Marketplaces that compound
Internet marketplaces where density, trust, and take-rate reinforce each other over time — so every cohort is cheaper to serve and harder to dislodge.
Anant Vidur Puri
Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, Bangalore — backing internet marketplaces, India SaaS, and AI.
I spend my days backing founders building India's next generation of marketplaces, SaaS, and AI companies. This is where I keep my writing, my portfolio, and the best ways to reach me.
About
Hello.
I'm Anant. I'm a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, based in our Bangalore office, where I focus on internet marketplaces and India SaaS — with a growing pull toward AI, ML, and cloud. I've had the privilege of backing companies like Swiggy, Urban Company, Cashify, Leena AI, and Entropik.
Before Bessemer I was at the Boston Consulting Group, working with financial and IT-services clients across India and North America. I studied Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi — where I got hooked on computer and machine vision — and did my MBA at Harvard Business School.
Away from work, you'll usually find me deep in fantasy fiction and mythology — Indian, Greek, Roman, Norse — on a tennis court, or traveling somewhere with a bit of history to it.
Writing
Notes on building, pitching & investing
Value Creation 102: Non Transactional Businesses
This is an extension to Value Creation 101. It’s often difficult to measure value from engagement or adoption led business models. I have been often asked in pitches that how do…
Thesis
What I look for
I back founders early and stay close. I'm drawn to businesses with a structural reason to win — not just a good quarter — and to people who are honest about what they don't yet know. A few patterns I keep coming back to:
India SaaS, built for the world
Software companies that start in India but sell globally from day one — pairing India’s talent and cost structure with a genuinely world-class product.
AI-native, not AI-flavoured
Companies where AI is the product and the moat, not a feature bolted on — reshaping a workflow or unit economics that legacy players structurally can’t match.
And underneath all of it: founders with unusual clarity about the customer, the discipline to build value before capturing it, and the resilience to keep going when the story gets hard.
Investing
Companies I've backed
A few from my portfolio at Bessemer Venture Partners — including the public companies Swiggy and Urban Company.
Building
Things I've built
Health tracking app
A personal health PWA I built to log my own data and reason over it — a Next.js front end, a Python API, and Claude doing the heavy lifting on insights.
Chitragupta
An AI knowledge companion for India’s consumer-tech and AI landscape. A retrieval-augmented chatbot built on Claude — it crawls and ingests sources into a vector store, answers with guardrails, and speaks back in multiple Indian languages.
Building experiments
A rolling set of small things I’m tinkering with on nights and weekends. Replace this with whatever you want to show, or split it into individual entries.
Connect
Find me online
The fastest ways to reach me or follow along.
Building in or for India?
I read every inbound. The best way to reach me is a short note on what you’re building and why now.