As the Founder of Valence Growth Partners, Kartik’s vision is to enable businesses to unlock growth by creating long-lasting bonds.

Before this, Kartik was part of the global investing team at Omidyar Network, where he sourced, evaluated and invested in ventures across FinTech, SaaS, Blockchain and Digital Infrastructure. He also helped drive Omidyar’s efforts towards fostering innovation by creating a platform in partnership with CIIE.CO (a start-up incubator established by IIM Ahmedabad) to incubate and accelerate entrepreneurship in India.

During his time at The London School of Economics, Kartik led their in-house consulting arm to help start-ups chart their zero-to-one journeys – from assessing product-market-fit to developing a go-to-market strategy. Among them was Circuit Mind, an AI-enabled circuit board design company, which was recognised and funded by Google for Start-ups as the most impactful companies in Europe led by black founders.

The entrepreneurial bug bit well before any of this, when Kartik was part of building India’s first D2C artisanal ice-cream brand. Several roadblocks, pivots, and iterations later – he learnt why ideas are a dime a dozen and it’s the execution that counts. His core values remain agility, grit and humility.