Picklebay Founder Siddhant Jatia walks Founder Thesis host Akshay Datt through the full pickleball business in India model - from rooftop conversions and court construction costs to tournament prize pools and the platform layer that no one has built yet.

Siddhant Jatia grew up inside a 120-year-old Kolkata business family and started working at 16, but it took a single session of pickleball to set him on the path to building Picklebay, India's first end-to-end pickleball platform, which now lists 700 verified courts across six cities and has developed proprietary venue management and tournament software to solve what he calls a critical information asymmetry harming venue investors.

In this conversation, Siddhant unpacks three counterintuitive ideas: that the explosive growth of the pickleball business in India is fundamentally a yield-per-square-foot real estate story, that in this sport the spectators are almost entirely the same people as the players - upending conventional sponsorship logic entirely - and that the largest gap in Indian sports tech is a channel management layer that aggregates all the booking aggregators, the same way hotel software syncs rates across MakeMyTrip and Booking.com.

With the Indian Pickleball Association now officially recognised as a National Sports Federation and India actively bidding for the 2036 Olympics, this conversation sits at a genuine inflection point for the sport and the businesses being built around it.

👉How a single tennis court footprint converts into four pickleball courts, multiplying player throughput and generating ₹9-10 lakh in gross monthly revenue at 60 percent occupancy across an 18-hour operating window

👉Why the ₹20 lakh total investment required to build a four-court pickleball venue in India typically pays back in 8-10 months, making it one of the shortest real estate payback timelines in sports infrastructure today

👉What Siddhant Jatia identifies as the single biggest missing layer in Indian sports tech - a channel management system equivalent to what hotels use, that aggregates all booking platforms into one unified inventory and pricing dashboard for venue owners

👉Why Ahmedabad runs its 500-plus pickleball courts to full capacity past midnight every night, and what this demand signal reveals about where the next wave of venue investment in India's pickleball business should go

👉How the Indian Pickleball Association's recognition as a National Sports Federation in 2024 is set to unlock government funding, standardised coaching certification, and a national ranking system for the first time in the sport's India history

👉What separates a profitable pickleball venue from an expensive mistake - the specific location, construction, and community factors Jatia says most new operators overlook entirely

#PickleballIndia #Picklebay #SiddhantJatia #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #PickleballBusiness #SportsTechIndia #IndiaStartups #PickleballCourtInvestment #SportsInfrastructureIndia #IndianSports #StartupIndia #PickleballPlatform #IndiaOlympics2036 #PickleballCommunity #IndianPickleballAssociation #HowToStartPickleballBusiness #PickleballVenueIndia #FounderInterview #realestateindia

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

Manu Awasthy spent over two decades managing wealth for India's ultra-rich at Citibank, IIFL Wealth, and 360 ONE before founding Centricity WealthTech in 2022. In under three years, he has built one of India's fastest-growing wealth management platforms, crossing ₹10,000 crore in AUM, onboarding 17,000 financial advisors across 70 cities, and raising a $20 million seed round led by Lightspeed at a $125 million valuation.

In this episode, Manu breaks down why India's wealth management industry is 20 years behind e-commerce, how most PMS and AIF products fail to beat a simple index fund, and why the laziest investors consistently win. He reveals the three levels of conflict of interest hiding inside India's most prestigious wealth firms, the structural reason why every wealth manager eventually becomes an asset manager, and why he has deliberately chosen not to. He shares Centricity's contrarian B2B2C model, his risk-first founder philosophy, and his bold vision for a single-window investment platform for India's global diaspora. He shared the full story in this candid, no-holds-barred conversation with host Akshay Datt.

Here is what you will learn in this episode:

👉Why 80 to 85% of PMS and AIF products underperform a basic index fund over 15 years, and what it means for every Indian investor

👉How Manu grew Centricity WealthTech from ₹20 crore revenue in Year 1 to ₹100 crore in Year 3, with 60% recurring ARR

👉The three hidden conflicts of interest inside India's biggest wealth management firms, and how Centricity is built to eliminate all three

👉Why India's passive investing penetration is near zero compared to 55% in the US, and the massive opportunity this creates

👉How Centricity's B2B2C model is turning 17,000 mutual fund distributors into full-spectrum wealth managers across tier-2 and tier-3 India

👉Manu's risk-first operating philosophy - why he says markets and geopolitics are uncontrollable, but asset allocation always is

If you found this episode valuable, subscribe to Founder Thesis for weekly conversations with India's most ambitious founders and investors. Follow host Akshay Datt on LinkedIn and X for real-time insights, episode drops, and founder stories you won't find anywhere else.

