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The operator’s decision desk for early-stage India.
Q2 2026
We read 480 anonymised founder ledgers to see how India’s pre-seed teams actually deploy their first institutional cheque — not the budget they pitched, the money they spent. Three findings, and the line items founders later wished they had cut.
₹50L
median first institutional cheque — and where the first year of it went
Across the sample, the median pre-seed cheque deployed in year one skewed hard to building and the team behind it. Go-to-market stayed deliberately small until a repeatable channel showed up; the disciplined teams kept a visible runway buffer rather than spending to zero.
Source — 0to1 Data Drop · n=480 ledgers · pre-seed India
34%
of regretted spend went to tools and SaaS sprawl
Asked which rupees they would take back, founders pointed first at quiet, recurring drains — overlapping SaaS, seats nobody used — then at hiring ahead of demand and paid acquisition switched on before the message was proven. Office space barely registered; most stayed remote or shared.
Source — 0to1 Data Drop · n=480 · self-reported
11 mo
median runway left at month twelve — for teams that set a written burn ceiling
The single habit that tracked with longer runway was unglamorous: a written, revisited burn ceiling. Teams that set one entered month twelve with months more cash than those who improvised — not by spending less on product, but by catching the silent drains earlier.
Source — 0to1 Data Drop · rolling, n=480
Drawn from 480 anonymised 0to1 founder ledgers with a first institutional cheque between ₹25L and ₹1.5Cr, active through Q2 2026. Allocations are share-of-spend over the first twelve months; “regretted spend” is self-reported in an end-of-year review. Figures are illustrative of the sample, not a market census; cohorts under 30 are suppressed. ₹ figures are nominal. The method is published so you can argue with it.
One pattern, one framework, one founder story. 800 words. No noise.