India’s fintech story has entered a new chapter.
We are now asking a different question: where does the next wave of opportunity lie?
In a conversation with Chandra R of Moneycontrol, Anand Lunia, Founding Partner at India Quotient and anchor investor for the fintech cohort of Leap to Unicorn Season 4, presented by IDFC FIRST Bank in association with Moneycontrol and CNBC-TV18, shared his approach to backing founders early – often before others see the potential in what they are building.
For Anand, it’s not about chasing what’s fashionable. It’s about identifying what could become inevitable.
Don’t Build for Today’s Hottest Market
By the time everyone agrees a sector is exciting, seed investors are already late. That’s why Anand Lunia isn’t looking for founders building the obvious next brokerage, lending platform or insurance marketplace simply because those categories are already attracting capital. Instead, he’s looking for businesses that will make perfect sense three to five years from now, even if they don’t today.
History, he argues, keeps repeating itself. Every time the market believes a category has been won, someone comes along with a sharper focus. Zerodha didn’t end brokerage. Groww expanded it. Then came specialist platforms like Dhan, proving there was still room for products designed around specific users rather than the mass market.
Follow Consumer Behaviour Rather Than Industry Trends
The best fintech founders don’t just study fintech; they study people.
Consumers today are far more comfortable sharing financial information, completing digital onboarding journeys and trusting online financial products than they were even five years ago. Founders who identified that behavioural shift helped shape entirely new categories.
Anand Lunia believes areas like AI-powered personal finance are becoming increasingly interesting. From intelligent expense management and tax optimisation to portfolio recommendations and personal financial copilots, entirely new businesses are emerging because customer behaviour has changed. He sees consumer behaviour as the driving engine here, not the improvements in technology alone.
For founders, that’s the real signal. Instead of asking, “What’s getting funded?”, ask, “What are customers becoming comfortable doing today that they weren’t willing to do yesterday?”
Respect Regulation. Don’t Fight It.
Few industries are shaped by regulation as much as fintech. Whether you are building in lending, insurance, wealth management or payments, regulation isn’t an obstacle to work around. It’s part of the market itself.
Anand Lunia’s advice is straightforward: don’t build businesses that depend on regulators eventually changing their minds. Forecast where regulation is headed, understand why it exists, and innovate within those boundaries.
The winners won’t be the companies constantly fighting regulators.
Challenge the Industry from First Principles
Experience can be valuable, but it can also become baggage in some ways.
Anand Lunia doesn’t always see the veteran banker who knows every regulation by heart as the most compelling founder profile. Instead, he often gravitates towards the entrepreneur who understands the rules well enough to question decades-old assumptions. That’s how discount brokerages transformed investing. That’s how fully digital financial products became mainstream.
The next generation of fintech companies, he believes, won’t simply make existing institutions marginally better. They’ll rethink how financial products should work from the ground up, asking why certain costs, processes or business models exist at all.
First-principles thinking often looks unrealistic until it becomes obvious.
Build for the Next Decade, Not the Next Funding Round
Seed investing is fundamentally an exercise in prediction, which is why Anand Lunia isn’t looking for companies that perfectly fit today’s market. He’s often looking for founders willing to spend years building towards markets that don’t fully exist yet.
Imagine a future where AI manages your investments, files your taxes, helps optimise your borrowing and quietly handles much of your financial life in the background. Or a world where insurance becomes dramatically cheaper because distribution costs collapse. Anand Lunia doesn’t anticipate these predictions to come true next quarter. They’re long-term shifts that require founders willing to be early, sometimes painfully so.
As he points out, seed investors are often looking for conviction before consensus arrives.
Conviction Matters More Than the Pitch Deck
One of Anand Lunia’s strongest messages was about founders. For him, the entrepreneurs who are asking investors how to hire their first employees or where to find office space simply don’t stand out because, in his mind, these are the sort of problems that founders shouldn’t need handholding with. He expects bigger problems solving muscles.
The people who do stand out are the ones who have already convinced a co-founder to join, left the safety of their jobs, built working prototypes and solved as many problems as possible before asking for capital. In one example, he described funding founders who had already built a functional product entirely on their own before raising money. They weren’t asking investors to help them get started. They were asking for resources to accelerate something that already existed.
Capital should amplify momentum, not create it.
Dream Bigger Than an Exit
Too many founders, he believes, optimise for building a ₹100 crore company. Instead, they should be asking themselves what they are willing to build for the next 30 or 50 years. India has produced extraordinary entrepreneurs. But Anand Lunia argues that the country still has room to create businesses that redefine industries on a truly global scale.
For founders braving the uncertainties that come with entrepreneurship, he recommends thinking big. After all, why play small? Ambition that’s bigger than the next funding round, bigger than the next acquisition, even bigger than the first company is what it takes to build something that deserves decades of their lives.
Final Word: The Best Time to Think Ahead Is Before Everyone Else Does
India’s fintech ecosystem has reached an unusual moment. The infrastructure is stronger than it’s ever been. Consumers are more digitally confident than ever before. And the barriers that once made building financial products painfully difficult are steadily falling away. But that also means the definition of innovation has changed.
It’s no longer enough to digitise an existing product, shave a few percentage points off the cost, or build yet another version of a familiar idea. The next generation of category-defining companies will come from founders willing to question assumptions, anticipate behavioural shifts, and build for markets that don’t quite exist yet.
That’s ultimately what Anand Lunia is betting on. Not the companies chasing today’s momentum, but the founders patient enough to create tomorrow’s.
To know more about Leap To Unicorn, visit https://www.moneycontrol.com/LTU.
If you are a startup building in the D2C, ESG, or Deeptech & AI space, register your interest to apply for Season 4 of Leap To Unicorn and take the next leap in your journey.
The pages slugged ‘Brand Connect’ are equivalent to advertisements and are not written and produced by Forbes India journalists.
