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You started exploring the ETA model at a very young age in India. What initially attracted you to buying businesses instead of building a traditional startup?
I am obsessed with learning new skills quickly. Growing up, I picked up multiple percussion instruments, martial arts, cricket, and mastered each of these skills. This process taught me something fundamental: the right models and mentorship compress the path to mastery dramatically.
When I turned that same obsession towards building generational wealth, I mapped out the realistic paths: founding a startup (high failure rate), climbing to the CEO chair of a Fortune 500 (too many variables + politics), or orchestrating capital events.
Capital events are the most reliable and repeatable vehicle for generational wealth creation. And among the many ways to engineer them, rolling up businesses stands out: acquiring, consolidating, and creating value arbitrage. It’s a proven playbook that has stood the test of time: from Andrew Carnegie in the 1800s to Henry Kravis today.
In your memoir about your journey, you describe deal-making as “modern-day warfare.” What did that analogy come to mean for you after spending time negotiating with business owners, banks, and advisors?
Dealmaking has a lot of similarities to warfare in terms of key principles:
Patience. The best deals are cultivated, not rushed. Seller trust is built over months, sometimes years; the discipline to wait for the right moment is what separates great acquirers from average ones.
Aggression. Patience without aggression is passivity. When the moment is right, move fast and move decisively. Conviction in your thesis, speed through diligence, and composure at the table, that’s what closes deals.
Positioning. The best dealmakers, like the best generals, control what the other side believes about your urgency, your alternatives, and your limits.
Intelligence. Diligence is reconnaissance. Understanding the business, the seller’s real motivations, and the market before you enter the room gives you an asymmetric advantage.
Adaptability. Rigidity kills transactions. The ability to restructure terms, pivot on financing, or reframe the narrative under pressure is what keeps deals alive.
Leadership. The dealmaker must be the gravitational center, holding confidence when lenders, sellers, and advisors waver. Conviction moves people.
Knowing when not to fight. In M&A, walking away from a bad deal is not failure, it’s discipline. Knowing when to say no is as valuable as knowing when to strike.
You originally focused your search on healthcare, particularly hospitals. What made the sector attractive in India, and how did your investment thesis evolve over time?
Healthcare is a recession-proof sector and in 2020, it was deeply overlooked in India, making it the right time to enter.
I initially looked at nursing bureaus and home healthcare, but the economics didn’t hold: low topline, thin margins, and nurse churn rates killed the thesis. Next I evaluated de-addiction centers, but fewer than 100 viable targets and significant regulatory ambiguity made it a sector I couldn’t build around.
I finally zeroed in on secondary care hospitals. 10,000+ NABH accredited facilities across India, with a significant majority carrying succession risk, exactly the profile an acquirer wants.
Valuation was the final variable. Metro city hospitals were priced at double-digit EBITDA multiples. Tier 2 cities offered the same asset at 5 to 7 times. Same fundamentals, meaningful discount, however, they come with their own challenges.
That became the thesis: Tier 2 India, secondary care hospitals, succession-driven sellers, assets the large corporate chains weren’t chasing in 2021. Fragmented, underleveraged, and ready for consolidation.
One recurring theme in your journey is how difficult deal sourcing can be. What tactics proved most effective for finding acquisition opportunities in India? Why did you prefer to approach business owners directly instead of relying on brokers? What advantages did that approach give you?
Deal sourcing is hard. In my case, the process was harder, I was cold calling doctors at the peak of Covid. Getting through to them was difficult, but once I did, most were genuinely happy to talk about something other than the pandemic.
Cold calling is what most people avoid. That’s exactly why it works. The best deals I found were never through bankers: they were organic, direct, and built on conversations nobody else was willing to have.
The reason I preferred to approach business owners directly was because investment bankers and brokers in India usually carried the worst deals. Further, as my thesis evolved, I realized a lot of them didn’t even have deals that matched my thesis.
Going direct gives you access to an uncoached seller. Many of the owners I reached out to didn’t even know their business was sellable. That creates an opportunity: to guide them, build a genuine relationship, and demonstrate the value of a deal that works for both sides.
This does elongate the sale process, but it gave me priority access to doing the deal: As I worked in PE later on, some of these deals can take upwards of 2+ years to materialize, given the cultural issues & other challenges, but once you are in, and have spent so much time with the seller the deal is essentially yours.
I cover my process of cold outreach in the chapter “Finding Deals” in my book.
