Gemba Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm led by Adith Podhar, a long-time operator and investor who began deploying capital in startups well before launching a venture fund. After years spanning banking, entrepreneurship, investment banking, and private equity investing, Adith started building an early-stage portfolio in 2018–2019 through direct angel-style bets. In 2020, he took the next step: launching a syndicate on AngelList India.

For Adith, leading SPVs wasn’t the end product. It was the bridge.

Challenge

In India, there’s a meaningful gap between being a credible angel investor and being a credible fund manager. The skill sets are different. The expectations are higher. And the moment you move from deploying your own capital to managing other people’s capital, the bar on process rises quickly from deal evaluation and communication to reporting and fiduciary responsibility.

Adith understood this early. He already had access to deals, but as an angel investor, he could only write cheques up to a point. More importantly, jumping directly from angel investing into a fund felt like skipping the stage that builds real confidence — both for the GP and for prospective LPs.

He needed a way to:‍

• Scale cheque size without scaling operational complexity
• Make his investment thinking visible to a wider set of LPs
• Build LP trust through repeatable, disciplined execution
• Learn how to run a tighter investing process before raising a fund

Or as Adith put it, the syndicate had to be the stepping stone between “I invest” and “I manage capital.”

Solution

Gemba launched its syndicate in 2020 to formalize and scale what was already working: high-conviction early-stage investing with clear decision-making. What changed was not the quality of deals, but the system around them.

A platform made three things possible.

1) Turning personal trust into scalable credibility‍

What surprised Adith wasn’t that people invested. It was who invested.‍

What began as a closed circle of friends and family quickly expanded. Investors he had never met read the memo, understood the thesis, and committed capital. A structured platform made conviction visible beyond personal relationships, widening the LP funnel in a way informal investing never could.

2) A forcing function for “GP-quality” thinking

For Adith, the deal memo isn’t admin—it’s the product.

Writing for a broader LP base forced clarity: why this company, why this team, what could go right, and what could go wrong. The memo became a record of judgment, not a summary of a deck. Over time, that discipline sharpened both underwriting and communication skills that matter long before a fund exists.

The GP’s ability not just to provide access to a deal, but to clearly articulate their view through a well-written investment memo, became the single most important differentiator for Gemba’s positioning in the market — and later helped them raise a VC fund.

3) Infrastructure that makes repetition possible

The hard part of leading SPVs isn’t closing one deal. It’s doing it again and again.

A platform provided the operating layer needed to make the motion repeatable: Clean deal execution -> compliant workflows -> consistent reporting -> LP communication.

That infrastructure allowed the focus to stay on decisions and founder support, while the syndicate scaled.

How Gemba built its LP flywheel

Across the syndicate years, Gemba raised ₹15 crore across multiple companies. But the engine behind that wasn’t volume. It was deliberate relationship-building.

Adith focused on a few practices that created repeat behavior:

• Being accessible: taking calls even for smaller check sizes when LPs were uncertain
• Bringing founders into the process: group calls or founder recordings embedded into the memo
• Active outreach per deal: short, direct messages to repeat LPs when a deal launched
• Sharing updates where possible: passing quarterly founder updates to investors to maintain trust

A consistent pattern emerged: LP confidence increases when they feel the GP is reachable, detail-oriented, and committed after the close — not just before it.

At the same time, Gemba was selective about who it engaged deeply. If an LP repeatedly asked for extensive information and didn’t invest or shared information without permission—Gemba simply stopped prioritizing that relationship. Protecting the integrity of a deal, especially in early-stage investing, mattered.

Investment discipline: Fewer high conviction deals.

A defining part of the Gemba approach was resisting the temptation to spray deals.

LPs explicitly told Adith they invested because Gemba only brought 8–10 deals a year. More volume would have reduced trust, not increased it.

This “fewer, higher-conviction deals” posture also shaped how founders experienced Gemba. Since Gemba was not doing every deal out there, founders also expressed that having Gemba on the cap table helped them in the startup’s positioning, since it was looked favourably by the larger VCs.

According to Adith, Portfolio founders would describe Gemba as an investor that “punches above its weight”, not just in check size, but in involvement, accessibility, and willingness to fight for basics like information rights.

Early on, Gemba also applied two deal filters that helped build credibility:

1. Signalling mattered early. Having a respected VC participate in a round reduced friction for new LPs considering investing alongside Gemba. Over time, as trust grew, Gemba could back deals purely on conviction — even without well-known co-investors.
2. Rights weren’t optional. If the syndicate couldn’t secure even basic information rights, Gemba would drop the deal. Adith’s view: “This is where good leads separate from bad ones—because when things go wrong, you should have some ability to protect investors’ rights and this is when negotiating on those clauses helps”.
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The Impact: Syndicate to fund

By the time Gemba transitioned from syndicate to fund, the most important work was already done: the investing motion was repeatable.

Adith is clear that syndicates and funds are not the same game. SPVs sharpen a GPs judgment deal by deal. Fund management requires institutional discipline from portfolio construction across stages and sectors to valuation control, reserves, and follow-ons.

The syndicate phase built the muscle. The fund formalized it.

That foundation expanded Gemba’s LP base beyond personal networks, strengthened credibility with founders and co-investors, and created a clear bridge from angel-style checks to managing third party capital at scale. Today, Gemba is building Fund II with the same DNA: fewer deals, higher conviction, and trust earned over time.