Daybreak - A European royal family walked into India’s startup boom with a billion dollars…

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Lightrock arrived in India with nearly a billion dollars and royal backing — the Liechtenstein dynasty's centuries-old fortune funding bets on around 40 growth-stage startups. The firm moved fast, doubled down on existing investments more aggressively than most peers, and scaled hard during the zero-interest-rate boom. Then the cycle turned. Its portfolio — Waycool, Pharmeasy, Dunzo — ran into trouble. New cheques dried up. Lightrock shifted from investor to caretaker, managing what it had rather than building what came next. A royal wager on Indian tech, still waiting for a payoff.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

A royal family from a country that is smaller than parts of Bangalore decided to bet nearly a billion dollars on Indian startups. And for a while, that sounded like a genius move. Liechtenstein. You probably never heard about it. It is a tiny principality in Europe, ruled by Prince Maximilian, whose full name I cannot pronounce for the life of me. His family also runs LGTE, which is one of the world's largest private banking groups.

The family's investment arm is called Light Rock, and in 2019, Light Rock came to India with a clear plan. Find growth stage companies, take large stakes and keep backing them, and be the patient investor that everybody says that they want but rarely gets. They were not slow about it either. In just 18 months, they deployed about $400 million across 25 companies. Farm Easy, Potter, Ship Rocket, Way Cool, Dunzo, these are names that you know. By the time three years had passed by, that number had climbed to $700 million. This is a pace that is usually associated with far larger firms.

So, naturally, founders loved them. Light Rock was seen as a deep-pocketed loyal partner. They kept showing up in follow-on rounds. They had one limited partner, the Liechtenstein family, which meant no fundraising circus, no misaligned incentives, just long-term capital doing long-term things. But here is the problem with being the most patient investor in the room. Patience is only a virtue when companies that you are patient with are actually going somewhere.

Many of Light Rock's biggest bets are now in trouble. One of their portfolio companies needed Light Rock to step in and pay off its loans, something that almost no VC ever does. And the two people who built Light Rock's India business from scratch have both quietly walked out of the door. So what really happened when this royal family brought billion dollars to India's startup ecosystem and just kept believing? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nagda Sharma and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargheese and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time.

Lightrocks India's story starts with an acquisition. In 2019, LGT bought a sales. Spada, a small impact investing firm run by Karthik Shriwatsha and Thomas Highland. It was considered a masterstroke. No other Indian fund had managed to bring in a single deep-pocketed backer of this scale. Asparra had previously been funded solely by the Soros Economic Development Fund. But after deploying about $70 million over the course of eight years, Soros wanted the firm to grow up and diversify.

LGT offered exactly that at a much larger scale. Prince Maximilian himself bought out Espada's entire portfolio for roughly $100 million and folded it into a global impact investing platform across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Overnight, the game had changed. Srivatsa went from writing checks of a few hundred thousand dollars to deploying roughly $20 million per deal. Vedahi Ravindran, who had previously worked in oil and gas, rose quickly within the firm to become a partner and co-lead, an assent that surprised many people internally. The strategy was quite deliberate. Take 15 to 30 percent stakes, back companies in sectors that need patient capital like agriculture, energy, logistics,

reserve about 40 percent of the capital for follow-on investments higher than the industry norm. and most importantly, expect about 20% of the portfolio to deliver outsized returns, 60% to return one to two times capital and only 20% to fail. That math works if the top performers actually perform. And for a while, the conditions were perfect. This was the zero interest rate era. Indian startups raised a record $42 billion in 2021. Deploying large amounts quickly was expensive.

expected. India became central to Light Rock's global strategy, accounting for nearly 30% of its total deployment at one point. Every investment, however, needed approval from the Global Investment Committee, often including the Prince himself. That did slow some decisions down, but the pace remained aggressive. The problem with moving fast and boom times is that you do not always know what you have actually bought until the boom comes to an end. on this in the next segment. By 2022, things had started to look different. The funding winter had arrived, and suddenly, Light Rock needed to tell a story, not just to

founders, but to new investors, because the plan was always for India to eventually raise its own external fund. That story was getting harder to sell. Peers like Temasek and SoftBank could point to large realized gains. Lightrock's returns were modest and mostly on paper. Its biggest exits, Ave finance, Ummead finance and Porter together totaled an estimated $150 to $200 million. Potter alone was expected to yield around $250 million, which is respectable but nowhere near the kind of exit that resets a fund. Meanwhile, parts of the portfolio were moving in the wrong direction. Farm Easy had fallen from a $5.6 billion valuation to roughly $450 million only. Axio sold to Amazon for around $200 million, a muted outcome by any measure.

Dunzo, which Light Rock backed in 2022 alongside Reliance Retail, was shutting down dark stores within a year. EM3 had shut down entirely. Sri Watsa and Ravindran tried a bold move after that. They explored spinning out, reviving the Espada name and raising as much as $2 billion independently. They issued term sheets to take significant, or... Often majority stakes in around 10 portfolio companies, including Viverty, UB, Scalar and Chalo. Other investors on these cap tables started celebrating exits. And then, the money never arrived and relationships freed.

Way Cool is probably the starkest example of where all of this landed. Light Rock poured about $95 million into the agri-tech company across four rounds. Prince Max himself visited the Chennai office. But Waycul, chasing scale, had accumulated over 400 crore rupees in debt, nearly as much as its projected annual revenue. When a planned fundraise from a sovereign investor fell through in 2023, Light Rock stepped in again with $20 million, even though the decision was internally contested. When Srivatsan and Ravindran left Light Rock in 2025,

it triggered a technical default at Waycul, since Ravindran was a boardman. member. The backstop Lightrock had offered was no longer theoretical. They had to deploy about 210 crore rupees earlier this year to help pay off the debt. Lightrock's new India team, led by Samir Abhankar, now has a different mandate. Exit what can be exited, deploy only out of whatever proceeds come in and do so with discipline. The firm says India remains a key market. They speak of lessons learned and that much is probably true. Patient capital sounds like a gift. Light Rock came to India with that gift.

The lesson it may leave behind and that the ecosystem might carry forward is that patients applied without judgment can become a trap of its own. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcast. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Niktha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv CN.