How Buyers Discover Startups, From a 10-Year Founder Journey to an EXIT Ankur Rawal & Vishwa Krishnakumar

This is a special episode from the Neon Fund. In 2025, the US saw $1.8 trillion worth of M&A deals, around 25× more than India. But India’s startup ecosystem is much younger, which makes every acquisition a playbook for founders on process, pricing leverage, and stakeholder management. Neon backed Zenduty in 2020, when the founders had been bootstrapping profitably for two years and were already growing at a pace many VC-backed startups aspire to. Today, founders Ankur Rawal and Vishwa Krishnakumar join Siddhartha, Partner at Neon, to discuss one of the most untalked acquisitions of 2025. Over a 10-year journey, Zenduty pivoted to SRE in 2020. Vishwa and Ankur also share insights on the future of the DevTools space, which they believe will always be a strong choice to build great products, because engineers are among the hardest end users to please. This episode is a founders’ view on how acquisitions work in Indian SaaS. 00:00 – Trailer 01:00 – Initial years of a decade-long journey 07:12 – How Zenduty chose its investors 11:04 – How much should founders dilute? 12:24 – Building with profitability before & after fundraise 14:45 – Six years of survival before the pivot 17:01 – Why the pivot to the SRE space? 18:39 – How Zenduty differentiated from PagerDuty 19:12 – End users are the toughest to please in engineering 20:39 – Is market attractive if biggest player is valued only $1.5B? 25:22 – Why acquisition and not a Series A? 27:18 – The process before acquisition 29:23 – How pricing negotiations work 31:51 – Should devtool companies build from India or US? 34:58 – Three types of connects at physical events 37:06 – What physical presence at events signals 39:06 – Founders’ feedback on Neon Fund 41:41 – “Don’t build in silence” 43:50 – How to build a core AI-native company today 47:54 – Do first-time founders have an edge in the AI era? 52:08 – Cost to PMF has drastically gone down 54:48 – What hard problems are startups solving today? 55:37 – Why are acquisitions rare in India? 1:00:20 – How US investors are facilitating M&As 1:01:14 – How to make your brand visible to potential acquirers ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

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How Buyers Discover Startups, From a 10-Year Founder Journey to an EXIT Ankur Rawal & Vishwa Krishnakumar is an episode from 100x Entrepreneur by Siddhartha Ahluwalia.

This episode is 63:45 long.

This episode was published on Jan 30, 2026.

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