Financing acquisitions appears to be one of the biggest obstacles in the Indian market. How do banking regulations and the lack of LBO financing affect search fund entrepreneurship in India? You also explored creative deal structures such as seller financing but encountered resistance from sellers and advisors. Do you think this is primarily a structural issue in India or more of a cultural one?
Until 2026, LBO acquisition financing was nonexistent in India. Very recently, the Reserve Bank of India approved LBO financing up to 75% of deal value for corporates with upwards of ~60M USD in net worth. Now, this doesn’t really help ETA entrepreneurs, but it is a start.
Most of the Indian banks and NBFCs won’t fund ETA deals. A critical thing to note is that cash flow lending doesn’t work in India. So, if one wants to finance deals through Indian banks, it’s critical that you look at deals with an asset base that you could collateralize. Now this poses challenges in structuring deals because a lot of sellers would want different valuations for their business and real estate. In summary, financing a deal would be the most challenging aspect from an India perspective.
Finally, seller financing is impossible in India for at least the next few decades. The reason seller financing works in the West is because of robust legal systems. India lacks that currently, and on top of that is a low trust society. I cover this in detail in the chapter “Seller Finance? Maybe Not” in my book.
You came very close to acquiring several hospitals but ultimately walked away. What were the most important red flags you learned to recognize during due diligence?
Some of the most critical red flags were actually beyond the financials and operational data. It was understanding the seller’s true motivations, in one instance, the seller wanted to use the proceeds of the sale to set up a competing hospital down the road.
From a hospital-specific perspective, another critical area of scrutiny was physician dependency. In India’s tier 2 cities, attracting qualified doctors is already a significant challenge, making retention an existential priority. A lot of deals that I evaluated had high doctor dependencies, where the founder doctor would contribute to upwards of 50% of revenue, and with him essentially retiring, the business would lose that revenue stream.
After more than a year of searching, you pivoted and structured a deal with a healthcare startup instead of acquiring a hospital. What did that experience teach you about creativity in dealmaking?
Dealmaking / Transactional entrepreneurship is all about creativity. As I came to the tail end of my search, I had negotiated multiple deals & gained invaluable experience, but in the process, I had used up all my life savings. I had to figure out creative ways to make ends meet, which led me to do multiple things including brokering deals and taking equity positions in startups to help increase revenue.
I cover this in detail in the chapter “The Pivot” in my book, but briefly: I had read Jeremy Harbour’s book, Go Do Deals, where he makes the point that dealmaking isn’t always about capital. Sometimes you can structure a deal without any, simply by identifying the right angle. And that’s exactly what I did. I found a startup that was hitting a bottleneck in revenue growth, mapped out a way to help them move forward, and in return ended up achieving a 27x return on invested capital.
Traditional SFs have started to emerge in India over the past two years, and the first acquisitions have recently been completed. How do you see the SF ecosystem evolving in India over the next decade? What characteristics of the Indian market make it attractive—or challenging—for ETA? What advice would you give to entrepreneurs considering launching a search in India today?
Search funds as an asset class are still fairly new in India, even though search funding has been attempted as far back as 2009 in India. Currently, you do see a lot of midsize businesses trying to figure out succession planning given the next generation doesn’t want to be involved in business. However, deal-making is extremely slow in India, and will continue to be so over the next few years. The reason is the most critical part of this entire process is financing, and debt financing is extremely challenging in India. Getting a deal through the investment committees at banks in India is next to impossible if you aren’t an established corporate. Furthermore, LBO financing regulations are a cherry on top.
Apart from financing the 2nd biggest deterrent to ETA is India being a low trust economy. Even though I was able to structure a creative deal, I must say I was lucky, and the odds of replicating the same are pretty thin. Having done deals for a PE firm as well, other creative models like earnouts and seller finance practically never fly in the Indian market. Finally, while dealing with midsize businesses, you would also have run-ins with unaccounted cash and some businesses would want you to separately value & compensate them for it.
The attractiveness of the market is the moat. I remember interacting with a veteran, and he mentioned that for the same amount of time you would put in India vs a western economy the odds of you doing multiple deals as well as experiencing multiple exits is higher in a Western economy. However, the valuation multiple that you can get in India would be way higher than in a Western economy for the same business. The challenge with India is still the speed & efficiency of doing deals.
In terms of advice: I would urge searchers to really spend time understanding the industry they want to do acquisitions in. Dealmaking in a lot of industries is unviable in India, thanks to the absurd valuations a lot of these industries carry. Further, figure out your unique value proposition, why should a seller sell to you apart from money, because that will help you creatively structure deals. Finally, financing a deal will be the biggest challenge, so be prepared to face that hurdle.