00:00 - Manu Awasthy and Centricity WealthTech Introduction

02:52 - India's Wealth Management Industry Explained Simply

11:20 - 85% of Fund Managers Fail the Index Test

34:50 - The Conflict of Interest Destroying Wealth Firms

47:30 - Wealth Management Is 20 Years Behind E-commerce

58:40 - India's Passive Investing Gap and the Opportunity

01:08:00 - Lazy Investors Win, Here Is the Math

01:13:00 - How Centricity's B2B2C Model Scales to 60,000 Advisors

01:19:30 - The NRI Wealth Corridor, India's Biggest Untapped Market

01:39:00 - Manu's Advice for Founders, Go Slow Grow Big

01:47:55 - Risk First, the Philosophy Behind Centricity's DNA

#ManuAwasthy #CentricityWealthTech #WealthTechIndia #IndiaWealthManagement #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #PassiveInvestingIndia #IndexFundsIndia #PMSvsIndexFund #AIFIndia #WealthManagementStartup #IndianStartups #FintechIndia #HNIInvestingIndia #B2B2CStartup #IndiaWealthTech2025 #PrivateBankingIndia #MutualFundsIndia #FinancialAdvisorIndia #WealthTechFunding #LightspeedIndia #StartupFounderIndia #IndiaFintech #UHNIIndia #WealthManagementConflictOfInterest Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

In this episode, Manu Nair, Co-Founder and CEO of EtherealX, breaks down the engineering breakthroughs, fundraising battles, and geopolitical forces reshaping the future of space tech in India and beyond.

Over 85% of the world's commercial satellite launches depend on a single rocket from a single country. That's not a monopoly - it's a dependency, and Manu Nair believes it is one of the most dangerous structural flaws in global space infrastructure today. Manu is the Co-Founder and CEO of EtherealX, the Bengaluru-based deep tech startup building the Razor Crest Mk-1 - India's first fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicle that recovers both its booster and upper stage.

In a conversation with host Akshay Datt, Manu traces the journey from bootstrapping on personal savings and a loan from his father, to closing a $20.5 million Series A co-led by TDK Ventures and Accel, to signing binding launch agreements with Japanese, Taiwanese, and European space agencies. He reveals the proprietary rocket engine cycle EtherealX developed, the first new feed cycle in six decades of rocketry, which harnesses re-entry plasma heat as a thermodynamic resource rather than fighting it with heavy ceramic shields.

He also shares why the economics of partial reusability are a dead end, why super-heavy rockets make no commercial sense for everyday satellite deployment, and why EtherealX's long-term roadmap extends from orbital launch vehicles all the way to small modular nuclear reactors.

A candid, technically rich, and deeply inspiring episode at the intersection of space tech, deep tech investing, India's policy renaissance, and civilisational ambition.

Key Highlights

👉Why 85% of global payloads riding one rocket is a civilisational risk, and how EtherealX is building the alternative the world needs

👉The FFSCC breakthrough - how EtherealX invented a new rocket engine cycle that turns re-entry heat into fuel, enabling full upper-stage recovery for the first time in the medium-lift class

👉How Manu and his co-founders bootstrapped for a year, raised a $360K milestone round, and eventually closed $26.3 million across four rounds to build India's highest pressure-rated private rocket engine test facility

👉Why the economics of large rockets like Starship don't work for routine commercial LEO deployment, and why the medium-lift segment will remain the engine of the global space economy for the next decade

👉India's regulatory renaissance - the FDI reforms, the Rs 1,000 crore IN-SPACe VC fund, and how ISRO's shift from gatekeeper to enabler created the conditions for EtherealX to exist

👉Why EtherealX's long-term roadmap includes fusion-based small modular reactors to power AI data centres on Earth, and why putting data centres in orbit is a dangerous mistake

#ManuJNair #EtherealX #EtherealExplorationGuild #FounderThesis #AkshayDatt #ReusableRocket #IndiaSpaceTech #SpaceTechStartupIndia #RazorCrestMk1 #DeepTechIndia #SpaceXAlternative #IndiaSpaceStartup #MediumLiftRocket #FFSCC #IndiaSpacePolicy #INSPACe #MultipolanSpaceAccess #SpaceFundingIndia #DeepTechFunding2025 #ReusableLaunchVehicle #FounderStoryIndia #IndiaStartupFunding #SmallModularReactors #SpaceTechPodcast #StartupPodcastIndia #ISROPrivateSector #IndiaDeepTech2025

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel