Kae Capital’s Sunitha Viswanathan on what’s driving consumer bets in India

When Sunitha Viswanathan, Partner at early-stage VC firm Kae Capital, talks about disruption, she does not mean it in a loose sense. She is referring to a specific, observable moment when consumers’ behaviour outpaces the platforms built to serve them, and a window opens for a new player to step in.

She has seen this happen before. For instance, quick commerce, which did not improve delivery alone, but also redefined what ‘fast’ meant, urging retailers to rethink their model. 

She is betting on disruption to happen again, especially in fashion commerce. 

“There hasn’t been any disruption in fashion commerce for over a decade," she says flatly. “After the likes of Myntra, there’s been zero disruption whatsoever.” 

Hence it’s time for one, she adds. 

Ecommerce in India has exploded over the last ten years. But the experience of buying fashion online, right from searching and scrolling to filtering, and checking out, has hardly changed. 

Sunitha argues that the expectations of the consumer, particularly the younger ones, have moved far ahead of what existing platforms offer. “If I search for a red T-shirt online, I’ll get 50,000 options. But I am not getting the right option.” 

The problem is not supply. It is curation—which involves understanding what customers want exactly, filtering products, and showing them the right options. The other issue is the absence of a social dimension that has always made fashion shopping what it is. 

These are the areas where disruption is expected to happen, and there are signs of that already.

 In fact, curation and social shopping are what drew Kae Capital to invest in KNOT, a Mumbai-based fashion commerce app offering 60-minute delivery. 

However, Sunitha hurries to define what KNOT actually is, lest the label of ‘quick commerce for fashion’ sticks. “The 60-minute delivery is a wedge to acquire the customer, it’s not the be-all and end-all of the platform,” she insists. 

What is KNOT building around this ‘wedge’? 

Virtual try-ons that promise to improve as LLMs (large language models) improve, a ‘shareable’ feature that lets users send their try-on image to a friend for a thumbs up or thumbs down, and a browsing experience designed for discovery rather than mere search, Sunitha explains. 

“Shopping has always been a social process. When you go to a mall, you are going with a friend, a family member, getting their opinion. KNOT is trying to embed that into the online experience.”

KNOT was launched in 2025, and it’s still early days. Its current user base shows a skew towards Gen Z and younger millennials, and this is partly by design. “Our supply was curated that way. We’ll expand to millennials as our supply also changes.” 

For now, the platform is deliberately narrow, choosing to build depth before breadth.

Opportunities in the D2C segment 

Founded in 2012 by Sasha Mirchandani in Mumbai, Kae Capital is one of India’s earliest seed-stage venture firms, writing first cheques at the pre-seed to pre-Series A stages. 

Across four funds, it has backed over 90 companies, including unicorns Porter and Zetwerk. Consumer brands Traya (haircare), Foxtale (skincare), and HealthKart (health and nutrition) are among its more recent bets. 

What is Sunitha’s reading on where investments in the D2C space, especially BPC (beauty and personal care) brands, are headed? 

It is not about backing broad-based brands but is about sub-verticals, she says.

“Indian consumers have gotten even more savvy," she says. They are more ingredient-conscious, more aware of the category, and quicker to adopt to global trends than ever before. “We will end up seeing a lot of sub-verticals where brands can get created.”

She cites the example of ‘sunscreen’ as an emerging sub-category in the beauty industry. 

“With India’s exposure to sun rays, practically 10 out of 12 months in most of the country, sunscreen is not just skincare. It is essential. Just the way you brush your teeth daily, you should be applying sunscreen.”

In her view, a brand built entirely around sunscreen, innovating on formulations for different skin types, climates, and age groups, can become a large standalone outcome.

The same logic extends to food and beverages too. 

Protein has entered everyday vocabulary—but Sunitha is more interested in what comes next. 

“How do you bring protein to the lower end of the income spectrum, where the consumer needs it but can’t afford a 100-rupee bar or a 1500-rupee protein powder?” 

Better ingredients and millet-based formats are trickling in at the premium end. But can anyone make the economics work at the lower end of the price spectrum? This is where the big opportunity lies, she believes. 

Then there is another segment at an inflection point: kids.

