Manufacturing
The base of the compounding story. Businesses moving from job-work to specification, and from price to relationship.
Batlivala & Karani Capital
We back founders building businesses meant to outlast them.
Companies going up the value chain, held for years rather than quarters.
- Mandate Growth equity
- Geography India
- Horizon Open-ended
- Position Minority
- Sectors Six
The firm
A house, not a fund
A privately held investment and advisory firm built on a pedigree of over 150 years of enterprise and entrepreneurship.
A fund is raised, deployed and wound up on a schedule fixed before the first investment is made. A house has no such schedule.
We invest proprietary capital in Indian companies, listed and unlisted, and we advise a handful of businesses we already know well. Both are the same work: knowing a business well enough to be useful to it.
What we look for
We would rather miss a good business than back the wrong people
Everything else can be modelled. This cannot.
A weak balance sheet can be repaired and a bad year absorbed. Character cannot be fixed later.
So we begin with how a business has conducted itself when behaving well was inconvenient. If that answer is wrong, nothing else about the company matters.
Where we focus
We stay inside six industries
Depth in a few beats coverage of many.
Pharmaceuticals
API to formulation, domestic to regulated markets. Long gestation and heavy compliance suit an investor with no exit deadline.
Healthcare
Delivery, diagnostics and the services layer around them — particularly where quality care is reaching tier-two India for the first time.
Industrials
Capital goods, components and the engineering base that import substitution actually runs on.
Technology
Electronics, hardware and instrumentation. The part of technology that carries a bill of materials, and the part India is only now learning to make at scale.
Emerging sectors
Industries that have not yet settled into shape. Being early matters more than being certain, and we are in no hurry to be proved right.
If we have written to you
It is because we have already spent time on your business and would like to understand it properly.