Ananya Iyer

I research early-stage Indian consumer companies — who is building them, who is funding them, and which of the two the market is mispricing.

Most of what I publish here starts from a primary source that the coverage skipped: a careers page, a contract manufacturer's filing, a Play Store listing, the third name on a cap table. I am interested in the gap between what a round is reported to be about and what it is actually paying for. When I make a call, I try to say what would prove it wrong, and I keep those on the record whether or not they hold.

I came to this from film. I spent close to a decade in production and content — assistant directing, building content operations, designing filmmaking curricula for CSR-backed education programmes across India. That work was mostly pattern recognition under a budget constraint, which turns out to be most of what research is. I moved into investment research because I wanted to point the same attention at companies.

I am the founder of Avan Partners, an advisory practice for early-stage Indian consumer founders raising their first institutional round, and I work with Skylife Research on Indian equity and market research.

I write most often about beauty and personal care, consumer and D2C unit economics, how Indian venture funds actually behave as against how they describe themselves, and the categories forming at the edge of consumer — AI as a purchase-decision layer, clinic-led distribution, contract manufacturing as an asset class.