There is no spreadsheet for this. You cannot plug in a dozen parameters, hit enter and receive a verdict on whether a startup matters. That was the opening salvo at a Huddle Global 2026 panel provocatively titled “The VC Truth: Build What Matters, Not What Gets Funded”, where three Indian venture capitalists spent the better part of an hour conceding, with refreshing candour, that the two are not always the same thing.

Moderated by Zerin Rahiman, Director at IndigoEdge, the session brought together Madhukar Bhatia, Managing Partner at Pentathlon Ventures; Anil Joshi, Managing Partner at Unicorn India Ventures; and Aditya Agarwal, Founder and Managing Partner at Tetration Ventures. What emerged was less a defence of the venture model than a frank audit of its blind spots, and a reminder to founders that the industry’s cheques follow a very particular arithmetic.

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The panel agreed early that “what matters” shifts depending on who is asking, and when. Their advice was to stop thinking like an investor altogether. Start with the customer instead: what problem is being solved, who actually has it, how the solution differs from what is already on the market, and whether it can become viable and scale.

It is a mindset, not a gulf

Joshi argued that the distance between what matters and what gets funded is narrower than founders fear. The difference, he suggested, is largely one of mindset. A founder obsessed with how the product helps the customer tends to end up with a fundable business; one obsessed with impressing investors often ends up with neither.

That sounds tidy, so the moderator pushed harder: are there companies that genuinely matter but simply do not belong in a VC portfolio? Here the panellists got honest. One admitted to admiring certain companies from afar precisely because they do not fit his fund’s thesis, and occasionally writing a personal cheque instead. Another put it more bluntly. Sometimes the answer is as simple as a mandate: a fund that has made promises to its Limited Partners cannot wander off-thesis, however good a company looks. Founders who skip checking a fund’s focus before pitching are, in effect, interviewing the wrong investor.

There was also an unusual admission of fallibility. One investor said he would always rather be proven wrong, because a company he passed on that later succeeds is the industry’s best teacher. It is a rare sentiment on a stage where VCs are more used to dispensing advice than following it.

The taxi meter problem

The sharpest explanation of the gap came from the economics of the asset class itself. Venture capital, one panellist reminded the room, is considered the highest-risk form of investing, and so it carries the highest return expectations.

Take an IT services company. It runs like a taxi meter, generating revenue month after month, with that revenue steadily climbing. It is very likely to survive. But its growth is shackled to headcount, and it cannot compound the way venture funds need. Every venture bet must carry at least the possibility of returning 100 times the money; a services firm never will. It solves a real problem, it matters, and it is still the wrong fit. Investors, after all, fund predictability of a very specific kind.

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The same logic applies to founders who simply want to grow slowly and steadily. That is a perfectly legitimate way to build a company. It just is not a venture-backable one, and the panel did not pretend otherwise. Good ideas are everywhere; venture capital is not.

When a noble problem meets a broken supply chain

Sometimes a problem matters enormously and the business still buckles under diligence. One investor walked through a startup tackling stubble burning in Punjab, the seasonal crop-residue fires that choke northern India’s air every year. The company ran a biomass marketplace connecting farmers who generate agricultural residue with industrial buyers who could use it.

The investors were initially enthusiastic. But as they dug in, the real problem turned out not to be matchmaking at all. Residue has to be aggregated, transported and stored within a narrow seasonal window, and the marketplace had no answer to that physical bottleneck. It is a lesson agritech investors are learning the hard way: software cannot wish away logistics.

Backing the founder who has lived the problem

If there was one trait the panel prized above all others, it was depth. Investors want founders who have spent years inside a problem, through their studies or their careers, because time in a space builds both insight and the relationships needed to sell into it.

One example was a company in electronics manufacturing services (EMS), a segment widely written off as commoditised and hardly the classic investable startup. But its founders had long histories in the industry and were moving up the value chain, from pure contract manufacturing into designing products as well as making them. The fund backed them, and the bet has paid off well.

The sixty-something founder who outlasted a pandemic

The most striking story involved a healthtech investment made in 2019. The founder was in his sixties, far older than the typical VC-backed entrepreneur, and was building non-invasive screening technology for diseases linked to tobacco chewing and poor oral hygiene, a stubborn public health challenge in India.

The investor wrote the cheque. Within a month, COVID-19 arrived. For roughly a year and a half the investment looked all but dead; nobody was queuing for screenings, and no secondary buyer was going to touch it. Yet the founder’s sense of mission never wavered. Today, close to 70, he runs a company that turned profitable last year and is planning to set up its own manufacturing facility.

Mission does not have to mean social impact

The panellists drew one careful distinction. Mission, they argued, is not a synonym for social impact. Not every founder is solving an environmental or social problem, nor should they need to. What investors look for is conviction: founders who believe they are the only ones who can solve a particular problem, and who bring the experience and unique insight to back that belief.

That conviction matters because the journey is brutal. Some young founders start companies because entrepreneurship looks glamorous, one panellist observed, and the glamour evaporates the moment money runs short. Mission is what keeps a founder in the chair when it does.

Why India’s sports startups struggle to raise

An audience member brought the debate down to earth with a pointed question: sportstech startups in India rarely get funded, so is that because sport does not matter? The answer, once again, was market size. Indians largely consume sport on television rather than play it, which shrinks the addressable market investors model. Parents may spend generously on their children’s training, but VCs question whether that adds up to a large business within a decade. Founders usually understand their market better than investors do, the panel noted, and it is their job to make the case that it is big enough. The panel left the door ajar, though: AI’s arrival in sport could yet reshape that calculus.

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The session’s takeaway was uncomfortable but useful. Building what matters and building what gets funded can overlap, but only when founders understand the rules of the game they are entering. Sometimes what matters today only gets funded years later; one founder’s company took six or seven years to find its footing. And sometimes the smartest decision is not to take venture money at all.

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