Pranav Pai
Founding Partner at 3one4 Capital
Pranav Pai
Founding Partner at 3one4 Capital
Bengaluru, Karnataka
Overview
Work Experience
Founding Partner and Chief Investment Officer
2016 - Current
3one4 Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Bangalore, India. Through a deep involvement strategy, the firm is committed to staying biased towards action and harnessing the best resources to help start-ups deliver audacious results. The fund’s focus areas include machine-driven actionable intelligence services, enterprise automation, ambient intelligence technologies, consumer products, fintech, digital media, and health. 3one4 manages USD 800M+ AUM and a portfolio of 70+ companies across the early stage. Pranav serves on the boards of and as an advisor to several of the companies he works most closely with. These include Licious, Betterplace, Darwinbox, Jupiter, Open, Kapiva, Dozee, and Tracxn.
Investor
2015
In the consumer space, the teams that truly understand how to continuously delight their customers with consistently high-quality experiences are the ones that make a real impact. In Licious, we see a team that has worked tremendously diligently to build an end-to-end experience that customers cannot forget. With their focus, perseverance, and subject-matter expertise, Licious brings a fresh approach to a much-ignored space. Their operational excellence and deep respect for customer feedback and satisfaction will drive the team to persistently deliver a unique value proposition. Licious is now India’s most valuable D2C startup. This is the story of a team relentlessly focused on delivering the best possible experience to their customers by combining an unconditional love for great food and perseverant execution to truly build a generational company. The path to becoming the first Indian D2C unicorn as a category creator has been challenging, and this team’s leadership by example has been the unyielding energy behind this achievement.
Investor
2016
Darwinbox’s cloud-based end-to-end Human Resource Management (HRMS) platform automates HR processes across the entire employee lifecycle – managing recruitment, onboarding, core HR, time and attendance, expense management, payroll, employee engagement, performance management and people analytics. At a time when the fundamental principles of human resource management are rapidly evolving in India, the team at Darwinbox has leveraged platform-scale technologies and the latest compliance frameworks to help their customers and partners adapt to the new realities in the labour ecosystem. By reimagining multiple workflows across HR, Darwinbox has unlocked several new strategies for tangible productivity improvements inside organizations of all sizes. In the process, the team has empowered these organizations to become more people-centric again by removing the information asymmetries and manual inefficiencies that come with opaque and outdated models of communication, collaboration, and feedback. We are delighted to continue working with the Darwinbox team as they help to grow a whole new constellation of tools and services that are improving the overall ecosystem in the country.
Investor
2019
Jupiter is India's first and largest digitally-native banking platform for retail customers. Jupiter believes that a bank account should be a smart utility that delivers insight, shares personalized tactics, and guides you towards your goals and attaining financial discipline.
Investor
2017
The team at BetterPlace has focused on bringing platform-scale technologies to the full-stack of workflows in the semi-formal ecosystem. At a time when long-term investments in human resources and labour empowerment have started to yield true productivity improvements in our economy, such a value proposition can leverage real horizontal innovation advantages and contribute even more powerfully to industry across the spectrum. BetterPlace is putting the labour force at the center of a universe of innovation, and helping make organisations of all sizes more people-centric. We are excited to be joining their journey and to helping scale these platform effects.
Investor
2018
Open is Asia's first and largest digital banking service for SMEs that offers an all-in-one digital financial operating platform. The Neo-banking platform includes a current account packed with powerful tools for bookkeeping, invoices, payments, and accessing credit.
Investor
2016
Bugworks Research is a biotechnology platform that develops novel compounds to counter drug-resistance in superbugs - bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics. The company is advancing a novel bacterial topoisomerase inhibitor (NBTI) effective against a very broad spectrum of multi-drug resistant bacterial pathogens. This first-in-class antibiotic was designed using ELUDE, the company’s proprietary efflux-pump avoidance platform, which enables the design of novel, differentiated antibiotics to cure hospital, community and bio-threat infections. Bugworks’ NBTI is a dual target small molecule inhibitor, with very low potential to create resistant strains, effective against all pathogens on the WHO Critical, High & Medium priority list as well as the CDC bio-threat bacterial pathogens.
Governing Council Member
2012 - 2017
The Archive of Indian Music (AIM) is established to create a world-class archive of Indian music that is technologically on par with archives around the world, and best in class in terms of sound recording and preservation capability. AIM also aims to collaborate with international bodies associated in this field and create partnerships with educational institutions, music organizations and other bodies involved and interested in archiving and preservation. Its key objectives are: To digitize and restore records and create a database of high quality and high fidelity recordings To preserve these vintage recordings and make them available for listening to students, scholars, researchers, musicians and interested public To enrich these recordings by sourcing additional information about them including biographical details of the artistes, photographs, gramophone record sleeve images and other materials of historical significance that document the era of the record
Steering Committee Member
2013 - 2016
CodeForIndia.org helps engineers build the tools that will help NGOs in India solve problems on the ground, empower citizens to actively participate in effective public service delivery in partnership with local government and give societies the power to help themselves. Worked on projects with support from CFI, BPAC (Bangalore Political Action Committee), Akshaya Patra Foundation, Ubuntu At Work, and the Aakash Tablet Group.
Product Management Lead
2013 - 2016
I led the cross-platform product management of EdCast's Knowledge Cloud and Personal Knowledge Network over web and mobile. As product lead, I managed several initiatives that sought to blend the consumerization of the corporate learning experience with the rigor of goal-oriented education. I was inspired by user stories and intelligence from client meetings and worked closely with design, engineering, BD, user support, and QA to set goals, scope deliverables, plan estimates, run experiments, and converge on success. EdCast was successfully acquired by Cornerstone in 2021.
Education
M.S.
2011 - 2013
B.E.
2007 - 2011
I.C.S.E and I.S.C
2000 - 2007
Investments
Latest Articles
The Theater of the Post COVID-19 New Normal For India — Mohandas Pai and Pranav Pai, 3one4 Capital
Talks about India, Economy and COVID-19 economic impact