Worth over $1.5 billion today, Fractal has raised close to $700 million in venture capital over its lifetime. But the path it took to get here is anything but boring. 

Growing up in a middle-class Indian family, Srikanth Velamakanni, Fractal’s co-founder and group CEO, remembers his father telling him there was no such thing as an “honest businessman”. The phrase was an oxymoron.

“So when I grew up, I told myself that while I’d go and get a world-class education, I would always work for a high-quality company. I would never start a business. It was very clear to me,” he says as we sit down for the latest episode of First Principles.

And yet, in 2000, Srikanth and five of his friends quit their jobs, scraped and pooled in Rs 2 lakh each (~US$2,400), and started Fractal.

It takes a lot to build companies for the long term—only 2% of all companies get to celebrate their tenth anniversary. The school of hard knocks is unforgiving to young companies and first-time founders. The odds are measured in terms of survival first and not success.

Fractal and Srikanth were part of the 2% that survived the first ten years.

Listen to this episode of First Principles to understand how the soon-to-be 25-year-old company plans to beat the odds and still be around 50 years from now.

Full Episode Transcript:

Rohin Dharmakumar 

Srikanth, on your website, very prominently, in the site navigation, there is something called ‘AI for Good’.

Later on in the site, I come across multiple instances where it talks about responsible AI.

Why is this so? Why do you need a header level navigation, which is the highest form of importance that a company gives on its home page for something that’s called ‘AI for Good’?

Srikanth Velamakanni

AI is a general purpose technology. It’s a general purpose technology that’s incredibly powerful. And with all things that are very powerful, you have to make sure that it’s a force for good.

And it’s not necessarily so. It’s such a big tool that it can be used for good or can be used for not so good things. So our idea of ‘AI for Good’ was to see how AI can fundamentally alter human progress in a positive direction.

So whether it was COVID-19, when we thought that the whole world was coming to an end, we realised very quickly that working with the government of Maharashtra and Mumbai, or Telangana, or the Karnataka state, we realised that we could bring in data to drive decision making very, very quickly.

We brought in all the data around arrivals of passengers to various zones within the city, the data on infections.