Father of the bride

In 2012, I started Gramener with half a dozen friends.

This week, we were acquired by Straive, a part of Barings Private Equity Asia.

How do you feel?

I feel like the father of the bride. Gramener was registered on 26 Feb. A day before my daughter’s birthday. I’ve spent more time with Gramener than my daughter. That makes Gramener my elder child. Who’s moving into a new household. Along with me. (I feel like சகலகலா சம்மந்தி.)

I feel grateful. I’m not good at business. But when my cousin remarked, “Anand, you’re now giving a livelihood to over 250 people!” I was stunned. My co-founders, colleagues and clients built a thriving business and put me (of all people) as CEO in the middle of it. How do I even go about saying “Thanks”?

It feels like joining college. New people. Larger group. New ways of working and learning. Lots of topics to explore. Exciting and scary.

What was it like?

Fundraising was rocky.
We started in 2019. COVID struck. We paused.
We resumed in 2021. Russia invaded Ukraine. We paused.
We resumed in 2023. The Israel – Hamas war started. Luckily, the deal was nearly done.
I’m grateful Naveen ran the entire process like clockwork, taking all the stress. I’m the happy free-rider, as usual.

Starting up was not that rocky.
We’re many. With half a dozen co-founders, there are enough shoulders to cry on. That counts.
We’re steady. We didn’t know how to blitz-scale, but we knew not to blitz-fail. Survival counts for a lot.
We’re lucky. This is basically the “I have no idea why we succeeded” category. Serendipity counts for a lot, too.
Ganes, Mayank, Naveen, Ram, Ravi, Vengatesh — yeah, it was fun. Not every day. But most of the time. It was fun.

What will you do?

I’m part of Straive’s data, analytics & AI business.

Straive extracts and analyzes all kinds of data. Financial. Legal. Research. Education. Pharmaceutical. There’s a fair bit of converting unstructured data to structured. Exactly the kind of thing I love doing.

So, I’ll be doing what I’ve been doing the last decade — extracting insights from even more data and telling better stories from those.

I joined Gramener as “Chief Data Scientist”. Now I’m debating “Data Storyteller”, “Data Detective”, “Data Psychologist”, and a few other evil titles.

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Wish me luck!