incomplete information, which is a family habit older than any of the businesses it built.
Colleagues who joined the fund as analysts have written publicly about being brought on by him and others from their first hesitant calls with founders to leading deals of their own. That is the unglamorous half of the job: not the investing, but the making of the next people who will do it.
Before This
He read Industrial and Production Engineering at the Manipal Institute of Technology — a discipline about systems, throughput and where a process loses time. It is an unusual training for an investor, and a useful one: it teaches you to look at an operation and see the constraint rather than the story.
Manipal Institute of Technology
B.Tech in Industrial and Production Engineering. Systems, processes and problem-solving.
AIESEC
Team Leader in International Relations and Operations — running exchanges and projects across borders, which is where most people first learn that coordination is harder than strategy.
The family business
Project coordination in real estate. The unromantic education: schedules, contractors, and what it costs when something slips.
TheCapitalNet
Product management at a fintech company building software for private equity and venture capital firms. He worked between the development, design and client teams on an end-to-end process management tool — learning the machinery of the investment industry from the inside before joining it.
Campus Fund
Growth and investments, backing student and graduate founders at the earliest stage.
There is a logic to the sequence that is only obvious backwards. He learned how things are made, then how they are coordinated, then how the investment industry runs its own processes — and only then went to sit on the other side of the table.
2020 · The Pandemic
In the second year of the pandemic, convalescent plasma became one of the few things families could actively go looking for. The problem was almost entirely one of information: recovered patients willing to donate existed, and people needing plasma existed, and the two could not find each other fast enough.
Sanket co-founded PlasmaForYou, a region-focused platform built to close that gap — matching recovered donors to those searching, and cutting the time it took to find an appropriate match.
It solved a coordination problem, at a moment when a coordination problem was measured in hours.
It was not a business and was never meant to become one. But it is the clearest thing on this page about how he thinks: see a bottleneck, build the smallest object that removes it, and do it while the problem is still happening.
That instinct has a long lineage in this family. The generation that answered the water crisis in Latur and the one that funded eye care in Hyderabad were doing a version of the same thing — identifying where the shortage actually was, rather than where it was most visible.
Continue
Bankers & Merchants
The ancestral firm — indigenous bankers, cotton merchants and commission agents who financed enterprise across the Nizam’s dominion.
The family story →Five Generations
From Gullar in Nagaur to the Deccan, and the branches the family put down in Gulbarga, Latur and Hyderabad.
The people →1860s to Today
Where this generation stands in a hundred and sixty-five years in the Deccan.
The timeline →