Anirvan: You built your startup and raised capital from a top VC. What motivated you to pursue entrepreneurship right after undergrad?
Sudhee: I stumbled into the startup world almost by accident through Hacker News. That led me to Y Combinator and Paul Graham’s essays, which I devoured one after another. The whole startup movement immediately felt like my vibe. I was also inspired by seniors from BITS who had gone on to build companies like Swiggy, Postman, redBus etc., seeing their journeys made entrepreneurship feel tangible.
During college, I interned at early-stage startups like Exotel and Instamojo, where I saw firsthand that once a startup finds product-market fit, the hardest challenge becomes scaling the team. The best talent rarely applies to jobs, they have to be discovered and convinced. That insight became the seed for Belong, which used data, machine learning, and personalized outreach to help startups find and engage great talent who were both a strong skill and cultural fit.
Anirvan: What prompted your transition from being a founder to becoming a venture capitalist?
Sudhee: At Belong, I learned that building a great product or having a great idea isn’t enough, you also need a large, growing market to support a venture-scale outcome. One of our big miscalculations was assuming that India’s B2B software market would mature quickly and that businesses would pay meaningfully for SaaS products, similar to the U.S. We learned the hard way that it’s a lot easier to make a dollar than a rupee.
That experience made me realize that if I wanted to truly understand how the best SaaS companies were built, I needed to learn from the best. That brought me to the Valley. I joined Segment, a YC startup I had long admired and even used as a customer, as a Product Manager in 2018. I got to see the company scale rapidly to become the leading Customer Data Platform and eventually get acquired by Twilio (NYSE:TWLO) for $3.2B.
After spending some time at Twilio, I started reflecting on what I wanted to do next. I realized my passion lies at the intersection of people, product, and markets. Around that time, I began angel investing, mostly informally and found that founders often found my perspective valuable. Those conversations, and the joy I got from them, naturally pulled me toward venture capital. It felt like the perfect way to stay close to innovation and founders while applying everything I’d learned as a builder.
Anirvan: How large is your fund and what is a typical cheque size? Further, as an investor today, how involved are you in your portfolio companies? Does your founder background help you collaborate more effectively?
Sudhee: At Battery, we are currently investing from our 14th fund, a $3.3 billion vehicle focused primarily on B2B software across horizontal and vertical SaaS. Our typical check size ranges from $5 million to $150 million, anywhere from seed through the growth and pre-IPO stage.
We prefer to lead rounds and take a proactive, thematic approach to sourcing rather than waiting for deals to come to us. Having been a founder myself, I can relate deeply to the emotional and operational challenges of building from zero. That experience helps me connect with founders as a peer, often as a sounding board in the messy, early stages when decisions feel most ambiguous.
Anirvan: Battery Ventures invests across several sectors, from application software to industrial tech. Which areas are you personally following most closely, and what drives your investment thesis?
Sudhee: I focus primarily on horizontal and vertical software companies, especially where AI is redefining how work gets done. In the SaaS era, the big opportunity was building systems of record, tools that captured data and streamlined workflows. With AI, that opportunity is shifting toward building systems of action, agents that can intelligently reason over data and actually perform the work.
What excites me most are products that show clear, measurable user value and strong product velocity. The best AI applications don’t just make teams more efficient; they reimagine what those teams can achieve when the software itself becomes a collaborator.
Anirvan: Beyond what founders include in their pitch decks, what factors help you decide whether a company or team is worth investing in?
Sudhee: We look for a few things: a large, urgent market, a founding team with deep, lived insight into the problem, and early proof of product–market fit where customers feel the pain acutely, have budget, and see measurable ROI.
Anirvan: How are customers measuring ROI from agentic AI automation, and how does that influence pricing?
Sudhee: Customers today measure ROI from agentic AI through workflow economics, focusing on whether the work done per dollar meaningfully exceeds their current baseline. The three most common levers are labor deflection or throughput lift on a defined workflow, cycle-time reduction with SLA-backed guarantees, and revenue expansion tied to a clear pipeline or conversion metric. Pricing that maps directly to these outcomes, such as per task completed, per ticket resolved, or per dollar collected, tends to move fastest through procurement. The best pilots define KPIs upfront and demonstrate measurable impact early, making expansion almost inevitable.
Anirvan: How has the agentic AI landscape evolved over the past year in terms of traction and winners?
Sudhee: Over the past year, we’ve seen a real shift in agentic AI from experimentation to execution. Models have evolved from being prone to hallucination to being able to reason, plan, and act across multi-step workflows. As a result, applications have progressed from lightweight wrappers doing search or summarization to true agents that can automate complex processes and show measurable ROI.
Enterprises across sectors are now actively experimenting with AI. It’s still early days, too early to call clear winners, but the progress is encouraging, both in model capability and in how teams are productizing these advances into dependable, high-ROI workflows.