Anant Vidur Puri

Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners — a decade backing India’s marketplaces, SaaS, and AI, from Swiggy onwards.

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.

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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

From the archive · 2015, iLeapAhead

Value Creation 102: Non Transactional Businesses

Measuring value in engagement- and adoption-led models, where revenue is not the obvious yardstick — a follow-up to Value Creation 101.

So you don’t have monetization figured out! Oct 2015 Value Creation 101: Transactional Business Models Sep 2015 Show me the Money! Sep 2015 Disruptive Component Analysis: Zeroing in on the problem Sep 2015

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On LinkedIn

Latest on LinkedIn

Audacious goals need audacious capital LinkedIn Jun 2026 The billable hour built modern Indian IT — AI is quietly retiring it LinkedIn Jun 2026 I joined a Google Meet to mentor students — by the end, they were teaching me LinkedIn Jun 2026 Sarvam’s Series B — a marker for where India is headed LinkedIn Jun 2026

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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:

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.

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