Sunitha sees white spaces across the board—apparel, accessories, gifting, food, clean personal care products. Nobody has built the “definitive” kids brand in India yet, she says. 

By that she means a brand that comes to parents’ minds when they think of their child’s needs, across product categories. This is both a gap and an opportunity, she adds. 

A recurring conversation on Twitter is about how Indian D2C brands are just glorified white-label resellers, importing products from China and slapping their logos onto them. 

Sunitha has heard it but she does not find the argument compelling enough.

“As an insider, I understand the complexity behind being able to even do that. For someone not close to it, I can imagine the thinking, ‘Oh, it’s just getting imported from China and they’re building a brand.’ But a lot of things have been built that way.”

She points out that established, respected brands across categories have long relied on imports for components. What matters to her, as an investor, is not where the supply chain originates but whether there is genuine innovation in the product—and whether that innovation can build “long-term moats”.

“Customer love leads to repeatability. Repeatability leads to better end-games. That’s where the business gets built.”

In this context, Sunitha singles out wellness brand Frido for what it has managed to achieve as a bootstrapped company. It recently crossed Rs 200 crore ARR with a lean team, no VC money, and meaningful in-house manufacturing. 

“Especially when so many brands die on the wayside, this is phenomenal,” she says. 

The point she makes with Frido is not that bootstrapping is inherently superior to VC backing. The key takeaway is that brands cannot be built on the back of quick commerce (qcom) platforms alone.

“Qcom is a great lever for growth, but the brand won’t get built on qcom. It is very easy to get replaced by the next brand willing to spend more marketing dollars. You have to be present wherever the customer shops—Blinkit, Zepto, Flipkart, D-Mart, the kirana store down the road.”

The big bet: Consumer AI for Bharat

If there is a single theme that excites Sunitha the most right now, it is not fashion, BPC or F&B. It is the emergence of AI-native consumer products designed specifically for India, not adaptations of Western tools, but products built ground up for the Indian user.

“Just the way India leapfrogged credit cards and went straight to UPI, India will also jump onto consumer AI-native solutions, not just ChatGPT or Claude for people like you and me, but genuinely India-native products.”

This is the rationale behind Kae Capital’s investment in SuperLiving, an AI companion app targeting customers in Tier II and III cities, with a focus on lifestyle and wellness. 

The product pairs customers with AI companions for specific health courses—for example, a 15-day gut cleanse—and provides real-time adherence support, personalised advice, and the kind of accountability a personal coach might offer. 

The value proposition is clear outcomes, not an open-ended chat.

Supernova, another portfolio company, applies a similar logic to education. It offers AI-powered personal tutoring for English language, skilling, and higher education. 

“For the first time, you can truly personalise at the level of a single student—not a thousand students in a category,” says Sunitha. 

She sees more sub-verticals emerging: AI in religion and spirituality, AI in healthcare, and AI for mental health.  

“We’re seeing a few solutions in religion and spirituality, but haven’t taken a bet yet. As for AI in healthcare, today people are uploading blood reports to ChatGPT, but there should be a better, more clinically mapped way to do this.”

On AI in mental health, she picks out a portfolio company from the pre-Gen AI era, Wysa, which provides clinically backed conversational mental health support and has won safety awards for knowing when to hand off to a human.

“If someone is on the verge of a crisis, the intervention an LLM can provide is limited. You need to be able to hand it off to a human. Providing that holistic care, that’s where specialised solutions will come up.”

The Indian market behaves differently compared to other markers. 

India consistently creates consumer categories that are uniquely suited to Indian needs; it then exports the playbook to Southeast Asia and West Asia. The country also adopts and services products faster than established markets because it has fewer legacy systems to replace. 

Quick commerce thrives in India precisely for these reasons. UPI has become the default payment option in many parts of the country where credit cards have struggled to scale. 

Consumer AI is ready for the next leapfrog, Sunitha believes. 

And this will happen not in the English-speaking, ChatGPT-using early adopter category, but among consumers in Tier II towns and cities who have never had access to a personal coach, a therapist, a skilled tutor, or a financial advisor.

“This is the bulk of India, and they will jump on to these consumer AI-native solutions,” she says.